The justifications for taking real and effective steps to slow climate change and limit the amount of carbon and other greenhouse gases we pump into the atmosphere continue to mount.
Recent studies and events now add to the warnings and recommendations about the threat to our health, our world and now our moral responsibility to protect what Pope Francis called last week our “common home” in his encyclical, “Laudato Si.”
The pope’s encyclical has been called a teaching document not only for Roman Catholic faithful but marching orders for advocacy and policy decisions for all. In a commentary published in Sunday’s Herald, the Most Rev. William Skylstad, bishop emeritus for the Diocese of Spokane and former bishop of Yakima, said Pope Francis pointed to “the interrelationship that exists for each person with God, with one’s self, with other human beings and with creation.” It’s the duty of lawmakers to consider the right relationship between the natural world and each other, Skylstad said.
To those who would dismiss the pope because he is not a scientist — forgetting that before joining the priesthood, Jorge Mario Bergoglio graduated with a chemist’s degree — the pope can, as can the rest of us, rely on the overwhelming preponderance of evidence and opinion on climate change from the vast majority of the scientific world. Nor should his authority to speak on a political issue be denied, unless the pope, and all pope’s before and after, are to be denied a voice regarding any number of moral issues with political implications, including capital punishment, abortion, human trafficking and poverty.
There’s a moral justification, as well for all, in what climate change may mean for the planet’s other species.
A day after the pope’s encyclical was released, the journal Science Advances, published a study that found that the Earth is losing mammalian species at a rate 20 to 100 times quicker than in the past, and that is to say nothing of other animal and plant species. The world, the study warns, is entering what could be the sixth great mass extinction, rivaling in speed past mass extinctions caused by asteroid impacts and other forces, such as the one that killed off the dinosaurs. Where past extinctions occurred over thousands of years, if the die-off of species continues at its current rate, it will devastate biodiversity in 240 to 540 years.
If that threat doesn’t seem imminent enough, we need only consider the harm we are causing to ourselves and to the immediate generations that follow us.
Earlier this week, the respected British medical journal The Lancet analyzed how climate change will effect human health. In 2009, a team of scientists convened by the medical journal called climate change “the biggest global health threat of the 21st century.” The current study now says global warming is threatening the gains of the last half-century in global health. The report found that over the next century, the threat from drought will more than triple compared to the 1990s, the threat from extreme rainfall will more than quadruple, and the exposure of older people to heat waves will rise by a factor of 12.
Beyond climate change, we can see the effect of pollution itself in coal-dependent countries such as China, where an estimated 1.2 million died in 2010 from illnesses related to air pollution. Not that we can feel superior; the Obama administration has said that by the turn of the century about 57,000 Americans will die because of disease caused by air pollution and another 12,000 will die from temperature extremes.
Thankfully, the study’s doctors have a prescription: Curbing air pollution by using alternative transportation and sources of electricity to cut the burning of coal and other fossil fuels, putting a price on the cost of carbon emitted, better urban design, improved delivery of health care during weather extremes and regular reviews of policy progress.
We have no shortage of reasons to take the actions necessary to slow climate change. And we have no excuses not to.
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