Being a Catholic Climate Scientist

Written by Sandra Rosales

I’ve spent the past couple of weeks feeling this stirring that this blog needs to go deeper, cut through the more fluffier side of responding to climate change, and be a space where I or anyone else can be transparent about what’s to come and the warrior side of fighting for our future.

Where this comes from is the undercurrent of disbelief and frustration that I have had since the beginning of my career as a climate scientist – and it still continues up until the present.

My career began as a young aspiring atmospheric scientist coming up in the time of the heated debates of the cause of climate change – is it natural, is it caused by humans? From day one, that river of frustration began. Why does it matter? We have a body of amazingly intelligent people who have modeled out the impacts of climate change (that we’re seeing now), regardless of its cause. To me, what the models were showing was the more important issue, but not everyone saw it that way.

So I turned and ran against the tide to join the body of researchers who were doing the modeling. My area of expertise – tropical storms. Extreme weather always fascinated me, but hurricanes (cyclones, typhoons) always caught my attention. And even more so was how climate change was impacting them.

I became a hurricane climate modeler. Not only modeling storms for future climates, but trying to create a product that would forecast the damage caused by a storm, in dollars, through county-level, nicely colored maps that would make it easy to see what counties were going to get hit the hardest, money-wise. In that time, I also eventually came to model storms that would wipe out small island nations and at that point, I stopped in my tracks. Where exactly is this career path going? Is this information of the scientific community getting out? How are we preparing these communities?

Those questions took me out of an office surrounded by four computer screens, coding with supercomputers, to the bayou of southern Louisiana. I went down there because I wanted to approach the issue of climate impacts on a community-based level, which was a big taboo back then for me, who was a ‘hard scientist’. How dare I now start mixing in social science? Interdisciplinary work was not favorable, but to me it made sense. How else are we going to communicate the risks and come up with solutions for vulnerable communities? We certainly can’t do that from our computer desks.

I thought the vulnerability I went to tackle was that of hurricanes. I quickly learned that there was a much bigger one. Extreme land loss. Yes, hurricanes were a threat, but land loss due to environmental degradation caused by dredging for oil and gas pipelines, which lead to saltwater intrusion, not counting the undocumented long-impacts of oil spills – it just isn’t a good situation down there.

Come to find out, even with the most sophisticated science indicating the widespread loss to come, those being hit the hardest with these vulnerabilities were in fact NOT being protected. In the time I was in Louisiana, the Coastal Master Plan was being developed and I was utterly dismayed hearing that the people of south Louisiana, past a literal line, were not economically worth adressing. I kid you not.

At that point I realized, protecting the most vulnerable from climate impacts is going to require putting your boxing gloves on.

My work in Louisiana quickly turned into something that was beyond just doing research – it was an act of service to my brothers and sisters who needed help being heard and coming up with solutions for the future they face. I was very glad to be leaving behind the world of research that was motivated by accolades, journal placements, and conference panels. I was on the ground, side by side, working with these residents trying to figure things out with them.

What we came up with – a simple culture awareness app/website called Vanishing Points. The intention was to archive their culture so that they had a reminder of who they always have been and will continue to be, even if they had to move. And in the occasion that they had to, that they had something they could show their new neighbors, so they could understand who they are.

I was deeply moved by their sense of community, their connection to their traditions, and past generations. I honestly felt at home there.

So when I left because ‘my research’ for my thesis was ‘complete’, I felt quite incomplete. It wasn’t my research. It was something we had just started to build together. And at the time, the community of Isle de Jean Charles was also trying to figure out whether they were leaving or staying. I wanted to be there for them, more than anything, because I could see from a mile away that there was such a high potential of them becoming a pet project of sorts, with no sign of trauma-informed practices, fueled by money and hidden agendas, dismissing the true needs, interests, and traditional knowledge of the community. (This is their relocation page now – heartbreakingly frustrating to me to see this and read their reports).

Climate migration - what Ise de Jean Charles faces now and what I recognized it to be back in 2012. At that time, climate migration was something so new to the US and I wanted to continue in this field, of looking at what it means and what’s required to use relocation as a form of climate change adaptation, its impacts, and ways we could incorporate mental health into displacement planning. But it was too new. I even offered to help colleges like Columbia create programs for this.

God had other plans for me though, which involved a multi-year journey for me of personal healing. It was most certainly not a straight and easy path, but after decades of shattered self-worth from sexual assaults and the responsive years of heavy alcohol and drug usage, God surely didn’t give up on me. As many times as I had tried to get better, and fell back into the darkness, I know that our God is an eternal spring of patience and mercy, and that there is nothing and no one He can’t restore and redeem.

With that in my heart, I know that no matter how bad things will get, God is always there waiting to help us get better. But track records show that many of us are pretty hard-headed, and we seem not to learn our lessons until really bad things happen.

