Remembering Pope Francis's climate advocacy, Bill Aitken's nature writing, and the race to avoid runaway climate change
In this edition of Climate Change & You, read about the vital role played by Pope Francis in the fight against climate change, Bill Aitken's nature writing, and how Indian heatwaves point to a terrible future
Climate Change & You is a fortnightly newsletter written by Bibek Bhattacharya and Sayantan Bera. Subscribe to Mint’s newsletters to get them directly in your inbox.
Dear reader,
With the death of Pope Francis on 21 April, we lost a powerful and persuasive force in the fight against climate change. It was probably to be expected that a Pope as progressive as him would draw clear connections between the plight of the poor and marginalized, and how this inequality only gets exacerbated by global warming.
The ‘Climate Pope’, as he is hailed by scientists, officials and climate activists worldwide, had made environmental advocacy a central part of his Papacy. Over the years, he intervened time and again, reminding both rich corporations and nations of the debt that they owed to nature and to the poor.
Two years after becoming Pope, in 2015, Francis published a now-famous document, the Laudato si’: On Care for Our Common Home. In it, he called climate change “a global problem with grave implications: environmental, social, economic, political, and for the distribution of goods." Speaking to The Guardian, Austen Ivereigh, a papal biographer, called the document Francis’s “signature teaching": “Francis has made it not just safe to be Catholic and green; he’s made it obligatory."
Also Read | India's climate crisis: Early heatwaves, melting Himalayan glaciers, and a biodiversity collapse
As planet-heating carbon emissions continued to rise despite warnings, Pope Francis took a more combative line, calling “Ecocide" a sin in 2019, and writing in 2023: “Despite all attempts to deny, conceal, gloss over, or relativize the issue, the signs of climate change are here and increasingly evident." In 2024, during a climate conference at the Vatican, he urged political leaders to think whether, “…we are working for a culture of life or for a culture of death."The Pope will be missed.
STATE OF THE CLIMATE
My newsletter partner Sayantan wrote about India’s early heatwaves in the previous edition, and I’ve written about how February was a record hot year for India. As expected, April was no different, with record early heat scorching north India. By mid-April, daytime temperatures in New Delhi had hit 40 degrees Celsius thrice, large parts of India and Pakistan were reeling from heatwaves.
A recent analysis of the heatwaves by French extreme weather attribution group ClimaMeter has found that temperatures in New Delhi were 5 degrees higher than the seasonal average, and the overwhelming reason for that is climate change, with temperature anomalies in India and Pakistan reaching as much as +12 degrees Celsius at times.
ClimaMeter’s analysis essentially compares the heatwave conditions to temperature data from the 1950s and concludes that the heatwaves were primarily due to the effects of human-caused climate change. A small percentage of the conditions could be attributed to natural climate variability.
THE NEWS IN BRIEF
-The state of coral reefs around the world are extremely precarious.This story is how a coral bleaching event in April, caused by marine heatwaves, affected 80% of corals around the world.
-Environmental pollution and climate change touches every aspect of your life, even down to skincare. In this interview, Dr Annie Black, the international scientific director at luxury beauty brand Lancôme, says that both pollution and UV rays are damaging the skins of Indians.
-This opinion piece for Mint makes a strong argument that if India has to get ahead of climate-fuelled health challenges, then it needs to build robust health-data infrastructure, strengthen inter-ministerial data sharing and enhance agency cooperation
CLIMATE CHANGE TRACKER
The Silent Climate Majority
Nearly everyone around the world is worried about climate change and would like more intense climate action. And nearly everyone thinks that very few people want climate action from their governments. Many see this strange conundrum to be at the heart of the reason why governments around the world aren’t trying as hard as possible to ramp up ambition.
The message that people who want more climate action are actually the overwhelming majority is at the heart of a new media endeavour called “the 89 Percent Project". Helmed by the journalism collective Covering Climate Now (CCNow), between 21-28 April, participating newsrooms like The Guardian, Deutsche Welle, Rolling Stone, TIME and Scientific American published a series of articles aimed at policymakers and governments to sensitize them about the “silent climate majority".
