Thread by @rahmstorf

30 years ago today the Rio #EarthSummit started on 3 June 1992. 154 nations pledged there to stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations to prevent a dangerous climate change, in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. A thread🧵. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Na…

The 12-year-old Severn Cullis-Suzuki brought tears to the eyes of delegates with her 8-minute speech. She can be seen as the @GretaThunberg of the 1990s, when time wasn't ripe yet for a big youth movement. Watch it!

I remember watching the news of the UNFCCC signing very well. I thought: *finally* they are doing something to stop #GlobalWarming, a looming crisis we have known about since at least the first official government report of 1965! project-syndicate.org/commentary/cli…

I'd completed my PhD in oceanography in New Zealand in 1990, not visiting my home country Germany in 4 years given my concern about the aviation CO2 emissions. I even had to miss my sister's wedding.
In 1988 NASA scientist Jim Hansen famously stated: Global warming has begun!

Of course we all know that despite the #EarthSummit and the UNFCCC, global greenhouse gas and CO2 emissions continue to increase until this day, reaching a new record high in 2021 after the Covid-dip in 2020. Source: IEA, iea.org/reports/global…

This is not least a "success" of the fossil climate denial machine, documented many times, e.g. in this paper by Supran/Oreskes: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.108….
Supported by complicit media (e.g. Murdoch's NewsCorp empire which includes Fox News) and cowardly or corrupt politicians.

This means we've squandered the opportunity for a gentle, gradual energy transition starting in the 1990s and we now need "immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors" (IPCC AR6). We have to hit the emissions breaks, hard, to prevent a disaster of planetary scale.

Climate Twitter, if we all remind people of the 30th anniversary of the #EarthSummit, maybe we can make the hashtag trend?