A FRIGHTENING CLIMATE REPORT FROM THE UN...BUT NOTHING ENVIRONMENTALISTS HAVEN’T BEEN TELLING US FOR YEARS NOW
After reading through the latest UN report on global climate change, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that there is a way we humans can maybe manage to survive climate change. The bad news is, if we don’t implement, within the next decade or so, immediate, urgent and serious steps to ensure human survival in the near future, we’re toast. And the news gets worse. The ceiling for keeping absolute catastrophe at bay is a total rise in global warming of no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Period. The climactic phenomena that we have been witnessing in recent years—prolonged drought, vast wildfires, unprecedented flooding, record summer heat, record winter storms, much more frequent and much more powerful tropical storms, typhoons and hurricanes, much increased cyclone activity, etc.—are all the result of a single-degree increase in global temperature above pre-industrial levels. On our current course, in which a small group of countries is