Newspapers, ordinarily fierce competitors, don’t often voluntarily publish the very same article on the same day. But on December 7, more than 50 newspapers around the world jointly published the editorial below, which calls for a “fair and effective deal and, crucially, a firm timetable for turning it into a treaty” from the Copenhagen summit on climate change. Writes Guardian deputy editor Ian Katz, the project’s lead organizer, the editorial “carries a simple message to the politicians and negotiators gathered in Copenhagen: if all of us who disagree about so much can agree on what must be done, then surely you can too.”
The US bears extraordinary responsibility for this crisis, and has so far played a largely obstructionist role in the negotiations. But, shamefully, only one US newspaper ran the article–The Miami Herald. One major US paper even told The Guardian, “This is an outrageous attempt to orchestrate media pressure. Go to hell.” What’s outrageous is the US media’s failure to respond to the climate crisis with the intensity of purpose that it demands. The Nation is proud to publish this call and join this extraordinary international journalistic endeavor.
Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency.
Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year’s inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world’s response has been feeble and half-hearted.
Climate change has been caused over centuries, has consequences that will endure for all time and our prospects of taming it will be determined in the next 14 days. We call on the representatives of the 192 countries gathered in Copenhagen not to hesitate, not to fall into dispute, not to blame each other but to seize opportunity from the greatest modern failure of politics. This should not be a fight between the rich world and the poor world, or between east and west. Climate change affects everyone, and must be solved by everyone.
The science is complex but the facts are clear. The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rises to 2C, an aim that will require global emissions to peak and begin falling within the next 5-10 years. A bigger rise of 3-4C–the smallest increase we can prudently expect to follow inaction–would parch continents, turning farmland into desert. Half of all species could become extinct, untold millions of people would be displaced, whole nations drowned by the sea. The controversy over emails by British researchers that suggest they tried to suppress inconvenient data has muddied the waters but failed to dent the mass of evidence on which these predictions are based.