Pope Francis Defies Trump, Pushes World Leaders to Battle Climate Change

Pope Francis urged world leaders to push for the Paris Climate Change Pact, a plea that defies U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's call to end the battle of the U.S. against climate change.

"Never before has there been such a clear need for science to be at the service of a new global ecological equilibrium," the pope said in a speech before the Vatican's academy of sciences.

The pontiff encouraged scientists, including physicist Stephen Hawking, to "develop a cultural model which can face the crisis of climatic change and its social consequences" and safeguard the future of the planet.

"It is worth noting that international politics has reacted weakly -- albeit with some praiseworthy exceptions -- regarding the concrete will to seek the common good and universal goods, and the ease with which well-founded scientific opinion about the state of our planet is disregarded," the pope said.

He added that there is a need for "a normative system that includes inviolable limits and ensures the protection of ecosystems, before the new forms of power deriving from the techno-economic model causes irreversible harm not only to the environment but also to our societies, to democracy, to justice and freedom."

During his campaign, Trump called "global warming an expensive hoax" while promising to cancel any participation from the U.S. in the international climate accord signed by President Barack Obama last December.

In a report from New York Times, Trump said he will keep "an open mind" about the relationship between human activity and climate change. However, Reuters reported just days after that Trump still believes climate change to be "a bunch of bunk."

This was the strongest speech of pope since his encyclical last year to the world's 1.2 billion Roman Catholics, in which he called for the "urgent challenge to protect our common home" and pushed world leaders to hear "the cry of the earth."