Pope urges scientists to push for political action on climate change

     
November 28, 2016
Pope Francis encouraged scientists to work for remedies to climate change, in a November 28 address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

Complaining that the world’s political leaders have reacted “weakly” to climate change, the Pope said that “it falls to scientists, who work free of political, economic or ideological interests, to develop a cultural model which can face the crisis of climatic change and its social consequences.”

Scientists have “been able to research and demonstrate our planet’s crisis,” the Pope said. Clearly indicating that he had no doubt that man-made climate change endangers the globe, the Holy Father said that the crisis has brought about “a renewed partnership between the scientific and Christian communities, who are witnessing the convergence of their distinct approaches to reality in the shared goal of protecting our common home, threatened as it is by ecological collapse and consequent increase of poverty and social exclusion.”

Referring to his own encyclical Laudato Si‘, the Pope said:

In our modern world, we have grown up thinking ourselves owners and masters of nature, authorised to plunder it without any consideration of its hidden potential and laws of development, as if subjecting inanimate matter to our whims, with the consequence of grave loss to biodiversity, among other ills. We are not custodians of a museum or of its major artefacts to be dusted each day, but rather co-operators in protecting and developing the life and biodiversity of the planet and of human life present there.