Pope puts the onus on all of usto act now
WHAT’S striking about the papal encyclical ‘Laudato Si’ is that it is about more than just climate change. It’s a clarion call to the global population to carefully examine how we consume finite resources, before carelessly discarding them without regard to the effect on the environment and the health of the world’s poor.
Pope Francis paints a compelling picture of environmental destruction, while carefully avoiding delving into the science which tells us that climate change is real and must be addressed.
Instead of quoting numerous reports from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), he instead says a “number of scientific studies” indicate that global warming is due to the immense concentration of greenhouse gas emissions which have been released “mainly as a result of human activity”.
There’s a very sound reason for taking this approach – it avoids entering into arguments with climate change sceptics about what is happening to our planet.
The pontiff instead focuses on the plethora of evidence which exists to show that the environment, and humanity, is suffering from decades of mistreatment.
He notes that people become ill from breathing high levels of smoke from fuels used in cooking or heating.
It’s also noted that hundreds of millions of tons of dangerous electronic and clinical waste is generated every year, much of it highly toxic and often dumped in developing countries.
The pontiff also talks about the ‘ lungs’ of our planet – the Amazon and Congo basins – being burned down and levelled for agriculture.
Overfishing has resulted in a depletion of some species.
Specifically on climate change, he notes that a “very solid scientific consensus” indicates that we are witnessing a disturbing
warming of the climatic system. Rising sea levels and an increase in extreme weather events have already been recorded, even if “a scientifically determinable cause cannot be assigned to each particular phenomenon”.
He uses a commonsense approach to tackling the problem – changes of lifestyle, production and consumption to combat the warming “or at least the human causes which produce or aggravate it”.
Neatly, he addresses some of the climate change sceptics’ usual arguments, that other factors such as volcanic activity, variations in the earth’s orbit and axis and the solar cycle are at play.
The encyclical is clearly aimed at spurring not only his flock, but everyone on the planet, to make the necessary changes and lobby politicians to address climate change and environmental destruction.
But he also puts the responsibility on us to make those changes: “Never have we so hurt and mistreated our common home as we have in the last 200 years. We need only take a frank look at the facts to see that our common home is falling into serious repair.”