It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of the Cop27 climate summit that is set to open in seven days in Sharm el-Sheikh, in Egypt. Soaring carbon emissions, set loose by humanity’s unrestrained urge to burn fossil fuels, have brought the planet perilously close to achieving a 1.5C degree rise in global temperatures. As a result, extreme storms, droughts and floods are already occurring more rapidly and with greater intensity than climate experts had anticipated. Worse, we are very near to triggering a wave of secondary calamities: the collapses of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets; the destruction of all the planet’s tropical coral reefs; and the thawing of Canada and Russia’s permafrost systems, an event that would release vast stores of methane, a gas many times more potent and dangerous than carbon dioxide.
It is a deeply disturbing vision. If such trends are not halted very soon, and emissions cut back and eventually halted, the world will experience, in a few decades, a meteorological catastrophe. Wildlife species will be eradicated in their thousands, droughts will spread over continents and famine will kill millions of people. We will have created a planet that has been stripped of its habitats and biological riches, a scorched and depleted world that we will pass on to our children and future generations. Only urgent action to cut carbon emissions, the prime driver of our climate woes, will stop this happening.
