24/09/2019

Greta Thunberg Condemns World Leaders In Emotional Speech At UN

The Guardian -  | Agencies at the United Nation
  • Thunberg, 16, says governments have betrayed young people
  • ‘You are not mature enough to tell it like it is. You are failing us’
Greta Thunberg excoriates world leaders.
Greta Thunberg has excoriated world leaders for their “betrayal” of young people through their inertia over the climate crisis at a United Nations summit that failed to deliver ambitious new commitments to address dangerous global heating.
In a stinging speech on Monday, the teenage Swedish climate activist told governments that “you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is. You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal.”


Greta Thunberg to world leaders: 'How dare you? You have stolen my dreams and my childhood'

Days after millions of young people took to the streets worldwide to demand emergency action on climate change, leaders gathered for the annual United Nations general assembly aiming to inject fresh momentum into efforts to curb carbon emissions.
But Thunberg predicted the summit would not deliver any new plans in line with the radical cuts in greenhouse gas emissions that scientists say are needed to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown. “The eyes of all future generations are upon you,” a visibly emotional Thunberg said. “And if you choose to fail us I say we will never forgive you. We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line.”
As the summit spooled through about 60 speeches from national representatives, it became clear that Thunberg’s forecast was prescient. Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India, told delegates that “the time for talking is over” in announcing a plan to ramp up renewable energy but didn’t announce any phase-out of coal – a key goal set by António Guterres, the UN secretary-general who convened the summit.


Greta Thunberg's full speech to world leaders at UN Climate Action Summit

Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, did set out the end of coalmining in her country but only by 2038 – a lengthy timeframe that disappointed environmentalists.
Meanwhile, China declined to put forward any new measures to tackle the climate crisis.
Emmanuel Macron, the French president, called for the European Union to deepen its emissions cuts and said that France would not make trade deals with countries not signed up tor the landmark Paris climate agreement. “We cannot allow our youth to strike every Friday without action,” Macron said, in reference to Friday’s global climate strikes.
Despite Guterres’ efforts, the summit was somewhat overshadowed by its absentees – most notably the US, and Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, whose representatives were reportedly not selected to make a presentation there because of Brazil’s failure to outline plans to strengthen its efforts to counter climate change.
Donald Trump did visit the UN on Monday but only briefly dipped into the climate summit to see Modi’s speech before attending a meeting which he had called on religious freedom.
As he arrived at the UN, Trump crossed paths with Thunberg, who fixed the president with a hard stare.


 Greta Thunberg sees Trump as he arrives for UN climate action summit

The summit was designed to accelerate countries’ ambition to address the climate crisis amid increasingly urgent warnings by scientists. A new UN analysis has found that commitments to cut planet-warming gases must be at least tripled and increased by up to fivefold if the world is to meet the goals of the 2015 Paris agreement of holding the temperature rise to at least 2C above the pre-industrial era.
The world is currently on track to warm by as much as 3.4C by the end of the century, the UN warned, a situation that would escalate disastrous heatwaves, flooding, droughts and societal unrest. Major coral reefs and many other species face extinction.
“There’s a big dissonance between every leader saying to Greta ‘we hear you’ and the commitments they are putting on to the table,” said Isabel Cavelier, a former climate negotiator for Colombia who is now senior adviser at the Mission 2020 climate group. “China said absolutely nothing new, India mentioned commitments made in the past, the US, Canada and Australia aren’t here. We are seeing governments showing up empty-handed. There’s a feeling that the big emitters are holding things back.”
There were a few signs of progress. A group of nearly 90 large companies promised to reach net zero emissions by 2050, while a handful of countries said they will be winding down coal use. But it became apparent that most of the ambition was coming from developing countries, rather than the major polluters.
Thunberg speaks at the summit. Photograph: Timothy A Clary/AFP/Getty Images
Thunberg’s speech was “very emotional and grounded in science”, said Alden Meyer, director of strategy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “If I were a world leader I’d feel very uncomfortable. But we’ve seen nothing from the big national leaders, the G20 players. It’s hard to say the summit moved the needle on the emissions curve.”
“Other countries must follow our lead,” said Hilda Heine, president of the Marshall Islands, a country situated on coral atolls in the Pacific that is extremely vulnerable to sea level rise. “Falling short will represent the greatest failure humanity has ever seen. The summit must be the moment we choose survival over selfishness.”
In his opening remarks, Guterres tried to capture the urgency of climate change and called out the fossil fuel industry.
“Nature is angry. And we fool ourselves if we think we can fool nature, because nature always strikes back, and around the world nature is striking back with fury,” Guterres said.
“There is a cost to everything. But the biggest cost is doing nothing. The biggest cost is subsidising a dying fossil fuel industry, building more and more coal plants, and denying what is plain as day: that we are in a deep climate hole, and to get out we must first stop digging,” he said.
Over the past year, Guterres has called for no new coal plants to be built after 2020, urged a phase-out of fossil fuel subsidies and asked countries to map out how to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.
While some countries have made progress, some of the biggest-emitting countries remain far behind, even as wildfires, heatwaves and record temperatures have provided glimpses of the devastation that could lie in store in a warmer world.
Pope Francis, in a message broadcast to the conference, called for honesty, responsibility and courage to face “one of the most serious and worrying phenomena of our time“.

