'This is our chance to start bending the climate curve'

摘要

YOU might say the body Petteri Taalas heads determines the weather on world climate action. At the very least, it takes its temperature. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO), based in Geneva, Switzerland, is the United Nations specialised agency on weather, climate and water resources. It co-founded the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the clearing house for scientific research on global warming, and runs observing systems that follow what is happening to temperature, precipitation, storms, sea level rise, glaciers, snow and ice cover and greenhouse gas emissions across the planet. The WMO has just produced its latest report, The Global Climate in 2015-2019. It comes a few short months after Taalas, the group's secretary general, found himself in the news for purportedly questioning the focus on the need for robust international action on climate change.