Summer, with the heat, is an opportunity for beautiful walks, along the sea, in the countryside or in the mountains. In the Alps, at the Col du Mont St Bernard, the landscape is grandiose, wild and magnificent. I went there a few months ago. It is a paradise for hiking, meditation and physical exercise. At first glance, a phenomenon catches the eye: we can see that over the years, multi-millennial glaciers have disappeared. Such an observation on climate change corroborates the data provided by the oldest weather station in the Alpine arc. It is located at the Grand-Saint-Bernard hospice at an altitude of over 2,400 m. In 150 years, analysis of the daily temperature readings scrupulously collected by the measuring devices indicates an average increase of around 2.5°C. A map produced by Météo Suisse illustrates such an evolution on a national scale, since 1864, with an increasing gradation of red from 0° to 2.5°C. The entire recent period of the last seven years clearly reflects global warming in an established and lasting manner, in the red zone.
The red zones linked to the evolution of Covid are topical. But we must not lose sight of the red zones of global warming, undoubtedly even more lasting, which are hitting our regions, in Switzerland, France and elsewhere in the world. In recent days, the smoke from the forest fires that occurred in California tinted the bay and the city of San Francisco orange-red in broad daylight. "While many aspects of our lives were turned upside down in 2020, climate change continued unabated," underlines the report of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) published by the UN last Wednesday. There were certainly reductions in carbon dioxide emissions in 2020, but the impact is very low in the atmosphere, and CO2 concentrations "have never been so high in 3 million years," adds the WMO.
Because of climate inertia, it is possible that the actions we take today will not have lasting effects on stabilizing climate increases before 2030, at best. For now, we perceive the effects of such warming, in all seasons of our lives in Anjou and elsewhere, as "across the biosphere, from mountaintops to the depths of the ocean, leading to an acceleration of sea level rise, with cascading effects on ecosystems and human safety" according to the rapporteurs of the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which participated in the report. The UN calls for "urgent and concerted action by all countries and all sectors". Its Director General, Antonio Guterres, urges States to "act together in the face of the climate threat, which is much more serious than the pandemic itself". The UN also calls for a change in our consumption patterns, combined with new technological solutions for carbon capture and storage (Les Échos, September 10, 2020). There is still time to act.
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