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Don’t Bet On The UN To Fix Climate Change – It’s Failed For 30 Years

The Conversation - 

Is the UN’s climate process fit for purpose? Alexandros Michailidis/Shutterstock
We’re constantly encouraged to think of the next big climate summit, conference or protest as the most important one, the one that is about to make the all-important breakthrough. The UN’s Climate Action Summit on September 23 in New York is no different. The UN’s Secretary General António Guterres is calling on world leaders to come with concrete and realistic plans to bring their national net carbon emissions down to zero by 2050.
But amid the hype, it’s worth putting this UN summit in context against the history of 30 years of such international meetings. Is it a vain hope for 197 countries to agree on any meaningful climate action at all, especially when it involves so much money and power?
Scientists knew from the late 1950s that carbon dioxide was building up and that this could be a problem. By the late 1970s, they knew it would be – it was just a question of when. By 1985, at a workshop of scientists in Villach, Austria, the answer became “sooner than we thought”.
Scientists and activists mobilised and in 1988 the stars aligned. An American drought, a NASA scientist called James Hansen willing to stick his neck out and an international conference in Toronto meant politicians had to respond.
On the 1988 American presidential campaign trail, George Bush Senior promised to convene a global conference on the environment at the White House to “talk about global warming”. But when it finally happened it wasn’t truly global.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was born the same year, endorsed by the UN general assembly, and produced its first report in 1990. By then, there had been fine declarations of motherhood-and-apple-pie in various European cities, such as the Hague and Bergen. However, negotiations towards an international treaty to do something about climate change itself did not begin until February 1991. The world’s media largely ignored them, as the 1991 Gulf War was underway.

UNFCCC birth pangs
Very little progress was made – a sign of things to come – and with a hard deadline of May 1992 approaching, a month before the world’s nations were to gather in Rio de Janeiro for an “Earth Summit”, powerful countries were at loggerheads.
The birth pangs of this search for an international UN treaty on climate change still shape what is and isn’t possible today.
The sticking point was – and still is – what the US government, and the business lobbies behind it, would find acceptable. The French government was keen that any treaty include actual commitments to reduce CO2 emissions, with targets and timetables for the rich nations. The Bush government warned that if these were included in the text they would not attend the Rio summit, leaving any treaty languishing. The French blinked, the UK acted as a middleman, and a deal was done.
The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) became law in March 1994, two years after the Rio summit.
The French, and others, had hoped that once the UNFCCC was signed and ratified, they could quickly address the question of rich country commitments to reduce CO2 emmissions. But this didn’t happen.
When the Kyoto Protocol, which extended the UNFCCC, was agreed in 1997, despite the fact that carbon trading and other economic instruments within it were designed to keep the Americans happy, no serious commitment to reductions was made. The Americans then pulled out of the implementation process of the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, when George W Bush became president.
The process staggered on and there was another helping of motherhood-and-apple-pie at Copenhagen in 2009. Finally, in 2015 a non-binding Paris Agreement was cobbled together, based on a previously discarded “pledge and review” mechanism, which has created an endless round of promises that haven’t been met.
The moment the Paris Agreement was sealed in December 2015. Christophe Petit Tesson/EPA
The scientist who had warned that climate change was upon us in 1988 – James Hansen – called the Paris Agreement a fraud, and since 2015, many nations are failing to meet their Paris commitments. Even if they did, global average temperature rise this century would be far in excess of the two degrees above pre-industrial levels that the deal is supposed to ensure.
The US pulled out of the Paris agreement in June 2017. A clear pattern has emerged.

