Climate change

IT’S AMAZING TO THINK there was a time when God could get one’s attention by setting a single bush on fire. Now, apparently, it takes the entire planet.

In the last 18 months or so, there’s been a lot of talk framing climate change as a lesser issue, that instead we’re concentrating on “affordability,” and so on. If that’s been true, our intermission is coming to an end. Meteorologists are predicting that a new El Niño will form in the Pacific later this summer, and that there’s a good chance it could be a “super El Niño,” only the third such occurrence in the last 30 years. But even if it’s just a “normal” massive injection of heat into the atmosphere, it will mean enormous trouble.

MAYBE YOU’VE NOTICED the pattern: Since 1995, the United Nations has called world leaders together every year to participate in a Conference of Parties, or COP, on climate change. Politicians and negotiators are tasked with discussing progress and commitments—or lack thereof. So far so good, right? But year after year, governments fail to show up with enough ambition to meet even their own targets—targets that already fall short of what social movements and scientists demand. Faced with an existential threat to human and other life on earth, our leaders meet annually and agree to back away from their promises, pushing the planet further into a situation of more flash floods and drawn-out droughts, more wildfire smoke and rising shorelines, a world less fit for life in all its variety.

In 2025, COP30 marked 10 years since the signing of the Paris Agreement, where 196 countries committed to limit global warming to 1.5°C higher than preindustrial temperatures. In the summer leading up to COP30, a document began to circulate: “The science is clear: we must limit global warming to 1.5°C to avoid catastrophic effects. We must never abandon this goal,” the document says. “It is the Global South and future generations who are already suffering the consequences. We reject false solutions such as ‘green’ capitalism, technocracy, the commodification of nature, and extractivism, which perpetuate exploitation and injustice.” Instead, the authors call for transformational, structural change, the kind of courage that never makes it to COP meetings.

The document reads like an impassioned call from a revolutionary climate movement, criticizing even the green economy for emerging “not as a break with capitalism, but as an incremental modernisation of capitalism, expanding its capacity for self-regulation while perpetuating systemic contradictions.” Yet the document did not come from the Extinction Rebellion, a socialist group, a left-wing think tank, or a handful of anarchists. It came from the Catholic bishops of Latin America, Africa, and Asia, who issued it together as “the message of the Catholic Church in the Global South.”

AS A PHOTOJOURNALIST, I have witnessed firsthand how climate change is shaping life in Kashmir, from snowfalls and receding glaciers to scorching heat waves and erratic rainfall. I have seen rivers drying, houseboats sitting in the dried portion. [This June] when I reached the outskirts of the capital city, Srinagar, kids were playing, bathing, cooling themselves during an intense heat wave.

SINCE I AM a Christian, I worship the Son, not the sun. That said, I’ve been spending most of my time lately thinking about that large ball of gas the good Lord was kind enough to hang in the sky, 93 million miles away. In fact, we’re getting ready for an entire weekend devoted to considering the most important object in our physical world — though it is the only one you can’t look at directly. SunDay will happen on September 20 and 21, 2025 (details at SunDay.earth), and I hope it’s a chance for real reverence.

The sun already supplies light, heat, and photosynthesis, and now it’s ready to provide all the power we could ever need. In the last decade, engineers have dropped the price of solar power by 90%; they have done similar work for batteries that store power for when the sun goes down. We now live on a planet where the cheapest way to generate power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun.

If we take full advantage of those new facts, we stand some chance of limiting the damage from the climate crisis. Last year, California reduced the amount of natural gas it used to generate energy by 25% compared to its usage in 2023. This is the most hopeful statistic I’ve come across in my 35 years of working on global warming. California was able to do this because it had put up enough solar panels to really make a difference. And this could happen everywhere. Texas is currently building clean energy faster than anywhere else in North America but is miles behind China, which put up about 60% of the planet’s solar panels last year.

