Editorial: We can no longer plead ignorance

Sometimes fact is stranger than fiction. Take for example the news that a conference on extreme heat, meant to be held in London, had to be cancelled because of extreme heat there. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

Perhaps we could plead ignorance a decade ago, clapping our hands over our ears to keep out the cacophony of dissent. Perhaps we felt that we were doing our bit for the planet, using metal straws, adopting ‘meatless Mondays’ and changing to electric cars.

Alas, those days of innocence are gone. We now read one horror story after another about extreme weather, from devastating floods and endless bushfires to heatwaves and hurricanes. But these are just the headlines, the pictures that shake us out of our comfort zone.

The context to all these stories is even more worrying. Scientists are fretting that the Atlantic current could collapse within decades, with unimaginable impact around its shores. We are expecting the current El Niño to be a ‘super’ event, with sea surface temperatures rising dramatically. The poles are warming faster than the rest of the planet, in the Arctic as much as four times the average for the rest of the world.

The global average temperature in 2024 was 1.6°C above pre-industrial levels, already above the 1.5°C calculated during the Paris Agreement in 2015 to be the “tipping point”.

And at some point, the damage to our ailing planet could become irreversible. Not only will changing our policies make no difference – it will also be impossible to turn back the clock.

Why did we allow it to happen? Right-wing populists, like Donald Trump, have defied science and sadly made climate change a political football, ignoring scientists’ advice to try to boost economies, as small islands prepared to disappear under the waves.

The next UN Climate Change conference is COP31 – yes, 31 years of talking, trying to make governments sit up and take notice. This is a whole decade after COP21 in Paris, which was the equivalent of someone stamping their foot to get attention. The UN had then warned that “action must come from governments, cities, regions, businesses and investors. Everyone has a role to play in effectively implementing the Paris Agreement.”

And meanwhile, the estimates of how much money is needed to turn back the clock keep rising: the World Economic Forum warns a warming world could result in 14.5 million deaths and $12.5 trillion in global economic losses by 2050. And the World Bank says that unless there is significant investment, another 132 million people would be pushed into poverty by 2030. That is less than four years away.

Researchers at the Columbia Climate School, with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, identified 65 of the most “at-risk” nations, where over two billion people live. Two-thirds of them are in Africa. Malta lies in 33rd place on this index in the ‘pessimistic’ scenario and 37th in the ‘optimistic’ one – and this is the scenario for 2050. We would rise up to 29th and 31st respectively by 2080.

Malta set up a National Climate Action Council and, to make sure that every angle was covered, it also set up a Climate Action Authority, the first to be set up in Europe.

It is too early to judge their impact – the authority mentions PVs being installed across four public schools – but their future reports will be closely scrutinised.

We are already experiencing more frequent and longer heatwaves in Malta, last January we faced the wrath of Storm Harry and there are already reports about alien species in our seas that are replacing ones that cannot cope with the warmer water.

And the warnings are that worse is yet to come. The least we can do is to listen to scientists’ warnings and act.