Climate Change for Parents: The Facts - More about climate change

You might hear the argument that the climate has always been changing, and that's true, but it has never changed as quickly as it is doing at the moment.

Scientists are very clear that the rapid climate change that is happening now is caused by human activities and on 5 November 2019, a group of over 11,000 scientists from 153 countries around the world signed a statement published in the US journal Bioscience stating that we now face a climate emergency.

Scientists have been warning about the risks of rapid climate change for decades.  Did you know that the first ever Climate Change Convention took place in 1979 in Geneva, Switzerland?  But despite all the warnings, and the various commitments and agreements that have been made since, very little has actually been done to tackle the problem.

The issue has been avoided by governments and large companies for at least 40 years, but now we know things can't carry on as they have done.  Things have to change.

And that has been underlined in the last few days with a new report from the World Meteorological Organization stating that the world's greenhouse gas emissions broke a new record in 2018 and a warning from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) that global greenhouse gas emissions need to be reduced by 7.6% each year until 2030 if we want to avoid average global temperatures increasing to more than 1.5C above pre-Industrial levels by the year 2100.