And honestly, that’s what I’m afraid is going to happen to us. We’ve allowed our consumerism and ways of living spin completely out of control, that we have absolutely no sense of responsibility of our actions. Yes, there are the few, but the majority continue to steer this massive ship headed for an iceberg that isn’t even hidden under the water.

We’ve known the danger. The scientific community has really tried to warn the people for decades now, but political agendas and the great monetary powers that be either shut out the words of warning to safeguard their interests or gaslight them to become weapons of division when unity and collaboration are what’s needed to get us in on track.

That’s the daily battle I face at work, trying to re-write how local government leaders function and interact. Silo-breaking is not fun, let me tell you. And the pace at which things need to move does not match the pace at which things usually move on the government level. Really, they have the power to change things overnight (look at the responses to COVID), but for some reason, the future that’s at stake is just not an urgent matter when in fact it’s a humanitarian emergency. Even as billions of dollars and extensive federal programs start to role out to try to get America to move towards resiliency, it just doesn’t seem to click for everyone, the importance of dropping how things have been done and picking up what needs to be done.

What I’m worried about now is seeing us fault into emergency response mode, in perpetuity, because our leaders haven’t hastily responded to the cries of the scientific community. And those that will be hit the hardest are the ones that couldn’t fed for themselves to begin with. Take for example how much devastation Hurricane Ida caused in South Louisiana, where most of the hardest hit communities (where I worked) didn’t even make it to mainstream news. My heart breaks knowing how many lives were permanently altered, and even more so, how much further they are from being prepared to endure hurricane seasons to come.

Our window of opportunity to prepare on a widescale (infrastructure and all) is pretty much closed and at this point, we have to buckle ourselves in for what’s going to be quite the ride in human history.

Now for me, buckling in doesn’t mean giving up into despair. Yes, there is going to be chaos. Yes, we are going to experience things we never thought we would. Yes, there is going to be a lot of suffering. And yes, many will die at the cost of our unresponsiveness. But that doesn’t mean we give up!

Now is not the time to try and cover up the truths of sufferings in our lives. Now is not the time to shut out each other, especially family members. Now is not the time to be putting each other down. Now is not the time to let the news headlines cause relationship-ending fights. Now is not the time to isolate, even if we are sick.

We need each other more now than ever. Our sufferings are not diseases that you pass onto others if you speak about it, but symptoms of our sick world that we all encounter and suffer from. And the more we try to stuff down and mask our sufferings behind “I’m good, how are you?”, the more we’re perpetuating pain. And pain manifests in how we interact with one another. And how we interact with one another is reflected in the current state of our natural world.

All this to say, how we carry ourselves as humanity is deeply connected with the environment we live in. And I’m deeply convinced that the moment we start to truly love one another globally, we will start to see restoration of our earthly home. We certainly won’t be able to get it back in balance by ourselves, so I think God will help us out with that. But because God doesn’t push His way into people’s hearts (since true and pure love cannot have any hint of coercion), He will continue to cry a father’s tears seeing His beloved children hurting and suffering, but also waiting patiently for when we decide to choose love.

And the crazy thing is, because God gives us this choice of love or not to love, they’ll always be difficulties. A world where everyone is perfectly loving is the very definition of heaven. So if you are reading this, then you aren’t there yet…and clearly neither am I! But when we make the choice to love, we get to enjoy pieces of heaven, where even our difficulties end up having purpose. And those difficulties we experience even when we choose love aren’t as burdensome as the difficulties we go through now. We surely have a track record of weaving ourselves into difficult situations – trust me, I know! I also know, thought, that God is the master untangler – we’re just afraid to use His services because it takes us away from what is comfortable and familiar to us.

Well, we’re soon to find ourselves in positions very uncomfortable and very unfamiliar, if not already, because of the climate crisis. And if we choose love, if we trust God to help us to detangle our lives, He’ll gift us with the things of heaven that we need to make it through, to be resilient to the changes ahead.

Disaster after disaster, war after war, crisis after crisis, we as a human race are still here. We’re going to make it through this too! We just have to work together.

Dig deep and get in touch with your passions and gifts that might just be hobbies now. Start telling others of what you dream to do. Reach out to family members you haven’t spoke to in decades. Forgive them. Spend time with one another, listing to each other, being there in times of trouble. Talk to your neighbors. Speak to someone about what you’re struggling with. Learn about your family traditions and connect with your family elders. Simplify your life so it’s less painful when luxuries are no longer affordable and/or available. Any extra stuff, give it away for free to those in need. Get acquainted with your kitchen, and make it a fun family activity to cook and meal prep. Turn off the TV and play board games. Clean up the family dining room table (or get one from a secondhand store if you don’t have one) and make it a place where you can actually eat meals together. Get off social media and call someone instead. Reconnect with nature. Pay it forward by carrying out random acts of kindness. Pray.