Pope's warning on climate change stirs controversy

On the day he was elected pope, Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Argentina stood before a line of his fellow cardinals to receive their blessings.

"Don't forget the poor," whispered his Brazilian friend, Cardinal Claudio Hummes, as the two embraced in the Sistine Chapel. And with that, Bergoglio knew the papal name he would choose.

"Immediately I thought of St. Francis of Assisi," he later said. "A man of poverty, a man who loved and protected creation."

To the delight of many around the world - and the consternation of many others - Francis on Thursday will honor his namesake with an encyclical asserting that modern climate change is real, mostly man-made, and of compelling moral concern because global warming is an affliction wrought by wealthy nations with disproportionate impact on the poor.

While Francis enjoys broad esteem for his commitment to social justice, many American conservatives are openly hostile to assertions that global warming poses a hazard or merits costly remedies.

Titled "Laudato Si: On the Care of Our Common Home," the encyclical will take its name from a celebrated poem St. Francis wrote in 1225. It will be released Thursday at a news conference in Rome.

"He's a pope from a developing country who has enormous passion for the poor," said Dan Misleh, executive director of Catholic Climate Covenant, based in Washington. "He wants us to encounter people on the margins and live our faith in service to them. I think that will all be tied into the encyclical."

Papal biographer Austen Ivereigh, who has discussed the document with several of Francis' advisers, agreed.

"It will not offer technical solutions" to climate change, Ivereigh said, "because the church is not competent to do so."

Rather, said Ivereigh, author of The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope, "it will be an appeal to religious conscience, to hearts and minds in order to move into action. . . . It will be a call to conversion."

Papal encyclicals, typically addressed as letters to the world's Catholic bishops, are regarded as authoritative statements of Catholic teaching but not as infallible.

The Latin laudato si, meaning "be praised," comes from St. Francis' celebrated poem "Canticle of the Sun," declaring that God is praised by all of creation, including "brother sun" and "sister moon," wind, air, water, fire, and "mother earth."

The document - with its political implications - will likely stir lively discussion when Francis visits the United States in September.

After two days in Cuba, he will visit Washington to address Congress on Sept. 24, and New York to address the United Nations on Sept. 25. He then will visit Philadelphia on Sept. 26 and 27 for the Vatican's international World Meeting of Families, with Mass for as many as 1.5 million people on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.

One of Francis' first acts as pontiff was to instruct the Pontifical Council on Peace and Justice to research the issue of climate change for a possible encyclical, Ivereigh said.

"It's been on his mind since the very beginning," he said.

The Rev. Thomas Reese, former editor of the Jesuit monthly America and author of several books on the Catholic Church, said he anticipates Laudato Si will "accept the scientific consensus that global warming is happening and is due to human activity," and that "environmental issues . . . are moral issues."

Scientifically speaking, Francis would be on firm ground.

Climate scientists are in near-unanimous agreement that humans have warmed the planet with emissions of heat-trapping "greenhouse gases" such as carbon dioxide, and that more warming and related impacts, such as rising sea levels, are in store.

Most generally agree, too, that poorer nations are likely to bear a disproportionate share of the impacts of global warming.

A prime example is Bangladesh, where 12 million people live in an area that is likely to be underwater by century's end, said Princeton University geosciences professor Michael Oppenheimer. This is due in part, he said, to rising sea levels and the sinking of land in that region.

The concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has increased from 280 parts per million circa 1800 to about 400 ppm today - driven by the burning of coal, gasoline, and other fossil fuels.

Average global surface temperatures have climbed about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit during that period, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the global research organization operating under U.N. auspices. The amount of anticipated future warming is uncertain, depending in part on how aggressively the world cuts emissions.

The panel's researchers have studied four scenarios. On the low end, with substantial pollution curbs, average global temperatures are projected to rise from half a degree to 3 degrees Fahrenheit by century's end. On the high end, with relatively unchecked emissions growth, average temperatures are expected to rise by 4.7 to 8.6 degrees during that period.

Archbishop Pedro Barreto Jimeno of Huancayo, Peru, has predicted Francis' message will meet backlash from those who deny humans are warming the globe.

"The encyclical will address the issue of inequality in the distribution of resources, and topics such as the wasting of food and the irresponsible exploitation of nature and the consequences for people's life and health," Jimeno told Catholic News Service.

"Pope Francis has repeatedly stated that the environment is not only an economic or political issue, but is an anthropological and ethical matter," he said. "How can you have wealth if it comes at the expense of the suffering and death of other people and the deterioration of the environment?"

Nowhere does skepticism about global warming run deeper than among conservative Americans, said Ivereigh, who is British.

Former Sen. Rick Santorum (R., Pa.), a Roman Catholic who has scorned global warming as a liberal hoax, recently told Fox News that the pope and the Catholic Church would be "better off leaving science to the scientists and focusing on what we're really good at, which is theology and morality."

