Rewriting the Climate Change Story from Tragedy into Triumph? - EDITORIAL

The Climate Change Conference being held in Glasgow in Scotland will end tomorrow with world leaders committing themselves to save Planet Earth, the only home we have, by reducing global temperatures to at least 1.5 degrees Celsius. “Really we’re at the last-chance saloon,” Climate Crisis Advisory Board (CCAG) head Sir David King, the British Chemist, who led the British delegation to the 2015 COP21 in Paris told Forbes News Agency. “And what this means is we must stop bickering with each other. That doesn’t pay off at all.”
At the groundbreaking Paris Agreement, the international community committed itself to limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius while pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

At this point we will do well to listen to the powerful speech made by the veteran naturalist, filmmaker and World Wildlife Fund Ambassador Sir David Attenborough, at the COP26 climate summit where he asked world leaders to “rewrite our story,” and that future generations would judge them for their success or failure at this conference.
Speaking to delegates that included US President Joe Biden, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Sir David said the climate emergency “comes down to a single number; the concentration of carbon in our atmosphere.”

Pointing out that CO2 “greatly determines global temperature and the changes in that one number is the clearest way to chart our own story,” he said “We need to rewrite our story to turn this tragedy into a triumph. We are after all the greatest problem solvers to have ever existed on earth. We now understand this problem. We know how to stop the number rising and put it in reverse. We must halt carbon emissions this decade.”

The 95-year-old Sir David emphasized the fact that, little more than 10,000 years ago, the Earth’s climate stabilized allowing human civilization to flourish. “Everything we’ve achieved in the past 10,000 years was enabled by the stability during this time,” he said showing that the climate had not wavered by more than plus or minus one degree Celsius over the period. But now, conditions were changing rapidly thanks to human activity.
“Our burning of fossil fuels, our destruction of nature, our approach to industry, construction and learning are releasing carbon into the atmosphere at an unprecedented pace and scale,” Sir David said. “We are already in trouble. The stability we all depend on is breaking.”

“Those who’ve done the least to cause this problem are being the hardest hit,” he said and pointed out that the poorest countries, which have released the least CO2 into the atmosphere are those bearing the brunt of extreme weather events made more severe by climate change.

However, he concluded with an upbeat message. “We must use this opportunity to create a more equal world, and our motivation should not be fear, but hope and to avert further instability, the international community must focus on keeping temperature change within 1.5 degrees Celsius this century, as prescribed by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. To achieve that would require a new industrial revolution, powered by millions of sustainable innovations.”

“It comes down to this,” Sri David said. “The people alive now [and] the generations to come will look at this conference and consider one thing: did that number [atmospheric CO2 concentration] stop rising and start to drop as a result of commitments made here? There’s every reason to believe that the answer can be yes.”
Nevertheless, COP26 is not without its critics. Climate activist Greta Thunberg said on Friday that the climate summit was a failure and lambasted the United Nations--brokered talks for turning it into a public relations exercise.

“It is not a secret that COP26 is a failure. It should be obvious that we cannot solve the crisis with the same methods that got us into it in the first place,” Ms.Thunberg said. “The COP has turned into a PR event, where leaders give beautiful speeches and announce fancy commitments and targets, while behind the curtains governments of the Global North countries are still refusing to take any drastic climate action.” 
She said COP26 had been described as “the most exclusionary COP ever,” and those at the sharp end of the climate crisis remain unheard and that the event could be considered a “two-week-long celebration of business as usual and blah, blah, blah.”

Let us hope the Climate Change Conference would not be another talk show or like Ms. Thunberg said the usual ‘blah, blah, blah’, but that it would produce tangible results by rewriting our story to turn this climate change tragedy into a triumph as underscored by Sir David Attenborough.