Damian Carrington: “You may have read that there are just eight, or 10, or 12 years to save the world from the climate crisis. There are not. It is already here, gaining strength every day as carbon emissions pour into the atmosphere. It is a slow-motion disaster. Action to avert the worst should have started last week, last year, last decade. This is not a message of despair, though, but one of measured hope. The gap between the action we could take to reduce global heating and the action we are actually taking can be measured by a brutally simple metric: human suffering. That means every action that closes that gap, however small, is meaningful. … With a problem to solve, setting a timeline feels necessary. But Greta Thunberg, with characteristic clarity, recently spelled out the mistake: ‘It’s never too late to do as much as we can, every fraction of a degree matters,’ she says. ‘There are of course no magical dates for saving the world.’ … [It is] imperative that every decision taken every day by governments, businesses and communities must pass the climate test: will it cut emissions?”
11 March 2020