The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group’s recently released report is a “code red for humanity,” warned U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
“The alarm bells are deafening,” he further warned. “And the evidence is irrefutable. Global heating is affecting every region on Earth, with many of the changes becoming irreversible.”
The IPCC report predicts that “Many changes due to past and future greenhouse gas emissions are irreversible for centuries to millennia, especially changes in the ocean, ice sheets and global sea level.”
But there is still a reasonable chance that humanity can greatly lessen the severity of other ecological disasters, only if we as individuals, nations and corporations act quickly and seriously.
In the absence of a unified global comprehensive commitment to keep coal, gas, and oil in the ground, totally switch to clean renewable energy, and to reverse deforestation, we will pass the catastrophic scientific “tipping points” of no return.
The IPCC report warns that unless there are immediate, large-scale reductions in human –induced greenhouse gas emissions, temperatures will continue to rise, and with increased heat will come more intense droughts, wildfires, marine heat waves, ocean acidification, glacier melts, and sea level rises.
And yet, many people deny the clearly observable existence of climate change, global warming, and the scientific fact that human activity is overwhelmingly causing it.
In this recent IPCC report, the international working group of scientists boldly declares: “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean, and land.”
On an anecdotal note, as a result of the massive wildfires in Canada, I recently experienced here in central Minnesota thick afternoon smoke darkening the sky and making it harder to breathe. It was rather eerie.
In his environmental encyclical letter Laudato Si’, On Care for Our Common Home, Pope Francis uses a quote from his patron Saint Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Creatures: “Praise be to you, my Lord, through our sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruits with colored flowers and herbs.”
“St. Francis of Assisi reminds us,” writes the pope, “that our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us. This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. ”
Honestly, shouldn’t we stop plundering our sister, our mother earth?
