Victor EzejaSpiritual leader of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis has decried the scant attention paid to climate change issues by politicians, businesses, even as he tackled those who failed to see the link between global warming and the continued use of fossil fuels.
As he did in his earlier encyclical, Pope Francis began by taking a serious look at what scientists are saying about the causes and consequences of greenhouse emissions. He identified climate change as one of the paramount challenges that face the global community.
In his Apostolic Exhortation, “Laudate Deum” (Praise God), released on Wednesday, the Pope said “our responses (to Climate Change) have not been adequate, while the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point.”
He harped on the need to transition towards clean energy sources, such as wind and solar power, while abandoning the use of fossil fuels. He expressed frustration with the slow progress made in this area, urging leaders to take more decisive action.
While highlighting how desperate the situation is, Pope Francis said, “Some effects of the climate crisis are already irreversible, at least for several hundred years, such as the increase in the global temperature of the oceans, their acidification and the decrease of oxygen.”
He noted that the overwhelming majority of scientists specializing in the climate agree that there is a correlation between global warming and “the accelerated increase in greenhouse gas emissions, particularly since the mid-twentieth century.”
The pope supports this assertion with scientific data thus: “The concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which causes global warming, was stable until the nineteenth century, below 300 parts per million in volume”.
He added: “While I was writing Laudato Si’, they hit a historic high — 400 parts per million — until arriving at 423 parts per million in June 2023. More than 42% of total net emissions since the year 1850 were produced after 1990.”
At the same time, “in the last fifty years the temperature has risen at an unprecedented speed, greater than any time over the past two thousand years. In this period, the trend was a warming of 0.15° C per decade, double that of the last 150 years. From 1850 on, the global temperature has risen by 1.1° C.
“At this rate,” he concludes, “it is possible that in just ten years we will reach the recommended maximum global ceiling of 1.5° C,” stressing that this will be disastrous.
Francis ended by presenting spiritual motivations for Christians to respond to the climate crisis. He cites Leviticus 25, where God says, “the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants.” He notes that Jesus “was in constant touch with nature” and invites us “to be attentive to the beauty that there is in the world.
“The world sings of an infinite Love: how can we fail to care for it?” he asked in the “Laudate Deum” serves as an update to the Catholic Church’s widely-praised environmental encyclical “Laudato Si’” from 2015.
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