Pope Francis challenged world leaders on Wednesday to commit to binding targets to slow climate change before it's too late, warning that God's increasingly warming creation is fast reaching a "point of no return."Pope Francis leads mass to open the Synod of Bishops in St Peter's Square at the Vatican on Wednesday.
"We are now unable to halt the enormous damage we have caused. We barely have time to prevent even more tragic damage," Francis warned., was unusual for a papal exhortation and read more like a UN scientific report. It carried a sharp tone and its footnotes had far more references to UN climate reports, NASA and Francis's own previous encyclicals than Scripture.
"What is being asked of us is nothing other than a certain responsibility for the legacy we will leave behind, once we pass from this world," he said. Even though encyclicals are meant to stand the test of time, Francis said he felt an update to his original was necessary because "our responses have not been adequate, while the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point."
"Small changes can cause greater ones, unforeseen and perhaps already irreversible, due to factors of inertia," he noted. "This would end up precipitating a cascade of events having a snowball effect. In such cases, it is always too late, since no intervention will be able to halt a process once begun."Featured Video
Francis said it was clear that the Paris target will be breached and will soon reach 3 C, and that already the effects are obvious, with oceans warming, glaciers melting and the world registering record heat waves and extreme weather events.
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