Scientists at Paris summit cite God, faith to bolster climate change action

Negotiators at the COP21 climate summit in Paris are entering the second and final week of the high-stakes talks with a draft agreement but some thorny issues left to iron out before Friday, mostly dealing with which parts to make legally binding — it looks like the most likely option is verifying progress on nations' own emissions targets — and deciding how much financial assistance wealthy countries will provide to developing nations. There is some optimism, and plenty of urgency. "We're talking about life itself," French Minister Laurent Fabius told the delegates in an emotional address Saturday night. "I intend to muster the experience of my entire life to the service of success for next Friday."

But climate scientists have been down this road before, and over the past 11 years, international negotiators have tried and failed to reach an international accord. This time, The Associated Press reports, some influential scientists have embraced a higher power, and also Pope Francis. "You can argue the science until cows come home, but that just appeals to people's intellect," says Marcia McNutt, the incoming head of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and former director of the U.S. Geological Survey and Science editor. "The pope's argument appeals to someone's heart. Whenever you appeal to someone's heart that's a much more powerful message."

Pope Francis has continued putting pressure on the climate negotiators, and the faithful have turned out in Paris to work and pray for a meaningful agreement. "The environment movement, which has primarily been a secular one, has realized that over the last 30 years or so it's not been that successful in achieving its goals," explained Joe Ware of Christian Aid. "Increasingly it has looked to faith groups for help in mobilizing a broader movement of people calling for action on climate change. They are actually natural allies as almost all faiths have a theology of creation care at their heart."

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John Schellnhuber, founder of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and a member of the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences, says the international negotiators "know they will be measured against the encyclical," referring to the pope's ecological/moral tract Laudato Sí. He hasn't seen much evidence of that happening in the first week, AP reports, "but he has faith it will."