At
his inaugural Mass on 19th March, the feast of St Joseph, head and
protector of the Holy Family, he placed great emphasis in his homily on the
duty of all of us to be protectors of creation.
‘The vocation of being a protector is not just something involving us
Christians alone. It involves everyone. It means protecting all creation, the beauty
of the created world, as the Book of Genesis tells us and as Saint Francis of
Assisi showed us. It means respecting
each of God’s creatures and respecting the environment in which we live.’ The recent giant climate report from the
Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a powerful message on how
necessary it is to forge an international agreement on tackling climate
change. The summary report will be
followed by the million word full version written by two hundred and fifty nine
top scientists drawing on nine thousand scientific publications is the fruit of
a mind-boggling thorough process.
Leading scientists had begun publicly saying that humanity was causing
global warming twenty years ago but the IPCC – with its necessarily painstaking
and cautious procedures – first accepted mankind’s responsibility for this in
2007. Even then – six years ago – it
grossly underestimated the resulting sea level rise and failed to predict a
dramatic melting of Arctic Sea ice.
The
publication of this report does not seem to have caused much concern to
governments. The party political
conferences seem largely to have ignored it.
Governments here or elsewhere seem to be still intent on exploring and
exploiting fossil fuels as if there are no future generations to worry
about. But as stewards of creation we
have a tremendous responsibility to protect our environment and make sure it is
a fit home for those who come after us.
As Pope Francis said in his inaugural Mass: ‘In the end everything has
been entrusted to our protection, and all of us are responsible for it. Be
protectors of God’s gifts! Whenever
human beings fail to live up to this responsibility, whenever we fail to care
for creation and for our brothers and sisters, the way is opened for destruction....
please, I would like to ask all those who have positions of responsibility in
economic, political and social life and all men and women of good will: let us
be ‘protectors’ of creation, protectors of God’s plan inscribed in nature,
protectors of one another and of the environment. Let us not allow omens of destruction and
death to accompany the advance of the world.’
This was an extraordinarily strong environmental message and warning
from Pope Francis – at the very beginning of his pontificate. I don’t think the media picked up on it at
the time – or since. It is a message
that we find uncomfortable and that we would prefer to ignore.
Average
per capita emissions of CO² - the main greenhouse gas – are 7.3 tonnes in the
European Union and 0.2 tonnes in Ghana.
But Ghana, which depends far more on rain-fed agriculture than we do, is
likely to suffer much greater weather extremes with far fewer resources to deal
with them. Justice demands that we help
those who have played little part in creating the problem but will bear most of
the costs and consequences. But there are many sceptics who think that a clique
of scientists has been concocting one of history’s greatest hoaxes and trying
to get governments to address a problem that has not come about by human
intervention. They hold that climate change
has always been happening and the rate of change has always ebbed and
flowed. The recent report, backed by
massive scientific investigation, tells us that its assessment of the
likelihood that humanity is warming the planet has increased from 90% previously
to 95% now. The objections of the
climate sceptics must be rebuffed. In
recent years there were doubts about the dangers of smoking, about the dangers
of exposure to asbestos and too much radiation.
Scientists proved all these sceptics wrong. The evidence from serious climate science is
now compelling. Of thirteen thousand,
nine hundred and fifty peer-reviewed articles published on climate change
between June 1991 and 9th November 2012 only twenty four (0.17%)
deny it is happening. (See www.jamespowell.org)
In
the wake of the report there were widely publicised sceptic assertions that the
world is warming at about half the rate that the IPCC had previously
estimated. What the IPCC actually found
was that the world is warming by 1.2 degrees centigrade a decade – which is
just one tenth of a degree less than its previous estimate of 1.3 degrees a
decade ago. Carbon dioxide emissions
globally have risen from 22.7 billion tonnes in 1990 to 33.9 billion in 2011.
Pope
Francis, recalling St Joseph the Protector at the end of his homily said: ‘To
protect Jesus with Mary, to protect the whole of creation, to protect each
person, especially the poorest, to protect ourselves, this is a service that
the Bishop of Rome is called to carry out, yet one to which all of us are
called so that the star of hope will shine brightly. Let us protect with love all that God has
given us.’
(I am indebted to Frank
J Convery, Senior Fellow at the Earth Institute, UCD for his scientific
article)
