Climate crisis has reached 'point of no return', UN chief says

The devastating impacts of global warming that threaten humanity are a pushback from Nature under assault, UN chief Antonio Guterres warned Sunday ahead of a key climate conference.

"For many decades the human species has been at war with the planet, and now the planet is fighting back," he said, decrying "utterly inadequate" efforts of the world's major economies to curb carbon pollution.

"We are confronted with a global climate crisis and the point of no return is no longer over the horizon, it is in sight and hurtling towards us."

Guterres flagged a UN report to be released Tuesday confirming the last five years are the warmest on record, with 2019 likely to be the second hottest ever.

"Climate-related disasters are becoming more frequent, more deadly, more destructive," he said on the eve of the 196-nation COP25 climate change talks in Madrid.

Human health and food security are at risk, he added, noting that air pollution associated with climate change accounts for seven million premature deaths every year.

The Paris Agreement calls for capping global warming at under two degrees Celsius, but recent science has made clear that the treaty's aspiration goal of 1.5C is a far safer threshold.

A UN Enviroment Programme report last week concluded that CO2 emissions would need to drop by a vertiginously steep 7.6 percent per year over the next decade to stay within that limit.

But Guterres insisted that the 1.5C goal is doable. All that is missing, he said, is political will.

"Let's be clear -- up to now, our efforts to reach this target have been utterly inadequate," he said. "The world's largest emitters are not pulling their weight."

Current national pledges -- if carried out -- would see global temperatures rise by at least 3C, a recipe for human misery, according to scientists.

(REUTERS)