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Climate Change Made South Sudan Heat Wave More Likely, Study Finds

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Friday, March 7, 2025

After a blistering February heat wave in South Sudan’s capital city caused dozens of students to collapse from heat stroke, officials closed schools for two weeks. It was the second time in less than a year that the country’s schools closed to protect young people from the deadly effects of extreme heat.Climate change, largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels in rich nations, made at least one week of that heat wave 10 times as likely, and 2 degrees Celsius hotter, according to a new study by World Weather Attribution. Temperatures in some parts of the region soared above 42 degrees Celsius, or 107 degrees Fahrenheit, in the last week of February.The analysis used weather data, observations and climate models to get the results, which have not been peer reviewed but are based on standardized methods.South Sudan, in the tropical band of East Africa, was torn apart by a civil war that led to independence from Sudan in 2011. It’s also one of the countries least responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions that are heating up the globe. “The continent has contributed a tiny fraction of global emissions, but is bearing the brunt of climate change,” said Joyce Kimutai, a researcher at the Center for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London.Heat waves are one of the deadliest extreme weather events and have become more frequent and more severe on a warming planet. But analysis methods connecting heat to mortality vary between and within countries, and death tolls can be underreported and are often unknown for months after an event.Prolonged heat is particularly dangerous for children, older adults and pregnant women. For the last three weeks, extreme heat has settled over a large region of continental Eastern Africa, including parts of Kenya and Uganda. Residents have been told to stay indoors and drink water, a difficult directive for countries where many people work outdoors, electricity is sporadic, access to clean water is difficult and modest housing means there are few cooling systems.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Years of war and food insecurity in the region made the extreme heat especially dangerous.

Climate change, largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels in rich nations, made at least one week of that heat wave 10 times as likely, and 2 degrees Celsius hotter, according to a new study by World Weather Attribution. Temperatures in some parts of the region soared above 42 degrees Celsius, or 107 degrees Fahrenheit, in the last week of February.

The analysis used weather data, observations and climate models to get the results, which have not been peer reviewed but are based on standardized methods.

South Sudan, in the tropical band of East Africa, was torn apart by a civil war that led to independence from Sudan in 2011. It’s also one of the countries least responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions that are heating up the globe. “The continent has contributed a tiny fraction of global emissions, but is bearing the brunt of climate change,” said Joyce Kimutai, a researcher at the Center for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London.

Heat waves are one of the deadliest extreme weather events and have become more frequent and more severe on a warming planet. But analysis methods connecting heat to mortality vary between and within countries, and death tolls can be underreported and are often unknown for months after an event.

Prolonged heat is particularly dangerous for children, older adults and pregnant women. For the last three weeks, extreme heat has settled over a large region of continental Eastern Africa, including parts of Kenya and Uganda. Residents have been told to stay indoors and drink water, a difficult directive for countries where many people work outdoors, electricity is sporadic, access to clean water is difficult and modest housing means there are few cooling systems.

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Progressive Christianity’s Bleak Future

Pope Francis leaves behind a Church that is moving away from the faith he championed.

