Humans 'will incinerate our only home', UN chief warns
A local resident gestures as he holds n empty water hose during an attempt to extinguish forest fires approaching the village of Pefki on Evia (Euboea) Island, off Greece, on August 8, 2021. Picture: Angelos Tzortziniz/AFP via Getty Images
Fossil fuel production must end and renewable energy must be accelerated, or else humans will "incinerate our only home", the UN chief has said, following a damning new report on the climate crisis.
UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres said that a report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) showing climate change indicators breaking records "is a dismal litany of humanity’s failure to tackle climate disruption".
The WMO's annual state of the climate report said four key climate change indicators — greenhouse gas concentrations, sea-level rise, ocean heat, and ocean acidification — set new records in 2021.
The past seven years have been the hottest seven years on record, the WMO confirmed, with its secretary-general, Professor Petteri Taalas, saying it is "only a matter of time" before another hottest-ever year is recorded.
"Our climate is changing before our eyes," said Prof Taalas.
"Sea-level rise, ocean heat and acidification will continue for hundreds of years unless means to remove carbon from the atmosphere are invented.
"Some glaciers have reached the point of no return, and this will have long-term repercussions in a world in which more than 2bn people already experience water stress."
Among other findings, the report warned that the global mean sea level reached a new record high in 2021, after increasing at an average rate of 4.5mm per year over the period 2013-2021.
"This is more than double the rate of between 1993 and 2002 and is mainly due to the accelerated loss of ice mass from the ice sheets," the WMO said.
"This has major implications for hundreds of millions of coastal dwellers, and increases vulnerability to tropical cyclones."
Separately, the European Commission's data analysis wing Eurostat said that EU economy greenhouse gases were above pre-pandemic levels in the last three months of 2021.
"In the fourth quarter of 2021, EU economy greenhouse gas emissions totalled 1,041m tonnes of CO2 equivalents, slightly above the pre-pandemic value for the fourth quarter of 2019," Eurostat said.
CO2 equivalent is the standard unit for measuring all greenhouse gases when put together. They include carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), and fluorinated gases and are measured in a common unit for simplicity and clarity purposes.
EU economy greenhouse gas emissions in the fourth quarter of 2021 increased by 8% compared with the same quarter of 2020, Eurostat said.
"This increase is largely due to the effect of the economic rebound after the sharp decrease of activity in 2020 due to the Covid-19 crisis," it added.
In another study in the journal, pollution was found to be the cause of 9m premature deaths annually, making it the world's largest environmental risk factor for disease and premature death.
That means pollution causes one in six deaths worldwide, the study concluded.
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