Climate change puts the world on “a war footing like we were in WWII” and makes 2015 “the most important year in history since the United Nations was set up in 1945,” former UK Chief Scientist Sir David King told a packed auditorium at Imperial College in London last week.
With governments of more than 190 nations meeting in Paris in December to hammer out an agreement to keep average global warming below 2ºC compared to pre-industrial levels, “I don’t think we have another chance after this one,” King said. “We are running out of time. Many people don’t seem to realize that 2ºC is already going to be very challenging.”
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A week before King’s talk, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its famous Doomsday Clock two minutes closer to midnight. “Owing to the gathering storm of nuclear proliferation and global warming, scientists warn that humanity now faces its gravest threat since the height of the Cold War in the 1980s,” The Huffington Post reports. “The minute hand currently stands a mere three minutes to midnight.”
