An urgent response to climate change

IF 11,000 scientists from 153 countries get together, agree and sign a paper (Ripple and colleagues, 2020), complete with the planet's vital signs indicating extremely worrying trends and, at the same time, exhibiting the lack of humanity's progress to halt and reverse climate change, then we better sit up, take notice and heed this clarion call for action. Since then, nearly 3,000 more scientists have added their signatures, and 1,990 jurisdictions in 34 countries have formally declared a climate emergency. If you are not living under a rock, you would have heard of the unprecedented snowballing of climate-related extreme events such as the devastating flooding in South America and Southeast Asia, record-breaking heat waves and the resultant wildfires in Australia and the Western United States, an extremely busy Atlantic hurricane season and apocalyptic cyclones in Africa, South Asia and the Western Pacific.

No wonder Ted Torres, erstwhile business editor of a rival paper, has been posting nonstop about climate change on his Facebook page. No wonder friends from the multilateral agencies have, likewise, been pushing solutions that are supposed to prepare us for such scenarios and to make our existence a bit more sustainable. Yet, nary a sign of concern or even acknowledgment that the future is bleak and that we need a multilateral, all of government, nay, all of nation — perhaps even an all of planet — approach to the problem at hand. It is unfortunate that other events, the ongoing pandemic, the geopolitical strains and general disintegration of society, the peddling of outright disinformation and the resultant cynicism of the populace have taken up much of our attention.