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Jakarta Post

We are 12 years from potential climate catastrophe

Nick Bridge (The Jakarta Post)
Premium
London
Fri, December 14, 2018

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We are 12 years from potential climate catastrophe Climate change is making more people around the world vulnerable to heat exposure. (Shutterstock/Calin Tatu)

“It is existential.” It was all the Fijian Prime Minister needed to say, when I asked him about climate change, after the most powerful cyclone ever recorded in the Southern hemisphere had destroyed his and neighboring islands back in 2016. 

We now need to wake up to the fact that the rest of us are not so far behind. This year, hundreds of extreme weather events — record heatwaves, floods, droughts and storms — affected hundreds of millions in every region of the world.

The risks to food, water and energy security are almost impossible to overstate. The poorest countries will be hit hardest. But in our globalized economy every single supermarket shelf relies on daily deliveries from around the world. As Martin Wolf said recently, “It is five minutes to midnight on climate change […] we are risking a world of runaway — and unmanageable — climate chaos.”

We have had 1 degree Celsius of warming since the 1850s, but this could dramatically accelerate to 1.5 degrees in the next 12 years, which could mean irreversible loss of ice sheets, resulting in multimeter sea level rise.  

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