Guterres said scientists told him the 1.5-degree goal was no longer alive
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres is preparing his last global-warming address as UN chief for the COP31 climate conference in Turkey, scheduled for Nov. 9-20 and set to open Monday. He told The Associated Press in a recent interview that his message for world leaders is: “This is a moment of truth.” His second and final term as secretary-general expires at the end of the year.
The planned message is blunt: “We can no longer wait, we can no longer have endless discussions in which everybody tries to push the responsibility to someone else. Everybody must do more, everybody must do more now,” he said. The phrase “moment of truth” carried the conversation: he used it three times in 20 minutes during the interview, seated in his 38th-floor conference room at UN headquarters. He discussed his one last push in the fight against climate change, according to The Associated Press.
His own moment of truth came last year, and he called it “one of the most difficult days of my life.” Before a major climate speech, after consulting with scientists, Guterres had planned, as he had for the previous nine years, to insist that the 2015 Paris Agreement’s main goal — limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times — was still alive. He also planned to say the world needed to do far more to stay below that threshold and that doing so was doable.
“Scientists told me you cannot say that because that’s no longer true,” said Guterres, an engineer before entering politics. Too much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, the result of burning fossil fuels, had been released into the atmosphere. “That was an enormous shock for me,” he said. The United Nations now tries to limit how much further past that threshold the world heads, and Guterres said the realization felt like a failure.
Over the previous decade, Guterres delivered variations of warnings about climate change. The Associated Press said climate change is caused by burning fossil fuels such as oil and gas and characterized the language of those warnings as often increasingly hyperbolic. Three years ago, referring to rising temperatures and increasing extreme weather, both results of climate change, he said, “the era of global boiling has arrived.”
The Associated Press described the urgency against a backdrop of worsening heat waves, storms, floods and droughts, ever higher temperatures and El Niño, a naturally occurring climate pattern that scrambles weather systems around the globe. Over his ten-year tenure, The Associated Press described Guterres as one of the most visible advocates urging countries to do more to reduce their emissions of heat-trapping gases.
“But it’s not the world that’s failed, it’s the political leadership that’s failed,” Guterres said. Protecting the planet requires a long-term strategic view, he said, yet in many political systems “there is no strategic view. And policies change frequently, not allowing the kind of constant determined investment that is necessary.” He pointed to his tenure as Portugal’s prime minister in the late 1990s to show it was possible to invest long term in a greener future. A worldwide boom in wind and solar power, he said, gives him hope because they are cheaper alternatives to fossil fuels.
Guterres also pointed to compounding pressures: wars in Ukraine and Iran, and worries about artificial intelligence, which he has also tried to rally world leaders around. “The problem is that all these things are getting combined,” he said, noting AI’s huge electricity and water consumption and carbon emissions. War-related energy shocks, he said, show that relying on fossil fuels is a fundamental security problem.
Three years ago, Guterres toured the highest peaks of Nepal and warned of a future in which swollen glacier-fed lakes burst into devastating floods and landslides. “I am here today to cry out from the rooftop of the world: Stop the madness,” he said in 2023. “The glaciers are retreating, but we cannot,” he said. “We must end the fossil fuel age.”
“Unfortunately they came sooner than what I expected,” he recalled. Floods in August killed more than 1,400 people in Nepal, with another 5,600 missing, and scientists said climate change played a role in the disasters.
Guterres said someone needs to pay to help the victims of climate change, who often did not cause the problem. “Fossil fuel companies are making huge profits and obviously those windfall profits should be taxed and those taxes should be applied in supporting the countries that are having the more dramatic impacts of climate change,” he said.
Earlier this month, talking with a science team on a drifting platform in the middle of the Arctic Ocean, Guterres said his trip to Mount Everest and his conversations with researchers changed him. Those encounters, he said, created “a sense of fury in relation to those who go on, if not denying, at least refusing to take the measures that are necessary to stop this madness.”
“António Guterres has consistently been eloquent, forceful and right on target in all of his many statements and initiatives to address the climate crisis,” former U.S. Vice President Al Gore said. Gore said Guterres has been so active on the issue because “he understands clearly that it is the greatest challenge facing humanity.” Laurence Tubiana, chief executive of the European Climate Foundation, who presided over the negotiations that resulted in the Paris Agreement, said Guterres “has done what he could, even pushing the ball much, much farther than any other SG, to the point that he may have been represented in a very adversarial context.”
The praise sits alongside the limits of the office. Because nations do not have to do what the UN or its leaders ask, and superpowers hold veto authority, Guterres said the secretary-general’s position “has no real power. We have not much money you know. But there is one thing we have: A voice.”
His three words of advice to whoever succeeds him — the UN Security Council is still deciding on the next secretary-general — are “Tell the truth.” And the one message he said he wants the public to remember on climate change: “Take it seriously because it is an existential threat. And the first thing we need to fight is for our own lives.”