Pope's climate push is 'raving nonsense' without population control, says top US scientist

Paul Ehrlich writes in Nature Climate Change that Francis is wrong to fight climate change without also addressing the strain from population growth on resources

One of America's leading scientists has dismissed as "raving nonsense" the pope's call for action on climate change - so long as the leader of the world's 1 billion Catholics rejects the need for population control.

In a commentary in the journal Nature Climate Change, Paul Ehrlich, a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, argues that Pope Francis is simply wrong in trying to fight climate change without also addressing the additional strain on global resources from population rise. "That's raving nonsense," Ehrlich told the Guardian. "He is right on some things but he is just dead wrong on that."