(Pope Francis earned a basic chemistry degree and worked as a chemist before entering seminary.)

"I think there are more pressing problems confronting the Earth than climate change," said Santorum, who is seeking the GOP presidential nomination. His staff did not answer a request for an interview.

Another vocal skeptic is Sen. James Inhofe (R., Okla.), chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and author in 2012 of The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future.

On a chilly February day, he tossed a snowball on the Senate floor to demonstrate that the Earth was plenty cool, and to convey his contempt for "the hysteria on global warming."

A Presbyterian, Inhofe has also decried as "outrageous" the "arrogance of people to think that we human beings would be able to change what [God] is doing in the climate," and said he is doing "God's work" by challenging claims of climate change.

There is speculation that the pontiff will discuss climate in one or both of his addresses to the U.N. and to Congress, where nearly one-third of the House members and a fourth of the senators are Catholic.

House Speaker John A. Boehner (R., Ohio), who is Catholic and who invited Francis to address Congress, has said there is evidence that Earth is warming but that he is "not qualified" to decide whether it is the result of human activity.

"I'll let scientists debate sources and their opinion of that change," he said in January.

Even before industrialization, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases were at work. When sunlight warms Earth, some of the emanating heat is absorbed by these atmospheric gases and then re-emitted back toward Earth, further warming its surface.

Climate scientists say most of the modern rise in temperature to date can be attributed to the increased output of industrialized nations, as the pope is expected to say. Their relative contributions can be measured in several different ways.

From 1850 to 2011, the United States emitted more carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels - for heating, electricity, transportation, and industry - than any other country, with 27 percent of the total, according to World Resources Institute, a Washington-based think tank.

But in 2008, China began emitting more than the U.S., according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. In 2012, the most recent year available, China put 8.1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the air, compared with 5.3 billion for the U.S.

The U.S. also does not lead in terms of emissions per capita. It is behind half a dozen Middle Eastern countries, among others, though it is well ahead of European nations, Russia, and China.

In short, it's a shared responsibility of the developed world, said Princeton's Oppenheimer, noting that the top 10 countries for annual carbon emissions account for two-thirds of the world's total.

"You put those countries in a room, and you could solve the problem pretty quickly," he said.

On Monday, leaders of the world's major industrial democracies, the G7, pledged at a summit in Germany to develop long-term low-carbon strategies and eliminate fossil fuels by century's end.

Most climate scientists agree that increasing warmth spells extra trouble for agriculture in many poorer nations, such as in sub-Saharan Africa, where it is already warm. Some crops likely will fail unless scientists develop heat-tolerant varieties.

"We are going into unprecedented territory," said Michela Biasutti, an associate research professor at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. "People working on new varieties are going into overdrive. You need a completely new way of thinking about agricultural production."

Temperatures will rise in richer nations as well, but a key difference is that they have resources to adapt, said Columbia hydrologist and climate scientist Michael Puma.

Most of sub-Saharan Africa lacks quality irrigation systems, he said.

Climate scientists also predict that continued warming will affect human health, especially in poorer countries, with intense heat and wildfires. They caution against attributing any one such event to human-induced global warming, but they expect more calamities such as the recent heat wave that has killed 2,500 people in India, with temperatures hitting 118 degrees in some areas.

In polluted areas, increased heat also can contribute to increased levels of ground-level ozone, a key component of smog. And rising temperatures may contribute to the spread of insect-borne disease in some parts of the world, but scientists say more research is needed.

While the impact of global warming on rainfall is a matter of debate among climate scientists, Lori Pearson, senior policy adviser for food security and agriculture at Catholic Relief Services, said disrupted rainfall is a cause for worry in most of the 100 poor nations her organization serves.

"Subsistence farmers on degraded soils fare the worst" in droughts and dry spells, she said. And when poor soils lack nutrients and don't retain moisture, "crops just wither."

Pearson cited a recent study in El Salvador projecting that maize and bean production on its poor soil will drop 32 percent by 2020, but just 1.1 percent on good soil.

"In the Sahel [mid-northern] region of Africa," where much of the soil is degraded, "farmers tell us the rainy season that used to last five months is now 3.5 months," she said.

"It's a vicious circle," Pearson said. "You've got poor people relegated to the poorest land, and they're using traditional farming practices that just deplete the land further. So we see a pattern of environmental degradation very much linked to poverty."

While previous popes have made that link, Pearson said, she is hopeful that Francis' encyclical will challenge climate change with a force the Catholic Church has never used before, and prove to be the "call to conversion" that some are predicting.

"It's an exciting moment for us," she said. "A hopeful moment.

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More carbon emissions, hotter summers. Graphic, A16.

Rabbis issue a letter on climate change. A17.

The poem that gives the encyclical its name. A17.

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