Another major red-flag warning on the here-and-now-but-worse-in-the-immediate-future thingie of climate change — a call from professionals/scientists to turn the boat — yesterday a big editorial:
NEW—Today, @TheLancet joins over 200 leading health journals worldwide in demanding emergency action to keep average global temperature increases below 1.5°C, halt the destruction of nature, and protect health. #HealthyClimate @richardhorton1 https://t.co/F1oYzumDxa pic.twitter.com/DhMm1u26pq
— The Lancet (@TheLancet) September 6, 2021
Nutshell via HuffPost this morning:
A coalition of more than 220 of the planet’s leading medical and public health journals issued an urgent rallying cry to address climate change on Sunday, saying the greatest threat to global health was the planet’s ongoing failure to rein in carbon emissions.
The editors of the journals wrote the impassioned joint plea, warning humanity was already facing irreversible threats to public health just weeks before the United Nations is set to meet for its general assembly later this month. The threat was so urgent, they wrote, that countries can’t wait for the end of the COVID-19 pandemic to begin reducing emissions.
“Health is already being harmed by global temperature increases and the destruction of the natural world, a state of affairs health professionals have been bringing attention to for decades,” the call, published in journals including the Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine and the British Medical Journal, reads.
“The science is unequivocal: a global increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius [2.7 degrees Fahrenheit] above the pre-industrial average and the continued loss of biodiversity risk catastrophic harm to health that will be impossible to reverse.”
Further nutshell from CNN:
“Despite the world’s necessary preoccupation with Covid-19, we cannot wait for the pandemic to pass to rapidly reduce emissions,” the authors wrote, calling on governments to respond to the climate crisis with the same spirit of “unprecedented funding” dedicated to the pandemic.
The UK-based BMJ, one of the journals that published the report, said that “never before” had so many health publications come together to make the same statement, “reflecting the severity of the climate change emergency now facing the world.”
Voices crying in the wilderness.
‘Why ain’t they turning?’
Once again, here we are…
(Illustration out front: Salvador Dali’s ‘Tête Raphaëlesque éclatée [Exploding Raphaelesque Head],’ found here)