On Wedneday, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that 'a dire warning about the need to mitigate man-made global warning from a Vatican-appointed panel of scientists has not yet convinced Australia's highest-ranking Catholic', Archbishop of Sydney Cardinal George Pell.
The 'warning' came from The Fate of Mountain Glaciers in the Anthropocene, the first report released by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, an independent body within the Holy See. It notes that today's change in ice cover (the most visible evidence of climate change) is happening at an unprecedented rate and is due to human-induced changes in carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.
The report echoes the positions of both John Paul II, who spoke at length about environmental questions, and Benedict XVI, who has expressed similar anxieties and has overseen the Vatican's endeavours to become the first carbon neutral state.
The Vatican's views, however, are not shared throughout the Church, and Pell's is the loudest and most persistent voice of dissent. He has not taken aim at the Pope for his views on climate change, but has been exceptionally vigorous in his criticism of climate change and climate scientists.
The difficulty is not that he holds heterodox views on this issue. We are all entitled to our opinions. What is concerning is Australia's most senior Catholic clergyman vigorously advancing a position that could be interpreted as a statement of the official stance of the Catholic Church in Australia.
Earlier this year, Dr Greg Ayers, head of the Bureau of Meteorology, painstakingly examined the scientific claims made by the Cardinal in a letter tabled in a Senate estimates hearing. In response, Pell called Ayers, one of Australia's leading atmospheric scientists with 140 peer-reviewed articles to his name, a 'hot air-specialist' who had made 'an unscientific contribution'.
This is but one of the more recent inflammatory statements by Pell, who often deploys more colourful rhetoric and invective on climate change than Tony Abbott or Andrew Bolt in his attacks on 'warmers'.
Across a number of years in his column in the Sunday Telegraph and the Catholic Weekly he has argued that the climate is not changing or, if it is, it is not changing as much as it has in the past, or if it has that this is natural, and that human beings have had no impact, or a negligible one, and that nothing we can do will make any difference.
He has repeated the talking points of climate sceptics that