A news headline made me cry. It wasn’t about a million euro’s worth of cocaine seized in Cork Airport, or a life sentence for a senseless murder, or an insane amount of money spent to transfer a footballer from one club to another.

It said, ‘Battle to halt global heating at 1.5 degrees is lost’.

It is the official confirmation by the UN of what we all know is happening - the earth is heating up and bad things are happening.

‘Bad things’ like the most extreme heatwave ever recorded hitting Europe this summer, killing thousands, wildfires sweeping through French, Spanish, and even Tipperary landscapes, glaciers melting, causing tsunami-like flash floods in Nepal, inevitable food price rises because of incessant drought.

Reading the headline, I thought of people living in low-lying countries like the Maldives, Tuvalu, Kiribati. For them, that bleak headline means their islands might be uninhabitable in the coming decades.

In response, the President of Palau, a Pacific Island nation with no traffic lights and a population of 18,000, said: “It is hard to overstate the depth of emotion for those of us living on the frontline.”

The UN report ringing the death knell is titled Limiting Overshoot. It details how the world is now 1.4C warmer than before the Industrial Revolution when we started polluting our planet at an industrial scale, and will inevitably exceed 1.5C because of our failure to curb greenhouse gases.

Just over a decade........

© Evening Echo