WALLACE-WELLS, David. "UN says climate genocide is coming. It’s actually worse than that"

David Wallace-Wells (US journalist who writes on the worsening climate emergency) on the 2018 IPCC Report “Global warming of 1.5 °C” (2018): “UN says climate genocide is coming. It’s actually worse than that… Just two years ago, amid global fanfare, the Paris climate accords were signed — initiating what seemed, for a brief moment, like the beginning of a planet-saving movement. But almost immediately, the international goal it established of limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius began to seem, to many of the world’s most vulnerable, dramatically inadequate; the Marshall Islands’ representative gave it a blunter name, calling two degrees of warming “genocide”. The alarming new report you may have read about this week from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — which examines just how much better 1.5 degrees of warming would be than 2 — echoes the charge… Barring the arrival of dramatic new carbon-sucking technologies, which are so far from scalability at present that they are best described as fantasies of industrial absolution, it will not be possible to keep warming below two degrees Celsius — the level the new report describes as a climate catastrophe. As a planet, we are coursing along a trajectory that brings us north of four degrees by the end of the century. The IPCC is right that two degrees marks a world of climate catastrophe. Four degrees is twice as bad as that. And that is where we are headed, at present — a climate hell twice as hellish as the one the IPCC says, rightly, we must avoid at all costs”. But the real meaning of the report is not “climate change is much worse than you think,” because anyone who knows the state of the research will find nothing surprising in it. The real meaning is, “you now have permission to freak out” … Monday’s IPCC may seem like a dramatic departure, and it is. But there is going to be much more like it coming. So long as we continue to squander what little time we have, the news will only get worse from here” (David Wallace-Wells, “UN says climate genocide is coming. It’s actually worse than that”, New York Magazine, 10 October 2018: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/un-says-climate-genocide-coming-but-its-worse-than-that.html ).

[Editor: The Climate Genocide website is an alphabetically-organized compendium of expert views on the worsening Climate Genocide - presently 7 million people die annually from air pollution, 15 million people die avoidably from deprivation in the global South (all variously impacted by man-made climate change), and perhaps about 1 million people die from climate change each year - however this is set to increase in a worsening Climate Genocide with, in the absence of requisite action, 10 billion people dying prematurely as we head to a world with a carrying capacity for humans of only 0.5 billion by 2100 (see “Climate Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/climategenocide/ ).