I FIRST CAME across digital media artist Madeleine Jubilee Saito’s work on social media. While scrolling through a sea of Instagram stories about environmental disasters, civil unrest, and humanitarian strife, I reached a square that made me pause: a multicolor four-panel image from a digital watercolor comic. I took in the top two panels of a gray figure staring out into the sky and then the glimmering, fruited foliage framing the bottom two panels. It felt like a vision from a better, more just future. The text on each panel, though brief, was powerful. I took in each word like a sacred telegram: THE GREAT WOUND / IS HEALED / ALL THINGS / MADE NEW.”

When I was younger, I found comfort in dynamic plotlines nestled in the predictable geometry of print and online comic series. Through Saito’s work, that comfort returned to me, in the form of four panels grappling with climate grief and environmental repair.

When I spoke with Saito about her work, she said that her affinity for comics started in high school. “As a young person, I had a very hard time accessing my own feelings or seeing that my interiority or my life were particularly valuable,” she said. “Comics were a way I could crystallize that value and the meaning of my own interiority for others — make it visible.” Now, Saito’s work conveys the value of the natural world. In her ecological storytelling, we see portraits of people amid towering trees and shimmering waterways. Her human subjects submerge themselves in the elements; her natural subjects invite readers to take a closer look at this numinous world.

Her upbringing in northern Illinois exposed Saito to the tensions between humans and earth. She grew up in a house deep in the woods — “a strip of forest in the middle of this desolate monocrop landscape,” she said, explaining how she saw beauty amid exploitation. “The animals — raccoons and possums — were pests to be managed. Every year the trees and bushes and plants from the forest would encroach further toward the house and every year they would need to be cut back.”

This awareness of the adversarial relationship with the natural world has guided her work and now culminates in her debut book, You Are a Sacred Place: Visual Poems for Living in Climate Crisis (Andrews McMeel, 2025). The first section explores the doom happening parallel to climate collapse. In one story, we see someone curled up in bed, sinking into and verbalizing their sadness post-job layoff. Wildfire smoke chokes the Seattle air around them. In this panel, I see myself, two years ago, numb from financial despair while wildfire smoke cast a noxious orange hue over Philadelphia.

Nearly 90% of U.S. Christian religious leaders believe humans are driving climate change. When churchgoers learn how widespread this belief is, they report taking steps to reduce its effects, as we found in our research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The fight to save the planet isn't over yet, but it will look different under Trump. Can Christians lead the charge? 

NONVIOLENT DIRECT ACTION is a relatively new invention — though prefigured by the Cross, it was Gandhi, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and a million others whose names we don’t know or remember who introduced this technique to us over the course of the 20th century. There’s no handbook for how it’s done, and no West Point equivalent — which means that we largely proceed by trial and error as we try to move the conscience of the world. We make it up as we go along. Which is fine, but you must be honest about what works.

Over the last year, one tactic that climate activists have tried is attacking cultural works — iconic paintings, right up to the “Mona Lisa,” and great shrines of humanity, most notably Stonehenge. They’ve been responsible, figuring out ways to do minimal damage, and perhaps such methods were worth a try: When you’re losing, you throw Hail Marys. And the people who carried out these actions clearly should not be subject to ridiculously punitive sentences.

God’s creation operates according to rules — we call them physics and chemistry — and they are not to be trifled with. Right now, we’re trifling.

But right now — at the exact same moment — we’re also using chemistry and physics to do some remarkable things that could potentially repair some of that trifling.

We don’t know which will win. It will come down to biology — that is, to the rules that govern who we are in this created order.

The trifling first: The climate crisis is clicking into its highest gear yet. 2023 was the hottest year in the last 125,000, and the steamiest too, as the heat drives up the level of moisture in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere grew at their fastest pace ever, surging more than 4 parts per million. Ralph Keeling, the veteran scientist in charge of compiling the data, said, “Human activity has caused CO2 to rocket upwards. It makes me sad more than anything. It’s sad what we are doing.”

It should make us sad. Some humans — climate scientists, specifically — warned the rest of us humans about all this more than three decades ago, when we could have headed off much of it. We didn’t.