The earth’s suffering reflects the cry of the poor, everyone’s cry
November 3, 2021 · By Sr Bernadette Mary Reis, fsp for www.vaticannews.va
The earth’s suffering reflects the cry of the poor, everyone’s cry
In just a few days, world leaders will gather in Glasgow for the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26), which will take place from 31 October to 12 November. One of its objectives is to “accelerate action towards the goals of the Paris Agreement and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.” On the vigil of this important meeting, Vatican News spoke with Professor Veerabhadran Ramanathan, who was the science adviser for the Vatican delegation to COP21 in Paris in 2015. Prof. Ramanathan forecasts that the “bizarre weather” we are currently experiencing will be amplified by 50% if we do not act quickly.
The cry of mother nature
Sometimes dubbed the ‘Pope’s climate scientist,’ Prof Ramanathan wrote his first paper on the changes taking place throughout the world in 1975 when he was thirty-one years old. Back then, he says, “We never talked about this in human terms. We talked about glaciers melting, sea level rising… This change between the warming and the weather extremes became so manifest just in the last ten years.”
“Mother nature,” Prof. Ramanathan says, “is doing her best to tell us, ‘You are hurting me!’ This makes me go back to what Pope Francis said in Laudato si’ and the cry of the earth. We have to hear it. And Pope Francis says the cry of the earth should be heard with the cry of the poor.”
The cry of the earth
In what way is the earth crying out? One of the ways is through the rise in temperature. Prof. Ramanathan says that he published a paper with colleagues in 2018 forecasting that by 2030 the temperature will have risen 1.5 degrees. “That’s just nine years from now. You see, going from 1 to 1.5 is a 50% amplification. Imagine everything we’re experiencing amplified by 50%.”
The rise in temperature touches off changes in weather patterns since the two are in close relationship with each other. Prof. Ramanathan says we are just beginning to see the effects of “global warming, [which] just in the last ten to fifteen years has morphed into a global disruption of the world’s weather systems. Everywhere people are experiencing bizarre weather,” the Professor continues. “What is supposed to happen once every thousand years, once every five hundred years, is happening twice in ten years. Generally, the pattern is the dry regions are getting drier, and the wet regions are getting wetter. Wetter would be good if the rainfall came in gentle rain. The wetter is horrible, if it’s like the rain we saw in Germany – it just washes away everything, including people.”