 The role of the UN
Some would argue that trying to get 197 countries to agree on anything is a fool’s errand. For 20 years, critics such as the international relations expert David Victor have questioned whether the UN is the appropriate venue for climate negotiations. Victor argues that such a forum is inevitably going to lead to gridlock. He’s not alone in this – as early as 1983 some policy analysts in the US were saying that such a global problem could not be solved because of the complexity of its politics.
The counter argument is that if a deal is agreed outside of the UN process, between the world’s major emitters – the EU, US and China – then it will be perceived as illegitimate, and will likely involve an even greater reliance on speculative technologies than the current Paris Agreement.
Ultimately, it becomes a matter of trust: do those already suffering the impacts of climate change trust those who have caused it to sort it out.
In my experience of talking to people who work in and around the UNFCCC’s bodies, many speak knowledgeably without hesitation, deviation or repetition about the alphabet soup of climate change acronyms, but are completely oblivious of much of this awkward history. Yet what happened – straightforward veto power by the US of anything that would look like real action – remains with us today, and it doesn’t help to pretend otherwise.
Whether the world can a transition to sustainability – the stated aims of both the UNFCCC and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals – remains to be seen. But the stakes could not be higher. If political, economic, technological and cultural solutions aren’t now found, the outlook for humanity – and the other species we share this planet with – is exceptionally bleak.

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Climate Change Is Accelerating, According To A New UN Report

SBS - AAP | SBS

A new UN report says the past five years have been the hottest on record, with deadly heatwaves, devastating hurricanes and cyclones, and severe wildfires.

Climate change is accelerating, with carbon dioxide levels increasing, sea levels rising and ice sheets melting faster than ever, experts have warned.
The warning from the World Meteorological Organisation forms part of a "united in science" review for a UN climate action summit at which countries are being urged to increase their ambition to tackle emissions.


Australia sends climage message

The WMO has published a report showing climate change and its impacts over the past five years between 2015 and 2019, which shows it was the hottest five-year period on record.
The world has warmed by 1.1C since pre-industrial times, and by 0.2C just compared to the previous five year period 2011-2015, the report showed.
And with levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases rising more quickly than before, to new highs in the atmosphere, further warming is already locked in, the WMO warned.
Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere increased at a higher rate between 2015-2019 than in the previous five years, and are on track to reach a record 410 parts per million in 2019, data indicate.
Deadly heatwaves, bearing the hallmark of climate change and causing record high temperatures, devastating hurricanes and cyclones, and severe wildfires which release more carbon have all gripped the planet in the past five years.
Sea levels have been rising by an average of 5mm a year in the past five years, compared to 3.2mm a year on average since 1993, with much of the rise coming from glaciers and ice sheets that are melting ever more quickly.
The Greenland ice sheet has witnessed a considerable acceleration in ice loss since the turn of the millennium while the amount of ice being lost annually from Antarctica in the past decade has increased by at least sixfold compared to the 1980s.
Arctic sea ice has seen record low coverage in winter between 2015 and 2018, the WMO said.
The organisation's secretary-general Petteri Taalas, who is co-chair of the science advisory group of the UN climate summit, said: "Climate change causes and impacts are increasing rather than slowing down.
"Sea level rise has accelerated and we are concerned that an abrupt decline in the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, which will exacerbate future rise.
"As we have seen this year with tragic effect in the Bahamas and Mozambique, sea level rise and intense tropical storms led to humanitarian and economic catastrophes."


A farmer's plea to the Government to tackle climate change

The challenges "are immense", he said, and warned there was a growing need to adapt to the changing climate as well as reducing greenhouse gas emissions, particularly from energy production, industry and transport.
The report has been released to inform the climate action summit convened by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, and to urge countries to up their climate efforts.
Under the international Paris Agreement, countries committed to curbing temperature rises to "well below" 2C and pursuing efforts to limit increases to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels to avoid the worst impacts.
But current commitments put the world on track for around 3C of warming.
The report comes after millions of people led by children on strike from school took to the streets around the world calling for urgent climate action, including hundreds of thousands in the UK.

