Sometimes the very learned and clever can be brilliantly foolish, especially when seized by an apparently good cause. My request is for common sense and what the medievals, following Aristotle, called prudence. — Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney

The jury’s out, says Cardinal Pell, on what’s really happening with the climate, and precipitous action is ill-advised, at best:

Where does scientific striving become uneconomic, immoral or ineffectual and so lapse into hubris? Have scientists been co-opted on to a bigger, better-advertised and more expensive bandwagon than the millennium bug fiasco?

We can only attempt to identify the causes of climate change through science and these causes need to be clearly established after full debates, validated comprehensively, before expensive remedies are imposed on industries and communities.

“My appeal is to reason and evidence,” he says, “and in my view the evidence is insufficient to achieve practical certainty on many of these scientific issues.”

Any “appeal to the consenual view among qualified scientists . . . is a category error, scientifically and philosophically. In fact, it is also a cop-out, a way of avoiding the basic issues. The basic issue is not whether the science is settled but whether the evidence and explanations are adequate in that paradigm.”

Indeed, “[T]he complacent appeal to scientific consensus is simply one more appeal to authority, quite inappropriate in science or philosophy.”

And the religious undertones of the controversy do not escape Cardinal Pell:

The rewards for proper environmental behaviour are uncertain, unlike the grim scenarios for the future as a result of human irresponsibility which have a dash of the apocalyptic about them.

The immense financial costs true believers would impose on economies can be compared with the sacrifices offered traditionally in religion, and the sale of carbon credits with the pre-Reformation practice of selling indulgences.

Some of those campaigning to save the planet are not merely zealous but zealots. To the religionless and spiritually rootless, mythology — whether comforting or discomforting — can be magnetically, even pathologically, attractive.

The archbishop seems loath to impute malicious — or even impure — motives to global warming alarmists, preferring to regard them as simply misguided or misinformed.

Read Pell’s op-ed in The Australian here.