The Pope's climate doomsday encyclical has generated a lot of controversy; and has probably doomed him to be eventually nominated for the Catholic 'hall of shame' for fear mongering anti-science.
Of course, it's not completely the Pope's fault for his ignorance. The Pope's gatekeepers and advisers can take much of the credit for making sure he did not hear about the actual climate science empirical evidence.
One climate doomsday scenario (among many) that continues to have no basis in climate science reality is the infamous prediction that Gaia will soon have a Venus-like atmosphere and boiling oceans...because of humans fossil fuel use. You can rest assured that Pope Francis was made aware of the potentiality of this fringe calamity.
It's a calamity that has long been pushed by the world's leading climate science alarmists.
NASA's former top climate expert, James Hansen, has been in the past a principal proponent of this particular doomsday prophecy. And of course, he provided the dramatic testimony to Congress in the summer of 1988 that really initiated the fear mongering in the U.S. regarding catastrophic global warming and climate change disasters - like turning Earth into Venus.
Unfortunately for the Pope, James Hansen and other hysterical climate doomsday soothsayers, the real world empirical evidence clearly shows that the world's climate is self-correcting and not prone to those scary predicted tipping points and runaway disasters from growing atmospheric CO2 levels.
Case in point: The Tropics (20S to 20N latitudes) - A Venus Doomsday?
The above chart plot reveals a tropical climate, as measured by satellites, experiencing a very slight cooling trend (blue curve) over the last 20 years. In contrast, the IPCC's latest climate model (CMIP5/RCP4.5) curve (green line) predicted a significant warming trend during that same 20-year period.
Going back even further, the red chart plot depicts an 83-month period of exceptional warming right after the Hansen testimony of 1988. In contrast, the IPCC climate models predicted a significant cooling trend for the Tropics for those 83 months - an abysmal failure, represented by a 7 degree trend difference between reality and prediction.
Needless to say, although we will, both the consensus climate experts and climate models have been spectacularly wrong in their doomsday projections for the Tropics, which means that human CO2 causing Venus-like conditions for Gaia has no basis in climate science reality.
It's unfortunate that this pope fell victim to his own gullibility and the anti-science machinations of his court jesters advisers. But there is good news for the Catholic masses: you can now also comfortably ignore this encyclical since it was produced from the irrational passion of fear versus the known rational, empirical climate science.
Previous regional, global and climate model charts.
Note: Dataset sources for Excel chart plots and trend lines: UAH satellite dataset and CMIP5/RCP4.5 models' mean tropic latitude dataset.