Half a year after the Cop 26 climate summit drew to a close, action at the scale and pace needed has not materialised, while warnings about record-breaking heatwaves, sea level rising and climate-related food insecurity are near-daily.
Alok Sharma, Cop 26 president, put it this way.
“Leaders have not done enough to deliver on their Glasgow commitments and that must change.”
“We need every nation to pick up the pace.”
A report by the World Meteorological Organization published at the end of May found that alarming new records were set for greenhouse gas concentrations, sea level rise, ocean heat and acidification in 2021, showing that human activities are causing “planetary-scale changes” on land, in the ocean and in the atmosphere.
“Our climate is changing before our eyes,”
said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas.
At the end of May the UK’s Conservative government has been accused of risking Britain’s reputation as a climate leader after announcing a tax relief measure for oil and gas companies who invest in new fossil fuel extraction in the UK.
Climate activists and opposition MPs rebuked Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, for incentivizing new oil and gas drilling when scientists, the United Nations and the International Energy Agency have plainly stated that the world must halt fossil fuel investment to prevent a runaway climate emergency.
What you might have missed
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- Santa Fe Literary Festival: Buddhist teacher Roshi Joan Halifax and author William deBuys discuss climate change as wildfires burn at their doors
- Exclusive: Scientists calls on UN to drop sustainability goals after ‘failure’
- Shell consultant quits over energy giant’s ‘disregard’ for climate change
- At Davos, climate activists say major issues ignored
- Data from the Mauna Loa facility, which has been continuously monitoring atmospheric change since the 1950s, revealed that carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Earth’s atmosphere reached levels not seen in millions of years.
Runaway CO2 levels are driving the climate crisis, causing catastrophic changes to Earth’s stable climate which has allowed civilizations to thrive. Hotter temperatures are melting ice sheets, raising sea levels, supercharging extreme weather and worsening droughts, globally.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the global authority on climate science, has warned that carbon emissions must reverse course by 2025 – less than three years from now – to hold average global heating to about 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. With every fraction of a degree more, the extreme conditions will become more frequent and more intense, the IPCC noted.
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