Also Read | The alarming climate shifts taking place in India
They made the case that there is actually overwhelming global support for the pivot away from fossil fuels while there is still time, and that governments shouldn’t pretend like this consensus doesn’t exist. There will be a second week of stories and advocacy in October, leading up to the COP30 UN climate summit in Brazil.
Climate action is popular not just with common people, but also with business leaders. A recent global survey of 1,477 executives in firms across 15 mature and economies revealed that 97% support a move away from fossil fuels. The survey, commissioned by Beyond Fossil Fuels (a Europe-based civil society campaign), E3G (a climate think tank) and We Mean Business Coalition (a climate non-profit that works with global businesses), also found that 84% of Indian business leaders supported a shift to renewable energy (RE) by 2035.
KNOW YOUR JARGON
Geoengineering
Geoengineering, or to be more precise solar geoengineering, is the ultimate pipe dream—that of unearthing global scale technological fixes to stop the planet from getting any hotter. These are ideas that are, in their present state, more to do with science fiction than science. Basically, geoengineering solutions are primarily about finding ways to prevent solar radiation (i.e. heat) from reaching the planet, by deflecting it. If enough heat doesn’t reach the Earth, the logic goes, then it won’t get trapped by greenhouse gases like CO2 and methane. And thus, the planet gets cooler.
There are all sorts of proposals for this, including one from 1997 of putting giant mirrors in space. Geoengineering ideas include spraying the Earth’s atmosphere with aerosol gas particles, or brightening high altitude clouds by spraying them with sea water. On 22 April, a UK government-funded programme announced that it will undertake small-scale outdoor geoengineering experiments to test the feasibility of the technology. The US administration under Joe Biden also flirted with geoengineering experiments.
But, as scientists have consistently pointed out, you cannot fix the climate by tinkering with planetary systems. It’s a matter of scale: first of all, we are decades away from any valid tech that can control heating or do effective carbon-capture-and-storage on a global scale. The money invested in such research would be better used to phase out fossil fuels instead. Secondly, even when possible, such experiments can cause more harm, like shifting rainfall patterns, and adversely affecting agriculture. Focusing on geoengineering is also a form of distraction, turning attention away from tackling the root cause of global warming—burning fossil fuels.
PRIME NUMBER
3
Unless there’s significant action within the next 5-10 years to drastically reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the world is staring at a catastrophic warming of 3 degrees Celsius or more by the end of the century.
I should make it clear that this is a distinct possibility. And if that happens, then global systems will start breaking down by the 2050s-2070s, as a spate of important new research has indicated.
According to one from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries at the University of Exeter, the global economy would lose 50% or more of GDP between 2070 and 2090. Inaction can also lead to compounding effects, and the report warns that if the world heats up by 3 degrees Celsius by 2050, the result would be the death of billions.
According to another study, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, warns of a loss of 40% to global GDP if we stay at business-as-usual. The researchers conclude that while the economic costs of shifting away from fossil fuels would be high in the short term, the cost of inaction is cataclysmic.
BOOK OF THE MONTH
The Nanda Devi Affair by Bill Aitken
When the travel writer Bill Aitken passed at the age of 91 in his home in Mussoorie on 16 April, I was one of his many fans who mourned the gentle, witty and sharp man’s loss. It seems somehow reductive to call a man of so many parts a mere travel writer, especially when you read his magnum opus—The Nanda Devi Affair.
The book is no mere travelogue, but Aitken’s meditation on his fascination and obsession with Nanda Devi, the 7,816m Himalayan peak that is also a goddess to the people of Uttarakhand. To read this joyful book is to soak in the verve with which Aitken chased down all of Nanda’s secret places and hidden lores. It is also a powerful reminder that nature is never impersonal.
The book may not have anything directly to do with climate change, but read it to awaken your environmental consciousness. You’ll want to defend our beautiful world with your life then.
That’s it with this issue of Climate Change & You, dear reader. Sayantan will be back with the next instalment in a fortnight.
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