Angry US Republicans tell Pope Francis to ‘stick with his job and we’ll stick with ours’

The US right will launch pre-emptive attacks on the pope's stance on climate change

Leading figures on the American right are launching a series of pre-emptive attacks on the pope before this week's encyclical, hoping to prevent a mass conversion of the climate change deniers who have powered the corps of the conservative movement for more than a decade.

The prospect that the pope, from his perch at the pinnacle of the Catholic church, will exhort humanity to act on climate change as a moral imperative is a direct threat to a core belief of US conservatives. And conservatives - anxious to hang on to their flock - are lashing out.