The report of the UN climate experts (IPCC) published Monday, August 9, a real “red alert” for humanity, must “sound the death knell” of fossil fuels that “destroy the planet,” reacted the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, after the publication of the document.
The scientific assessment report “must sound the death knell for coal and fossil fuels, before they destroy the planet,” Antonio Guterres said in a statement, urging that no coal-fired power plants be built after 2021.
Newspaper all over the world are filled with alarm in the wake of the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s global climate change report – the first since 2013 – which finds that human activity is changing the Earth’s climate in “unprecedented” ways, with some of the changes now inevitable and “irreversible”. An image of an elderly woman reacting to unprecedented wildfires on the island of Evia in Greece so perfectly encapsulates the global feeling of distress and fear that it appears on the front pages of the Guardian, Financial Times, Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph.
Global warming is dangerously close to spiralling out of control, a U.N. climate panel said in a landmark report Monday, warning the world is already certain to face further climate disruptions for decades, if not centuries, to come.
Humans are “unequivocally” to blame. Rapid action to cut greenhouse gas emissions could limit some impacts, but others are now locked in.
Drastic reductions in emissions are urgent and necessary, it is too late to return the world to less extreme weather patterns. The piece includes a quote from Greenpeace UK’s chief UK scientist warning: “This is not the first generation of world leaders to be warned by scientists about the gravity of the climate crisis, but they’re the last that can afford to ignore them.”
The deadly heat waves, gargantuan hurricanes and other weather extremes that are already happening will only become more severe.
Monday alone saw 500,000 acres of forest burning in California, while in Venice tourists waded through ankle-deep water in St. Mark’s Square.
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres described the report as a “code red for humanity”.
“The alarm bells are deafening,” he said in a statement. “This report must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels, before they destroy our planet.”
Greta Thunberg called on the public and media to put “massive” pressure on governments to act.
In three months, the U.N. COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, will try to wring much more ambitious climate action out of the nations of the world, and the money to go with it.
Drawing on more than 14,000 scientific studies, the IPCC report gives the most comprehensive and detailed picture yet of how climate change is altering the natural world – and what could still be ahead.