In his final Easter address, Pope Francis touched on one of the major themes of his 12-year papacy, that love, hope, and peace are possible amid a rising tide of violence and extremism: “What a great thirst for death, for killing, we witness each day in the many conflicts raging in different parts of our world!” Archbishop Diego Ravelli read the prepared text aloud to crowds gathered in St. Peter’s Square, because Francis was by then too ill to deliver his remarks himself: “How much contempt is stirred up at times towards the vulnerable, the marginalized, and migrants!” The hallmark of a truly Christian sentiment is its radicalism, how deeply it subverts systems of worldly power and domination. Francis understood that.Accordingly, his observations about the revolutionary truth of Christianity with respect to global political affairs were often rejected, sometimes bitterly, by the world leaders he meant to exhort. His opponents were mainly conservatives of various stripes—some traditionalists upset by his relative coldness toward older liturgies, some members of the political right frustrated with his unwillingness to spiritually cooperate in their sociopolitical projects. Thus some conservatives were positively delighted by Francis’s death. The risible Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted, “Today there were major shifts in global leaderships. Evil is being defeated by the hand of God.” Greene’s own Christianity was evidently insufficient to discourage such profound judgment, and hers may unfortunately be the way of the future.[Read: The papacy is forever changed]To what evil might Greene refer? Perhaps Francis’s embrace of philosophical concerns associated with politically progressive causes—such as climate change, as addressed in his landmark encyclical Laudato Si’ (“Praised Be”). Francis wrote that “the earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth,” an epiphenomenon of what he called “throwaway culture,” which encourages not only waste and environmental degradation but also a cavalier disinterest in the lives of the poor in favor of wanton consumption. “We fail to see that some are mired in desperate and degrading poverty,” he wrote, “with no way out, while others have not the faintest idea what to do with their possessions, vainly showing off their supposed superiority and leaving behind them so much waste which, if it were the case everywhere, would destroy the planet.” The pope had a keen sense of class consciousness, which he pointedly expressed in a speech last year to leaders of global popular movements: “It is often precisely the wealthiest who oppose the realization of social justice or integral ecology out of sheer greed,” he said, adding that humanity’s future may well depend “on the community action of the poor of the Earth.” The marginalized people of the world were always Francis’s beloved, a Christian principle that led him to intervene on behalf of migrants, documented and undocumented, whenever he could.In fact, it was the pope’s efforts to quell growing Western hostility toward migrants that recently put him directly at odds with the Trump administration. After Vice President J. D. Vance had a public spat with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops over the rollback of a Biden-era law preventing Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from apprehending undocumented migrants in schools and churches, Francis wrote a letter that seemed to chastise Vance directly. “The true ordo amoris,” Francis wrote, citing a Catholic term Vance had invoked to defend the proposition that love of kin and countryman should reign supreme, “is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘good Samaritan.’” That is, he continued, “by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”Admirers of Francis’s papacy have reason to worry for the Christianity that lies ahead. I had presumed with some sorrow, tracking long trends of vanishing American religion, that Christianity’s days here were numbered, and perhaps they still are. The country has long been headed in a secular direction. But that seems to be changing now—the decline is on pause, and another shift is under way, from a politically varied multitude to a more decidedly right-wing bloc.A recent study from Pew Research Center documented the pause. “For the last five years, between 2019 and 2024, the Christian share of the adult population has been relatively stable,” the study’s authors wrote—hovering just below two-thirds of the population. The reasons for this stabilization are undoubtedly complex, and I was heartened by these numbers—but they may well spell doom for the kind of progressive Christianity that Francis evidently hoped to shore up. In particular, it’s possible that the much-discussed departure of young, progressive people from the faith is almost complete: Virtually everyone who was going to leave has left. And now that the young progressives are nearly all gone, the overall decline has ceased, leaving behind a more solid—and conservative—core of believers. Meanwhile, it also seems that new conservative converts are joining the faith, and bringing their politics with them. The result will be a much more conservative American Christianity.[Read: What border-hawk catholics don’t get]Which isn’t to say that American Christianity has generally been associated with progressivism; it hasn’t, but the two weren’t always as opposed as they seem now. Over the past decade, most Christian traditions in America have shifted rightward politically: Ryan P. Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University who studies religion, found that from 2008 to 2018, 27 out of 34 Christian traditions surveyed became more conservative, judging by changes in congregants’ party affiliations. Burge alluded to the reason in a social-media post earlier this month, noting that although 42 percent of very liberal survey respondents identified as nonreligious in 2008, by 2024 the number had skyrocketed to 62 percent, meaning that progressives have left religion in droves. Accordingly, the Gallup senior scientist Frank Newport wrote in 2023, “everything else being equal, the more religious the individual in the U.S. today, the higher the probability that the individual identifies with or leans toward the Republican party.”Today’s American Christianity, therefore, is a good fit for young men of the right. “As pastor of a parish in South Carolina, I am witnessing a remarkable trend,” Father Dwight Longenecker, a conservative priest, wrote in a 2024 article for National Catholic Register: “Almost every week I receive a call, email or visit from at least one young man interested in learning more about the Catholic religion.” These new converts are undoubtedly somewhat diverse in their interests and beliefs, but a common theme in their conversion stories is disillusionment with modernity, and attraction to Catholicism as a source of stability, tradition, and ethics that transcend time and place. “I felt like the modern world was constantly in flux,” Vance, one such young convert, said of his own recent entry into Catholicism at a 2021 conference. “The things that you believed 10 years ago were no longer even acceptable to believe 10 years later.” This is conservatism in the classical sense, and like Vance, young men journeying into Christianity for conservative reasons typically have conservative politics. Conservative Christian politics are not everywhere and always destructive, but today’s right is more extreme than its recent predecessors. I fear that the next era of American Christianity will be about conquest and triumph rather than peace and humility, and will profligately lend its imprimatur to nationalist agendas that are hostile to the weak and the marginalized. (Vance’s invocation of the ordo amoris to justify the Trump administration’s extreme anti-immigrant politics is perhaps a preview of things to come.) And that would be a devastating development, not just because of the predictable political consequences of such an alignment, but also because the Christianity Francis represented really is loyal to the Gospels in its devotion to the people Jesus loved so much, whose fortunes are rarely of interest to people in power: the poor, the sick, the oppressed and exploited, the displaced and rejected. It was for those that Francis prayed, wrote, and spoke, and to them that he dedicated his time on the chair of St. Peter. And theirs will be the kingdom of heaven.

