‘Bleak’ U.N. Report on a Planet in Peril Looms Over New Climate Talks

With world leaders gathering in Madrid next week for their annual bargaining session over how to avert a climate catastrophe, the latest assessment issued by the United Nations said Tuesday that greenhouse gas emissions are still rising dangerously.

A gas flare at a Shell refinery in Norco, La. 

“The summary findings are bleak,” said the annual assessment, which is produced by the United Nations Environment Program and is formally known as the Emissions Gap Report. Countries have failed to halt the rise of greenhouse gas emissions despite repeated warnings from scientists, with China and the United States, the two biggest polluters, further increasing their emissions last year.

The result, the authors added, is that “deeper and faster cuts are now required.”

As if to underscore the gap between reality and diplomacy, the international climate negotiations, scheduled to begin next week, are not even designed to ramp up pledges by world leaders to cut their countries’ emissions. That deadline is still a year away. 

Read the story from The New York Times by Somini Sengupta - “‘Bleak’ U.N. Report on a Planet in Peril Looms Over New Climate Talks.”

Is 13 too young for my daughter to decide she doesn't want children?

I’ve always been open with my 13-year-old about the realities of climate catastrophe. She’s the sort of kid who asks questions and initiates difficult conversations. Since the recent UN released a 33-page report summarising the IPCC’s (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) latest assessment, we’ve begun talking in terms of plans for the future. I don’t shield her from the facts. I've asked her whether she’s thought about not having children.

I fear my daughter has harder choices than us to make.CREDIT:

At her age, I wasn’t even aware of the concept of climate change. But she can’t afford the luxury of being blissfully ignorant. Time is running out. She performed in a play last year based on Derrick Jensen’s graphic novel As the World Burns. She’s painfully aware of the possibility that her children and grandchildren will have a harder time being alive. And the band-aid banalities coming from politicians and lobby groups are no solutions at all.

Read the story from the story from The Sydney Morning Herald by Katerina Cosgrove - “Is 13 too young for my daughter to decide she doesn't want children?”