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Pope Francis Prays U.N. Climate Summit Will ‘Unite the Human Family’ROME — Pope Francis said Wednesday that “Mother Earth groans and begs us to stop our abuse” of creation.Following his weekly general audience in the Vatican, the pontiff noted September 1 will mark the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, kicking off a month-long “Season of Creation,” culminating on October 4, the feast of St Francis of Assisi. The pope went on to express his wish that the call to listen to the voice of creation will “foster in everyone a concrete commitment to care for our...

The world must “keep a close eye on climate protection” as it faces the economic fallout of the pandemic, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Wednesday, speaking remotely for the Petersberg Climate Dialogue. “We need a financial market that provides cheap capital for climate-friendly investments,” said Merkel, during an address for the annual event usually held in Berlin. Merkel also called for climate action to be included as part of economic reconstruction plans following the pandemic, including investments in future-oriented technologies such as renewable energy. In a video address following Merkel, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said the pandemic had “exposed...

Many German lawmakers were flooded with messages during the recent debate on the UN migration pact, in what appeared to be the work of social media bots, said Ralph Brinkhaus, the head of the parliamentary group of the ruling conservative CDU party. The emails “often had same blocs of texts”, Brinkhaus told Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung in an interview published on Sunday. “But most of all, this wave of untruths and defamation was unleashed online and on social media,” he added, urging a series of measures to fight disinformation. On social media, a “bot” is a label used for automated programs...

Church leaders urged governments around the world to ramp up their climate action efforts on Friday (26 October), calling for “ambitious implementation” of the Paris Agreement. In a joint appeal, the presidents of the Catholic continental bishops’ conference, which represents church leaders from five continents, insisted that the international community has a “moral duty” to meet the targets of the landmark climate accord. According to the appeal, launched today in Rome, the six presidents said that the upcoming UN climate change summit in Poland this December should act as a “milestone on the path set out in 2015 in Paris”....

The Trump administration is in the beginning stages of forming an adversarial "red team" to play devil's advocate in a plan to debate the facts behind global warming and take on what skeptics call climate alarmism. The White House and the Environmental Protection Agency are recruiting scientists by enlisting the help of the Heartland Institute, considered to be the lead think tank for challenging the majority of scientists on climate change. The institute has its own red team, which is the antithesis to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which it calls, unabashedly, the Nongovernmental International Panel on...

A former member of the Obama administration claims Washington, D.C., often uses “misleading” news releases about climate data to influence public opinion. Former Energy Department Undersecretary Steven Koonin told The Wall Street Journal Monday that bureaucrats within former President Barack Obama’s administration spun scientific data to manipulate public opinion. “What you saw coming out of the press releases about climate data, climate analysis, was, I’d say, misleading, sometimes just wrong,” Koonin said, referring to elements within the Obama administration he said were responsible for manipulating climate data. He pointed to a National Climate Assessment in 2014 showing hurricane activity has...

Paris (AFP) - France's top diplomat, who will preside over a year-end Paris summit tasked with inking a climate rescue pact, warned Sunday of looming planetary "catastrophe" if negotiations fail. "It is life on our planet itself which is at stake," Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told journalists as ministers and climate envoys from 70 countries met for pre-summit talks to iron out tough political questions. With the key UN conference just three weeks away, he also announced that Russia's President Vladimir Putin would attend the November 30 opening. Russia, a major oil producer, is seen as a deal-maker or -breaker...

United Nations (United States) (AFP) - Robert Redford told the United Nations on Monday that negotiations on a global deal to tackle climate change could be the world's "last chance" to save the planet. "This December, the world must unite behind a common goal," said the American actor and producer. "Because look, this is it. This is our only planet, our only life source. "This may be our last chance." World governments will try to forge a new global accord to address climate change at a UN climate conference in Paris in December, with both developed and developing countries committing...

BONN, Germany (Reuters) - Pope Francis is likely to have a major impact in spurring U.N. negotiations on global warming with an encyclical on the environment next week, the U.N.'s climate chief said on Thursday. "Pope Francis is personally committed to this issue like no other pope before him," Christiana Figueres told a news conference at June 1-11 talks on a deal to combat climate change due to be agreed in Paris in December. The encyclical, a letter sent to bishops, due next Thursday would add a moral dimension to work on climate change for many believers, who would view...

BONN, Germany (Reuters) - Almost 80 percent of people worldwide are perturbed about global warming and most want tough action to fix the problem, according to a new study that the United Nations touted as a spur to an international climate deal later this year. The report, based on consultations with 10,000 people in 75 nations from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, also showed that 66 percent viewed measures to tackle warming, such as more wind or solar energy, as a chance to improve their quality of life. Christiana Figueres, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, said the findings were "important...