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Ahead Of UN Summit, Leading Scientists Warn Climate Change ‘Hitting Harder And Sooner’ Than Forecast

UN News

Top climate scientists issued a report on Sunday showing that over the last several years, sea-level rise, planetary warming, shrinking ice sheets and carbon pollution have accelerated; a sobering call to action for political leaders headed to New York for summit-level climate change talks tomorrow at the United Nations.
The largest glacier in the Swiss Alps, the Aletschgletscher, is melting rapidly and could disappear altogether by 2100. Geir Braathen
The landmark new report, which will be presented to the UN Climate Action Summit, underlines the glaring – and growing – gap between agreed targets to tackle global warming and the actual reality.
Compiled by the UN World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the report, United in Science, includes details on the state of the climate and presents trends in the emissions and atmospheric concentrations of the main greenhouse gases.
Among other findings, the report says that accelerating climate impacts from melting ice caps to sea-level rise and extreme weather were to blame for the record as the global average temperature increased by 1.1°C above pre-industrial (1850-1900) times and 0.2°C warmer than 2011-2015.
It highlights the urgency of fundamental socio-economic transformations and carbon-curbing actions in key sectors such as land use and energy to avert dangerous global temperature increase, with potentially irreversible impacts. It also examines tools to support both mitigation and adaptation.
The assessment from the world’s top climate experts and scientific organizations comes not just ahead of the UN summit, but also against the backdrop of last week’s global ‘climate strike,’ which saw millions of students across the world take to the streets to demand real action from politicians and big corporations to reverse the impacts of what UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called a “climate emergency.”
Swedish teen activist Greta Thundberg told hundreds of young people gathered at UN Headquarters on Saturday for the first-ever Youth Climate Summit that “young people are unstoppable”  and echoed her young  compatriots who vowed to keep up the pressure on governments to make serious policy course corrections towards green energy and planet-friendly agriculture to seriously tackle climate change .
Mr. Guterres told the young activists that he feared “there is a serious conflict between people and nature, between people and the planet.” Saying that there is no time to lose, with so many people around the world already suffering from the impacts of climate change, the UN chief has been bluntly telling  world leaders “don’t come to the Summit with beautiful speeches … come with concrete plans,” including carbon neutrality plans for 2050, options to tackle fossil fuel subsidies, taxing carbon and a possible end to new coal power sources after next year. 

Climate insights
The findings presented by the report’s experts spotlight the sense of urgency. Amid growing recognition that climate impacts are hitting harder and sooner than climate assessments indicated even a decade ago, there is now a real risk of crossing critical tipping points, according to the scientists.
For example, the report shows that the average global temperature for 2015–2019 is on track to be the warmest of any equivalent period on record. It is currently estimated to be 1.1°Celsius (± 0.1°C) above pre-industrial (1850–1900) times.
Widespread and long-lasting heatwaves, record-breaking fires and other devastating events such as tropical cyclones, floods and drought have had major impacts on socio-economic development and the environment. Moreover, as climate change intensifies, cities are particularly vulnerable to impacts such as heat stress and can play a key role in reducing emissions locally and globally.



Against this backdrop, meeting the targets set under the 2015 Paris Agreement requires immediate and all-inclusive action encompassing deep decarbonization complemented by ambitious policy measures, protection and enhancement of carbon sinks and biodiversity, and effort to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.​
 “Strategies for mitigation and for upscaling adaptive risk management are necessary going forward. Neither is adequate in isolation given the pace of climate change and magnitude of its impacts,” says the report, which warns that to stop a global temperature increase of more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the level of ambition needs to be tripled.
The scientists say that “only immediate and all-inclusive action encompassing: deep de-carbonization complemented by ambitious policy measures, protection and enhancement of carbon sinks and biodiversity, and efforts to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, will enable us to meet the Paris Agreement.”
“The scientific data and findings presented in the report represent the very latest authoritative information on these topics. It highlights the urgent need for the development of concrete actions that halt the worst effects of climate change,” said the Science Advisory Group to the Climate Action Summit, co-chaired by WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas and Leena Srivastava, former Vice Chancellor of TERI School of Advanced Studies.

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