Cardinal defends Pope from GOP climate criticism

A top adviser to Pope Francis said Thursday that Republicans and other critics are wrong to say the Pope should not comment on climate change or other scientific matters.

{mosads}“That the Pope should not deal with science sounds a little bit strange,” Cardinal Peter Turkson, president of the Pope’s Council on Justice and Peace, told reporters at the Vatican. “Since science is a public domain, it’s a subject area that anybody can get into.”

Turkson spoke shortly after Francis released his encyclical, which called for the world’s governments and people to fight climate change.

“It’s all very easy to say that because the Pope is not a scientist, he should not talk about science,” Turkson said in response to a question about Republican criticisms of the encyclical. “I think it’s pushing the exclusion of people who are not experts.”

Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush said Wednesday he would not use Francis’s encyclical on climate change to inform his policies on the matter.

Former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), another presidential candidate who, like Bush, is a Roman Catholic, also questioned Francis’s qualifications for writing about climate change, as has Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and a vocal climate change skeptic, and other high-profile Republicans.

While Francis has studied and worked in chemistry, he does not consider himself a scientist. Instead, he heavily cites the science on climate change to conclude that “most global warming in recent decades is due to the great concentration of greenhouse gases” from human activity.

It’s an opinion with which most Republicans disagree.

“The Pope is not a scientist,” Turkson said. “That does not mean he cannot consult scientists.”