Demand for emergency response from governments and a mass move away from polluting industries to avert the devastation predicted by scientists
Climate change activists began two weeks of protests focused on the capital’s financial district, which they blame for helping to fuel climate change and targeted London’s Guildhall, parts of which date back to the 15th Century, by climbing on the outside of the headquarters. Extinction Rebellion, had caused days of traffic chaos in London two years ago, provoking criticism from politicians who said the police had been too tolerant.
Extinction Rebellion, which caused days of traffic chaos in London two years ago, said it is targeting the city’s financial district, which they blame for helping to fuel climate change.
The group wants an emergency response from governments and a mass move away from polluting industries to avert the devastation predicted by scientists.
Meanwhile, on August 9, 2021, after decades of amassing evidence, a United Nations panel vindicated the theories of Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius by concluding that we’re definitely to blame for heating the planet.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has concluded beyond a shadow of a doubt — “that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land.”
The report stated that some changes, such as sea-level rise caused by melting ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica, may be irreversible.
Exceeding critical temperature thresholds 2021-2040 is also absolutely possible, it warned.
In 2021, for instance, scientists found that a heat wave this year in parts of Canada and the United States, with sweltering temperatures close to 50C, would have been “virtually impossible“ without humanity’s greenhouse gases.
“Our fingerprints are all over the climate system,” Ben Santer, a top climate scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, said.
“Humans were no longer innocent bystanders in the climate system. By burning fossil fuels and increasing atmospheric concentrations of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, humans were changing Earth’s climate.”
— Ben Santer, top climate scientist
“Climate denialism is still alive and well in the United States Congress. And in the U.S., the credibility of climate science is still being challenged by powerful individuals,” Santer said.
“But the times are changing. The concerning changes in extreme events — particularly heat waves, drought, floods and wildfires — are diminishing the space in which denialism can thrive,” he wrote.
Santer wrote, “humans were no longer innocent bystanders in the climate system. By burning fossil fuels and increasing atmospheric concentrations of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, humans were changing Earth’s climate.”