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AP: Globale Erwärmung: Weltklimarat drängt zu raschem Handeln
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UN report on global warming carries life-or-death warning
SHOTLIST:
ASSOCIATED PRESS - AP CLIENTS ONLY
Geneva - 8 October 2018
1. World Meteorological Organisation Secretary-General Petteri Taalas arriving
2. SOUNDBITE (English) Petteri Taalas, World Meteorological Organisation Secretary-General:
"There's extreme urgency and countries, they are giving their pledges after the Paris agreement, and so far the progress hasn't been good enough that we would move towards 1.5- or 2-degrees target."
3. Taalas at briefing
4. SOUNDBITE (English) Petteri Taalas, World Meteorological Organisation Secretary-General:
"There's clearly a need for a much higher ambition level to reach even 2 degrees target, so we are more moving towards 3 to 5 at the moment rather than 1.5 to 2. But the message from the science community is that we still have a possibility to change it, but something needs to happen in the coming 10 years, and that's going to be very critical for the success of Paris (climate accord) implementation."
5. Taalas listening to question
6. SOUNDBITE (English) Petteri Taalas, World Meteorological Organisation Secretary-General:
"We expect that this 1.5-point degree will be reached between 2030 - which is 11 years from now - and 2052, and we still have time to change our behaviour to reach 1.5. So, we haven't lost the battle yet."
7. Hands typing
8. Screen with map
9. SOUNDBITE (English) SOUNDBITE (English) Petteri Taalas, World Meteorological Organisation Secretary-General:
"Asian countries are the most sensitive to sea level rise and they are having plenty of big cities on the coastline, like Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong and also there are plenty of big cities on the coast of India."
10. Journalist at briefing
11. SOUNDBITE (English) Petteri Taalas, World Meteorological Organisation Secretary-General:
"The solution needs both the governments' decisions and the finance sector's resources but also individual consumers are key players so they can decide what kind of vehicles they're using, how they heat their houses, for example, cool their houses, and what kind of diet they are having, and how they're consuming goods."
12. Journalist at briefing
13. SOUNDBITE (English) Petteri Taalas, World Meteorological Organisation Secretary-General:
"It's a major challenge and the message from the science community is that it would be rational to think of the welfare of the coming generations. So, it's a question of whether we can make certain decisions in the coming years about whether beneficiaries are going to be our children and grandchildren and several coming generations."
14. Taalas and media at briefing
15. SOUNDBITE (English) Petteri Taalas, World Meteorological Organisation Secretary-General:
"The fact that we eat so much meat means that we are using a fairly large fraction of our agricultural land for cattle instead of instead of producing vegetarian food that would be more carbon friendly. "
16. Various of briefing
17. Taalas speaking to reporter
18. Various exteriors of UN building
STORYLINE:
The head of the UN's climate agency on Monday said governments, the financial sector and citizens everywhere need to mobilise to help keep a lid on global warming, pointing to the "extreme urgency" to hit international targets to keep the earth from heating up too much.
Petteri Taalas of the World Meteorological Organization said the scientific community agrees that "we haven't lost the battle yet" but that action is needed such as through changing diets away from beef _ raising of cattle is a key producer of heat-trapping gases _ and changing the way people use transportation.
The comments from Taalas come after the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a gloomy report on the battle against global warming at a meeting in Incheon, South Korea.
The WMO is a co-sponsor of the panel.
The IPCC detailed how Earth's weather, health and ecosystems would be in better shape if the world's leaders could somehow limit future human-caused warming to just 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit (a half degree Celsius) from now, instead of the globally agreed-upon goal of 1.8 degrees F (1 degree C).
In 2010, international negotiators adopted a goal of limiting warming to 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) since pre-industrial times.
In 2015, when the nations of the world agreed to the historic Paris climate agreement, they set dual goals: 2 degrees C and a more demanding target of 1.5 degrees C from pre-industrial times.
The 1.5 was at the urging of vulnerable countries that called 2 degrees a death sentence.
Taalas insisted that the scientific community believes hitting the 1.5-degree target is feasible, but that the world community needed to take a longer-term view about the environment _ notably about how the world will be left to future generations.
