Practically everyone has seen a satellite weather image of the part of the planet where they live. We all use forecasts of temperature and precipitation numbers to plan our daily or weekly activities. Extended over enough time, the actual record of these weather features is a picture of the climate of a place, and the merger of all the places becomes Earth’s climate system. For the sixth time since 1988, a large international group of scientists coordinated by the United Nations has produced a report that explains the current scientific understanding of the climate system and how it is changing. The report involved 751 principal and contributing authors from 66 countries. The official title is: The report of Working Group I (“The Physical Science Basis”) for the Sixth Assessment Report (6th AR) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Normally, the release of a final draft report of a scientific working group might produce only a stifled yawn outside the community of specialists. But the topic of climate change, even the science of it, is politically supercharged. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres called the report a “code red for humanity.”
In short, the topic on the table is how we live our lives, and even how we might be permitted to live our lives in a time of climate change. The climate change issue has emerged as one of the principal drivers of global ethics. The 195 national governments and the largely academic experts involved in the IPCC process are clearly volunteering to define those boundaries. Catholic individuals, families and communities — even the Church itself — have a great deal at stake here.
If that’s the case, then the answer to the question of how good of a job Working Group I has done in assessing the science of climate change is of exceptional importance.
What the science says
When the IPCC assessments began in 1988, scientists simply did not have the reliable databases to do Earth system science to the level of precision and accuracy needed. The current 6th Assessment Report demonstrates impressive improvement.
So, what are some highlights in the latest report? The world has now warmed about 1.1°C compared to preindustrial levels. Earth has not been this warm for 100,000 years with one relatively brief exception. Today, some parts of the Earth, especially the Arctic (and 71 U.S. counties), have already warmed more than 2°C. The water stored in glacial ice is moving into the world ocean so that sea levels are rising, with about a meter more to come by the end of the century if there are no surprises (as noted in Laudato Si’, No. 24). Human developments near ocean coasts are going to be under water or attacked by greatly increased erosion. At the end of summer, there is now about half the ice cover of the Arctic Ocean typical of a half-century ago, and the open water absorbs noticeably more sun energy than the former ice pack, causing more warming than greenhouse gasses alone.
Increasing soil temperatures in the far north are starting to allow the breakdown of the huge amount of carbon stored in dead plant remains there, especially in permafrost where carbon is otherwise locked away. The soil carbon is coming out as the greenhouse gasses carbon dioxide and methane. Carbon dioxide is the really big climate-warming greenhouse gas.
Places that are experiencing strong warming and drying are literally burning up, and after some fires, forests may not be able to continue to grow where they have in the past. The issue is complex, as humans have suppressed formerly frequent low-intensity wildland fires, ensuring that fires today are hotter and more destructive. However, enough data is now available to allow reasonable estimates of how much of the overall change in the fire situation is due to the human contribution to climate change. For example, it is estimated that 10-30% of the California drought of the past few years (the strongest in 1,200 years) was probably caused by humans. In dryland regions — from the Mediterranean to California, Australia, and monsoon regions of Africa and Asia — there is now less available water overall, less clean water, and less water per capita. Shrinking mountain glaciers will provide less meltwater in many places within the foreseeable future. Obtaining water and growing food face new challenges, obstacles and costs.
Caring for God’s creation
The whole assessment process is, of course, grounded in secular rationality. However, Catholics and other Christians appear to have a special role to pull some people back from a worldview that is so immersed in computer modeling of futures that it risks feeding a neopagan “desire for power over time, history, and, in the last analysis, other human beings” contradicting “… the honor, respect, and loving fear that we owe to God alone” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 2116).
Sometimes a review of these facts, processes, and clear trends can make for gloomy reading. But the human and natural systems affected by change have a certain amount of adaptive capacity, even if we don’t have all that good an idea of how much of it exists. Here and there the path of change we are on provides new opportunities for some human needs in some places, although few so far in comparison with the challenges and problems.
It’s been a wild 200 years, with the Industrial Revolution, a vast global increase in living standards, prosperity, new ideologies, global war, revolution, reaction, knowledge explosion, population expansion, species extinction and loss of nature, pollution, the communications revolution, and expansion and recession of the Christian faith. Now, increasingly, we are going to be living in an age of climate change adjustment. Society will adjust to the changes happening around us. There is no alternative. We can only choose to make the adjustments more successful or less so.
A strict secular worldview ultimately may not provide a strong enough basis for sticking together and sticking with the task ahead of us long enough. Even more seriously, some apparently popular policy responses have the potential to make our response to climate change a grim, glum, squashing of human potential and freedom, just as the COVID-19 lockdowns revealed religious freedom can be threatened from unexpected quarters. Alternatively, our adjustment to the challenges of a changing world can be the occasion for a time of reconnection to the enduring, meaningful things in life — things such as vocation, family, human compassion, the natural world we have made ourselves responsible for, and, most of all, faith.
Clearly, these challenges will not be met by people with self-obsessed materialist values, by blissed-out individuals in a drug-induced haze failing to launch into adult life, or angry and vindictive power-seekers. Most of all, it will take faith. Faith in divine providence and faith in our God-given potentials and individual charisms. As Catholics, we believe and teach that we are not trapped in the perpetuation of the flat horizontal plane of an unchanging Earth. Christ called us — and calls us still — to a higher and eternal destiny. And far from an excuse for inaction, that call must be the enduring motivation to never put in opposition the honor we give to the created order, to the human person and, most of all, to the God who out of love for us created and sustains it all (cf. Laudato Si’, No. 119).
Dr. Glenn Patrick Juday is a professor emeritus of Forest Ecology, Department of Natural Resources and Environment, at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.