The pandemic has muted the U.N. meeting, with world leaders
speaking not from the podium in New York but via video from home.
In a year of
cataclysm, some world leaders at this week's annual United Nations (UN) meeting
are taking the long view, warning: If Covid-19 doesn't kill us, climate
change will.
With Siberia seeing its warmest temperature on record this year and enormous
chunks of ice caps in Greenland and Canada sliding into the sea, countries are
acutely aware there’s no vaccine for global warming.
“We are already
seeing a version of environmental Armageddon,” Fiji's Prime Minister Frank
Bainimarama said, citing wildfires in the western US and noting that the
Greenland ice chunk was larger than a number of island nations.
This was meant to
be the year “we took back our planet,” he said. Instead, the coronavirus has
diverted resources and attention from what could have been the marquee issue at
this UN gathering. Meanwhile, the UN
global climate summit has been postponed to late 2021.
That hasn't
stopped countries, from slowly sinking island nations to parched African ones,
from speaking out. “In another 75 years, many ... members may no longer hold
seats at the United Nations if the world continues on its present course,” the
Alliance of Small Island States and the Least Developed Countries Group said.
The main goal of
the 2015 Paris climate accord is to limit the rise in global temperatures to 2
degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times, but
scientists say the world is on track to soar past that. A new study found that
if the world warms another 0.9 degrees Celsius (1.6 degrees Fahrenheit), the
West Antarctic ice sheet will reach a point of irreversible melting. It has
enough water to raise global sea levels by 5 meters (16 feet).
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