Do the Pope and I live on the same planet?

Having read through Pope Francis’ new encyclical, I am dismayed at how many groundless assertions it makes. From a strictly scientific point of view, Laudato Si is an embarrassment.

I’m not talking about the much ballyhooed support the encyclical gives to climate change. The problem lies in other questionable claims it makes about the “environmental crisis,” and “the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air, and in all forms of life.”

Here are some of the fictions related in Chapter One of the encyclical, which is entitled “What is Happening to Our Common Home”:

On the issue of water, for example, the encyclical claims that “One particularly serious problem is the quality of water available to the poor…the quality of available water is constantly diminishing.”

But according to the Millennium Development Goals 2014 Report, “Access to an improved drinking water source became a reality for 2.3 billion people” over the past 20 years. This United Nations report rightly celebrates the fact that “the target of halving the proportion of people without access to an improved drinking water source was achieved in 2010, five years ahead of schedule.”

Then there is the section of the encyclical called “The Loss of Biodiversity,” which makes the sweeping assertion that human beings are killing off other species at an alarming rate: “Each year sees the disappearance of thousands of plant and animal species which we will never know, which our children will never see, because they have been lost for ever. The great majority become extinct for reasons related to human activity.”

The evidence does not support this claim. While many species have seen their natural habitats reduced, the Convention on Biological Diversity set a goal of setting aside 17% of global terrestrial areas and 10% of coastal and marine areas by 2020 as nature preserves. The good news is that such preserves currently include some “14.6% of the earth’s land surface area and 9.7% of its coastal marine areas.”

This means we are already very close to achieving our internationally agreed upon goal of protecting biodiversity and reducing anthropogenic species extinction in this way. There is no need for panic.

The encyclical also looks askance at economic growth: “[T]he growth of the past two centuries has not always led to…an improvement in the quality of life.”

Really? In 1815, there were approximately 1 billion people alive on the planet. The average lifespan was 30 years, and the per capita income was a mere $100.

Today there are 7.3 billion people on Planet Earth. They can expect to live to an average age of 71. They also enjoy a GDP per capita (using purchasing power parity) of more than $12,000. In other words, as our numbers have grown, our well-being and prosperity have multiplied. Lifespans have more than doubled and per capita incomes have risen a hundredfold!

How can this dramatic — and historically unprecedented — improvement in the quality of life be so cavalierly dismissed?

A dismal tone of environmental “apocalypse now” pervades the entire document, as when it breathlessly proclaims that “Doomsday predictions can no longer be met with irony or disdain. We may well be leaving to coming generations debris, desolation and filth.”

Such passages read for all the world like “The Limits to Growth” study commissioned by the Club of Rome, a global think tank. This 1972 study predicted that the world would run out of various “nonrenewable resources” in the 1980s and 1990s, and that environmental, economic and societal collapse would follow.

It didn’t happen then, and there is no evidence that it will happen now.

It is perhaps no coincidence that Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, a radical environmentalist who had a part in drafting the encyclical, is a member of the Club of Rome. Schellnhuber was apparently selected for this role by Archbishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, the head of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

Pope Francis is not trained in the natural sciences and so necessarily relied on environmental “experts” selected by others to advise him on these matters. Who but the head of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences should have ensured that this encyclical was free of the errors of scientific fact the it is littered with?

But in selecting Schellnhuber, Archbishop Sorondo might as well have turned the pope’s manuscript over to a fundraising copywriter from the Environmental Defense Fund.

The people pushing this agenda aren’t interested in smart solutions that benefit humans while protecting the planet. They’re alarmists who won’t be happy until we’re back in caves.

Written by Steven W. Mosher. He is president of the Population Research Institute and the author of “Population Control: Real Costs and Illusory Benefits.”