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Trump Celebrates Earth Day by Gutting Key EPA Office

Several employees in the Environmental Protection Agency spent their Earth Day learning that they needed to find new jobs. Hundreds of staffers in the department’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights were laid off as part of a reduction in force Tuesday, as were employees working on environmental justice and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in regional offices.In February, environmental justice staffers were placed on administrative leave and some of the agency’s probationary workers were fired. Now, 280 workers involved with environmental justice and diversity, equity and inclusion will be terminated, with 175 other EPA workers being assigned to new jobs. It’s all part of EPA chief Lee Zedlin’s pledge to drive “a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion.” According to an EPA memo obtained by NBC News, the reduction in force will take effect on July 31. The EPA under Trump is ditching its mission of actually protecting the environment. The department rolled back environmental regulations last month along with parts of the Clean Air Act. In addition to the rollbacks and cuts, the agency also tried to cut grants to nonprofit organizations in an attack on the Greenhouse Gas Reduction fund, set up by President Biden with the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. A federal judge temporarily nixed those plans last month. The regulatory changes that Zedlin is pushing with Trump’s blessing will harm countless Americans, including Trump’s supporters. “It’s practically inevitable” that more people will get sick from reduced regulation and the loss of funding, one EPA staffer anonymously told TNR earlier this month.It’s fitting that Tuesday’s layoff announcement fell on Earth Day, because the Trump administration has shown that it cares little, if anything, about the earth. The new energy secretary, fracking executive Chris Wright, last month described climate change as the “side effect of building the modern world.” The FBI has moved to criminalize groups like Habitat for Humanity for receiving grants from the EPA under the Biden administration, and Trump himself has claimed that climate change will provide more seafront property and is therefore better for real estate. The White House is celebrating Earth Day by making the planet worse.

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Remembering Pope Francis on Earth Day: How He Linked Capitalism, Climate & Catholicism

As the Vatican prepares the funeral for Pope Francis and church leaders begin to consider his replacement, we look at the late pontiff’s environmental legacy. Pope Francis frequently called for action on the climate crisis and urged his followers to be good stewards of the Earth. He also openly criticized the role of wealthy nations and capitalism in causing the climate crisis. “He brought together the riches of Christian and Catholic tradition to bear with the prophetic work of social movements around the world in confronting a global crisis,” says Nathan Schneider, professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Schneider is also a contributing writer at America, a national Catholic weekly magazine published by the Jesuits, where he has been covering Catholic engagement with climate change and the economy. Pope Francis argued that “our relationship with the Earth depends on justice among people, and that in order to address this environmental crisis, we need to also address the crisis of disposability, of treating not only the planet, but each other, as disposable,” says Schneider.

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Francis was the first climate pope. Who will take up his mantle?

Pope Francis was quick to grasp the risks posed by climate change. But his tenure showed humanity’s limits in confronting the peril.

