Vatican City • Pope Francis was about to take a major step backing the science behind human-driven global warming, and Philippe de Larminat was determined to change his mind.
A French doubter who authored a book arguing that solar activity — not greenhouse gases — was driving global warming, de Larminat sought a spot at a climate summit in April sponsored by the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Nobel laureates would be there. So would U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, U.S. economist Jeffrey Sachs and others calling for dramatic steps to curb carbon emissions.
After securing a high-level meeting at the Vatican, he was told that, space permitting, he could join. He bought a flight ticket from Paris to Rome. But five days before the April 28 summit, de Larminat said, he received an email saying there was no space left. It came after other scientists — as well as the powerful Vatican bureaucrat in charge of the academy itself — insisted he had no business being there. "They did not want to hear an off note," de Larminat said.
The incident highlights how climate-change deniers tried and failed to alter the landmark papal document unveiled last week, one that saw the leader of 1 billion Catholics fuse faith and reason and come to the conclusion that "denial" is wrong.
It marked the latest blow for those seeking to stop the reform-minded train that has become his papacy. It is one that has reinvigorated liberal Catholics even as it has sowed the seeds of resentment and dissent inside and outside the Vatican's ancient walls.
Yet the battle lost over climate change also suggests how hard it may be for critics to blunt the power of a man who has become something of a juggernaut in an institution where change tends to unfold over decades, even centuries. More than anything, to those who doubt the human impact of global warming, the position staked out by Francis in his papal document, known as an encyclical, means a major defeat.
"This was their Waterloo," said Kert Davies, executive director of the Climate Investigations Center, who has been tracking climate-change deniers for years. "They wanted the encyclical not to happen. And it happened."
Papal advisers say Francis signaled his intent to draft a major document on the environment soon after assuming the throne of St. Peter in March 2013. His interest in the topic dates back to his days as a bishop in Buenos Aires, where Francis, officials say, was struck by the impact of floods and unsanitary conditions on Argentine shantytowns known as "misery villages."
In January, Francis officially announced his aim to draft the encyclical - saying after an official visit to the Philippines that he wanted to make a "contribution" to the debate ahead of a major U.N. summit on climate change in Paris in December.
But several efforts by those skeptical of the scientific consensus on climate change to influence the document appear to have come considerably later - in April - and, maybe, too late.
In late April, the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, a free-market group that serves as a hub of skepticism regarding the science of human-caused global warming, sent a delegation to the Vatican. As a Heartland news release put it, they hoped "to inform Pope Francis of the truth about climate science: There is no global warming crisis!"
It was meant to coincide with the same April meeting that de Larminat was trying to attend. Heartland's activists were not part of the invited contingent either, Heartland communications director Jim Lakely said.
"It was a side event," Lakely said. "We were outside the walls of the Vatican. We were at a hotel - literally, I could throw a football into St. Peter's Square."
Seven scientists and other experts gave speeches at the Heartland event, raising doubts about various aspects of the scientific consensus on climate change, even as several also urged the pope not to take sides in the debate. It's impossible to know how that influenced those in the Vatican working on the pope's document - which one Vatican official said was at "an advanced stage." But Lakely said his group did not see much of its argument reflected in the final document.
"We all want the poor to live better lives, but we just don't think the solution to that is to restrict the use of fossil fuels, because we don't think CO2 is causing a climate crisis," Lakely said. "So if that's our message in a sentence, that message was not reflected in the encyclical, so there you go."
One member of the Heartland delegation was E. Calvin Beisner, a theologian and founder of an evangelical group called the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation. In April, the group launched an "open letter" to the pope, signed by more than 100 scholars and theologians, arguing that climate-change models "provide no rational basis to forecast dangerous human-induced global warming.