Pope Francis on the verge of asking Catholics to step up together to fight climate change.
Science and religion don't always mix, but Pope Francis is expected to lay the groundwork for a
massive campaign to fight climate change:
With that complicated history looming, Pope Francis, once a chemist, will soon issue an authoritative church document laying out the moral justification for fighting global warming, especially for the world’s poorest billions.
Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a Scripps Institution of Oceanography climate scientist, briefed the pope on climate change. He said scientists felt they were failing in getting the world to understand the moral hazard that man-made warming presents. Now, he said, scientists who don’t often turn to religion are looking forward to the pope’s statement.
The news comes on the heels of a study which
reaffirms the link between conservative religious faith and climate change doubt:
The result, at the broadest level, was that Catholics and Protestants were generally less worried about climate change than those who are religiously unaffiliated (although Jews were more worried). Zooming in more closely, meanwhile, Arbuckle and Konisky found that it was evangelical Protestants who really stood out as being climate unconcerned. “Individuals that affiliate with an Evangelical Protestant church, all else equal, are less likely than both Mainline and Protestant churches to be worried about climate change,” they wrote.
And not just that — the study goes further and singles out the role of biblical fundamentalism. “These findings suggest that individuals in religious traditions that are more prone to teach biblical literalism are less likely to express high degrees of concern about the environment,” the authors write.
Once again, Pope Francis seems to be leading the Catholic Church in a new direction. We can only hope he will make the case to conservative Catholics, particularly in the United States, to start taking climate change more seriously and get aggressive on ways to combat it.