VATICAN CITY — For 12 years, Pope Francis devoted himself like no other pontiff to what he called “an existential” threat “for our human family.”He started by writing a 184-page encyclical — a formal teaching document — about climate change and the moral duty to care for the planet. Then he kept going: hosting environmental summits, meeting with climate activists and stressing to policymakers how every fractional degree of temperature rise creates new cataclysms.

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Transition to telemedicine has come with considerable reductions in carbon emissions: Study

The use of telemedicine reduced carbon dioxide emissions by the equivalent of up to 130,000 gas-fueled cars per month in 2023, a new study has determined. These findings suggest that telemedicine could have a modest but tangible contribution to curbing the effects of climate change, according to the study, published in the American Journal of Managed Care on Tuesday. “As Congress debates whether to extend or modify pandemic-era telehealth flexibilities, our results provide important evidence for policymakers to consider," John Mafi, an associate professor-in-residence at the University of California Los Angeles's David Geffen School of Medicine, said in a statement. Specifically, those considerations could focus on the idea "that telemedicine has the potential to reduce the carbon footprint of US health care delivery,” Mafi added. Today, the U.S. health system is responsible for about 9 percent of domestic greenhouse gas emission — worsening the impacts of climate change and thereby posing a possible threat to human health, according to the authors. Meanwhile, because the transportation sector accounts for more than 28 percent of the country's total emissions, the authors argued telemedicine would have the potential to decrease the environmental footprint of healthcare services. To draw their conclusions, the researchers used the existing Milliman MedInsight Emerging Experience database to quantify almost 1.5 million telemedicine visits, including 66,000 in rural regions, from April 1 to June 30, 2023. Ultimately, they estimated that between 741,000 and 1.35 million of those visits occurred instead of in-person appointments. As a result of that shift to telemedicine, the researchers estimated carbon emissions reductions of between 21.4 million and 47.6 million kilograms per month. That quantity is approximately equivalent to cutting the carbon dioxide generated by 61,000 to 130,000 gas-powered vehicles each month or by recycling 1.8 million to 4 million trash bags, according to the study. The researchers acknowledged that there were some limitations to their findings, including the fact that the results were based on a single, easy-to-access resource rather than a random selection. They also noted that telemedicine use has dropped since the end of the pandemic — potentially leading to overestimations regarding the emissions averted. Nonetheless, they maintained that telemedicine does provide a significant chance to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and to therefore bring benefits to human health. "The health care sector contributes significantly to the global carbon footprint,” co-senior author A. Mark Fendrick, director of the Center for Value-Based Insurance Design at the University of Michigan, said in a statement. “The environmental impact of medical care delivery can be reduced when lower-carbon options, such as telemedicine, are substituted for other services that produce more emissions," Fendrick added.

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Climate Change Made South Sudan Heat Wave More Likely, Study Finds

Related News

Progressive Christianity’s Bleak Future

Trump Celebrates Earth Day by Gutting Key EPA Office

Remembering Pope Francis on Earth Day: How He Linked Capitalism, Climate & Catholicism

Francis was the first climate pope. Who will take up his mantle?

Transition to telemedicine has come with considerable reductions in carbon emissions: Study

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Talking Trees

CO2? CO-Nee!

Reboot

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a sustainable future

sign up for our mailing list to stay informed on the latest films and environmental headlines.

Cookies help us run our site more efficiently.

Climate Change Made South Sudan Heat Wave More Likely, Study Finds

Related News

Progressive Christianity’s Bleak Future

Trump Celebrates Earth Day by Gutting Key EPA Office

Remembering Pope Francis on Earth Day: How He Linked Capitalism, Climate &amp; Catholicism

Francis was the first climate pope. Who will take up his mantle?

Transition to telemedicine has come with considerable reductions in carbon emissions: Study

Suggested Viewing

Talking Trees

CO2? CO-Nee!

Reboot

We Trees

Beyond the Soil

Join us to forgea sustainable future

sign up for our mailing list to stay informed on the latest films and environmental headlines.

Remembering Pope Francis on Earth Day: How He Linked Capitalism, Climate & Catholicism

Join us to forge
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