WASHINGTON (CBSDC) — Secretary of State John Kerry warns U.S. ambassadors that they will be dealing with “climate refugees” in the not-too-distant future. Kerry told U.S. ambassadors at the Global Chiefs of Mission Conference in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday about the threat climate change poses around the world. “There’ll be climate refugees that all of you will be coping with at some point, if not now, in the not-too-distant future,” Kerry said. “Ninety-seven percent of all the scientists for 20 years tell us unequivocally that this is happening and happening now, and humans are causing it, and we have a...

A scholarly paper explaining why predictions made by climate computer models used by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) tend to exaggerate global warming has ignited a political firestorm. Dr. Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon, a solar physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, came under attack by environmentalists after co-authoring a peer-reviewed paper explaining “the widening discrepancy between prediction and observation” in climate change models, and members of Congress soon took sides. The scientific paper, entitled “Why Models Run Hot,” concludes that the computer models overstated the impact of CO2 on the climate: “The impact of anthropogenic global...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The world still isn't close to preventing what leaders call a dangerous level of man-made warming, a new United Nations report says. That's despite some nations' recent pledges to cut back on carbon dioxide emissions. The report looks at the gap between what countries promise to do about carbon pollution and what scientists say needs to be done to prevent temperatures rising another two degrees. The two-degree level is a goal that world leaders set in 2009. "The time window (for reaching that goal) is closing, closing," said United Nations undersecretary for environment Achim Steiner. And the...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Global warming is here, human-caused and probably already dangerous — and it's increasingly likely that the heating trend could be irreversible, a draft of a new international science report says. The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on Monday sent governments a final draft of its synthesis report, which combines three earlier, gigantic documents by the Nobel Prize-winning group. There is little in the report that wasn't in the other more-detailed versions, but the language is more stark and the report attempts to connect the different scientific disciplines studying problems caused by the burning of fossil...

Geneva (AFP) - Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations have crossed a new threshold, the UN's weather agency said Monday, highlighting the urgency of curbing manmade, climate-altering greenhouse gases. In April, for the first time, the mean monthly CO2 concentration in the atmosphere topped 400 parts per million (ppm) throughout the northern hemisphere, which pollutes more than the south, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said. "This should serve as yet another wakeup call about the constantly rising levels of greenhouse gases which are driving climate change," WMO chief Michel Jarraud said in a statement. "If we are to preserve our planet for...

OSLO (Reuters) - Part of East Antarctica is more vulnerable than expected to a thaw that could trigger an unstoppable slide of ice into the ocean and raise world sea levels for thousands of years, a study showed on Sunday. The Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica, stretching more than 1,000 km (600 miles) inland, has enough ice to raise sea levels by 3 to 4 meters (10-13 feet) if it were to melt as an effect of global warming, the report said. The Wilkes is vulnerable because it is held in place by a small rim of ice, resting on...

(Reuters) - Following are main findings by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in a report on Sunday saying that time is running out to keep global warming within agreed limits. The 33-page summary, by leading scientists, is meant to guide almost 200 governments which have promised to work out a deal by the end of 2015 to slow climate change. Nations have promised to limit warming to a maximum 2 degrees Celsius (3.6F) above pre-industrial times, seen as a threshold for more heat waves, droughts and rising seas - temperatures have already risen about 0.8C (1.4F).

BERLIN (AP) — The head of the United Nations scientific panel on climate change urged diplomats and scientists to show "enlightenment" Monday, as they began a weeklong meeting aimed at spelling out in plain terms what options the world has if it wants to prevent catastrophic global warming. Delegates at the closed-doors meeting in Berlin need to tackle a number of sensitive issues, including how best to cut carbon emissions and how to share the cost of shifting away from the fossil fuels that are largely blamed for producing the gases that are heating the planet. Their conclusions will feed...

OSLO (Reuters) - A little-known technology that may be able to take the equivalent of China's greenhouse gas emissions out of the carbon cycle could be the radical policy shift needed to slow climate change this century, a draft U.N. report shows. Using the technology, power plants would burn biomass - wood, wood pellets, or plant waste like from sugar cane - to generate electricity while the carbon dioxide in the biomass is extracted, piped away and buried deep underground. Among techniques, a chemical process can strip carbon dioxide from the flue gases from combustion. The process - called bio-energy...

Geneva (AFP) - Last year tied for the sixth-hottest on record, confirming that Earth's climate system is in the grip of warming that will affect generations to come, the UN's weather agency said Wednesday. "This is confirmation of the trend of global warming of the planet," World Meteorological Organization (WMO) chief Michel Jarraud told AFP. Last year equalled 2007 as the sixth-warmest year since reliable records began in 1850, with a global land and ocean surface temperature that was 0.5 degrees Celsius (0.9 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 1961-1990 average, the WMO said in a statement. Last year equalled 2007 as...