Climate change is on the verge of changing for the worst. The United Nations Climate Change Special Report of 2018 showed that we may have only 12 years or so for global warming to be kept at bay which is 1.5°C, which is the upper safer limit for global warming, beyond this the risk of droughts and floods will increase and poverty and food shortages will be liable for hundreds of millions of people which will, in the end, lead to mass extinction of people and possible climatic chaos.
Political context
This situation is worsened by the existing political context. Governments and political leaders are not helping much, leaders such as the United States president Donald Trump and Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, show their willful ignorance by asserting that science is wrong and that nothing needs to change or should change and that forests should be done with and fossil fuel be subsidized and be promoted as clean coal.
This rhetoric encourages the feeling of trees which causes the climate to change to the worst because as we know, trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in a bid to slow climate change. Other presidents such as Vladimir Putin and Mohammed bin Salman, do not ignorantly deny science like their counterparts but calculate how much they would lose; they did not want to welcome a UN report agreeing on the 1.5°C limit for global warming, instead, they saw that their fossil fuel interest would be in jeopardy. People today are not concerned about climate change; mass protests are fewer as only handfuls of people are campaigning against climate change for governments to act.
Four blocking governments
Four blocking governments which are overrun by fossil fuel interests, have been stalling the UN report and preventing them from studying the climate situation in their countries. Furthermore, the ministers of those countries more often shoot down bills pertaining to the UN report.
Thus this reluctance of leaders to prevent climate change would lead to climatic chaos which has already started between the UN and countries like Russian, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. Inability to stop climate change would eventually lead to a mass extinction of people due to various consequences of global warming such as food shortages and poverty. Governments should, therefore, drop their interests and see the bigger picture that climate change is a real threat to humanity.
Credits: commons.wikimedia.org
