Pope-gate** has started to get the feel of the Eurovision song contest. We’ve already had a series of monotonous contributions and now there’s some dreadful singer dressed in an appalling costume singing a song that no doubt was humorous in their own country but the humour has been lost in translation. And this is still the very start!!
In a similar vein, the latest re-incarnation of the “Pope-gate” story is a series of press releases asserting that sceptics are attacking the pope – and we are still days away from the official release!
That a rush of stories appears with similar wording isn’t news – because no doubt some green blobbiest has sent out a press release (but it could be a sceptic?)
But what is more interesting is what I found in one of these articles in the Telegraph Pope attacked by climate change sceptics because not only does it quote Lord Monckton:
“My message to the Pope would be, don’t take sides on the science. Don’t make the same mistake as seven out of 10 judges in the trial of Galileo, when they invited him to retract his views (that the Earth orbits around the Sun rather than the other way around).
“The Vatican used to be prepared to hear both sides of the debate but now they don’t want to listen to the sceptics,” said Lord Monckton, who was UKIP’s leader in Scotland before being sacked by Nigel Farage in 2013.
“Benedict XVI took a very cautious line but Pope Francis is not willing to say, ‘don’t bully the sceptics’.”
He accused the UN of “falsifying” data on climate change and insisted that levels of global warming were “insignificant”.
But it also quotes DeSmug Blog (an alarmist blog that banned me from commenting). More importantly, these new correspondents seem to be … treating both sceptic and alarmists as equal! Wow! That’s very unusual in this subject.
Almost invariably journalists take sides and those like the BBC are so biased that if ever they include any comment from sceptics it is always preceded by the obligatory “warning” phrases intending to signal to the listener that our views are not credible.
But now the Pope seems to have brought out is a rash of articles where journalists (who do not appear to be natural sceptics) are treating our views with respect. What a change! Better still, because it is the pope, these stories are reaching a whole new audience (those interested in religion) who will be reading what we say free from the usual snide comments for the very first time.
So, thank you Pope!
Far from undermining us, by entering the debate and involving a whole new group of journalists who don’t have the preconceived hatred of sceptics, you have quite unintendedly given Sceptic views credibility.
The big question now is this – will the initial interest being shown in Sceptic views lead to wider discussion, increased public interest in the sceptic view and potentially a wholesale shift in public opinion? Only time will tell, but suddenly I am beginning to think we sceptics may see progress – and not in the direction the Pope intended!
**Pope-gate – is just a humorous name – originally intended as a parody on the way everything these days seems to get called “-gate”.
Skeptic – Unrelated – you should follow up on the Vitamin D – influenza connection that I highlighted on the WUWT site – you commented. There is an extensive literature that associates vitamin D deficiency with increased incidence of many types of illness, including several kinds of cancer, auto-immune diseases, and respiratory illness in general.