Catholic leaders—”representatives of bishops conferences from around the globe”—have produced a document urging climate “negotiators” meeting in Paris next month to stop global climate change. The Catholics’

10-point proposal calls for governments to approve legally binding limits to global average temperatures, set a mid-century decarbonization goal….

Never mind that humanity has no control over global temperature; indeed, climate-related temperature variations have been demonstrated to be closely linked to the sun’s output variability, and the variability of the Earth’s (and Moon’s) orbital behaviors. Never mind, too, that atmospheric CO2 is plant food, without which we’d have no hope of feeding our multitudes; that when atmospheric CO2 was orders of magnitude higher in earlier epochs, life on Earth was lush; and never mind that significant changes in atmospheric CO2 are trailing indicators confirming the increasing health of Earth from the burgeoning life exhaling all that CO2 and alternatively confirming the ailing of Earth as life decreased in the face of cooling and Ice Ages, and so exhaling less CO2 into the atmosphere.

It’s amazing to me that Catholic leadership should commit so blatant a sin of arrogance. They would do well to learn from King Cnut’s example, wherein he attempted to stop the tide as a demonstration to his subjects of the limits of mere human power.