An awful lot of this article is standard "anyone who disagrees with me is biased, a victim of groupthink" stuff that sounds like it is talking about how to evaluate scientific claims, but doesn't really give you any information on how to find reliable sources, and it only points to two sources of information on the scientific question. One of these sources is very flawed, the other is legit, but a single paper - I'll look at that at the end.
The article criticizes Francis for saying this:
For those who may have doubts on these matters, Francis counsels “go to the scientists… [who] speak very clearly…telling us which path to follow.”
However, there are scientists who come to very different conclusions.
If you focus on scientific associations, what is taught at universities, or what scientists who work in the field come up with if you lock them in a room and ask them to read all of the scientific literature and summarize what it says, I think Pope Francis is right. And the article ignores pretty much all of mainstream science.
There are always some scientists who come to different conclusions, which is why the debate among scientists is important. It points to two things to make its point. First ...
There are also the 31,000 climatologists, meteorologists, physicists and other scientists who signed the Global Warming Petition
But
that petition (which we have seen before) is an Internet petition that is hard to verify. It requires only that you claim to have a bachelor's degree related to any field of science, and they didn't check even to make sure that your name is the name of a real person (as opposed to a Star Wars character or one of the other amusing names people slipped past them.) According to the people behind the petition, only 12% of the signers have degrees (of any kind) in earth, environmental, or atmospheric science, and there is no requirement to have read any scientific papers at all.
This is not even remotely like a debate among scientists who have all looked at the same data and are asked to summarize what it says. It is not a credible scientific source of any kind, it's just a website that does not tell you who funded it, promoted by a letter written by a man who spent a good bit of his career as a hired gun for the tobacco lobby.
The other scientific link is more interesting:
Solar activity predicted to fall 60% in 2030s, to 'mini ice age' levels: Sun driven by double dynamo.
A new model of the Sun's solar cycle is producing unprecedentedly accurate predictions of irregularities within the Sun's 11-year heartbeat. The model draws on dynamo effects in two layers of the Sun, one close to the surface and one deep within its convection zone. Predictions from the model suggest that solar activity will fall by 60 per cent during the 2030s to conditions last seen during the 'mini ice age' that began in 1645.
Results will be presented today by Prof Valentina Zharkova at the National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno.
Science Daily is pro-science, and generally very factual. They are reporting on a paper that has not even been presented for the first time, so I really have no idea how other scientists responded to the paper. This is the kind of finding that other scientists need to debate and take into account. I have no idea how that paper was received. They are reporting on it before it even becomes part of the debate, when they are just announcing that they are going to tell a group of scientists their findings.
But I see nothing in the Crisis Magazine article that makes me question what Francis says: if you look at scientific associations, scientific journals, what is taught at the university, or what you find in literature reviews, it's pretty clear that mainstream science is saying global warming is real, manmade, and may have serious consequences.
So a lot of this boils down to basic media literacy. What kinds of sources are reliable for understanding the state of the debate on scientific questions? I don't think the Crisis Magazine article points us to anything at all that a scientist would consider a reliable source for answering that question.
Is it biblical? Is it Christlike? Is it loving? Is it true? How can I find out?