This is what Christina Figueras, the chairperson of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, who was one of the driving forces behind the Paris Agreement in 2016 and the recipient of the Dan David Future Time Dimension Award for 2019, said at the award ceremony at Tel Aviv University
"The decisions in the next ten years regarding the climate will affect hundreds and even thousands of years"
This is what Christina Figures, the chairperson of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, who was one of the driving forces behind the adoption of the Paris Agreement in 2016 and the recipient of the 2019 Dan David Future Time Dimension Award, said at the award ceremony at Tel Aviv University on Sunday this week.
The decision of the judges' committee states that Christina Figueres won the Dan David Award for her extraordinary leadership as the chairwoman of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which culminated in the Paris Agreement in 2015 and for her tireless efforts to ratify the agreement in 2016. This agreement, which expresses international cooperation Without precedent, it was signed by 195 countries, and heralds a significant chance of slowing global warming."
At the beginning of her speech, Figueres gave a snapshot showing human history in the right proportion: "After the last ice age, the earth, which was 4.5 billion years old, entered what is known as the Holocene period, a geological period that resulted in the formation of a "sweet window" in which the climate was unprecedentedly favorable compared to ages many in the past.”
"This sweet window lasted only ten thousand years during which humanity prospered. All of recorded human history took place in a very short time span of ten thousand years, compared to the aforementioned 4.5 billion years, but my friends, I have news for you. We are no longer in the Holocene. We are living today in a new geological period - the Anthropocene (that is, under the control of man AB). This era began only fifty years ago. What is quite frightening is that we are required to make decisions about where to take the Anthropocene. Is it going to be written in the history books as a geological period in which humans destroyed all natural systems and everything that supported life. Or is the Anthropocene really going to be the period when the human race set high goals for itself."
"Until now, everything that has been written about the Anthropocene is only about the destruction we caused. We have an opportunity and a responsibility to decide now and for the next ten years but no more where this geological period is going. What we do in the field of energy, what we do well for transportation, what we do with the oceans, the use of technology, what we do with the forests and what we do in the economic field. These collective decisions will determine the quality of human life not for a decade or years but for hundreds of years.
This is a responsibility that no generation has shouldered until today, this is a moment in the history of mankind and in general in the history of the earth to do so. We must learn from the past. We need to act wisely in the present to be able to create a more secure future of peace and prosperity for all."
"The only way to do this, and this may surprise you, is to be an optimist. And today I invite everyone to be optimistic, but let me define what optimism is. Optimism is not when you get Moses and then you grieve yourself. It's called celebration, not optimism. My optimism is not the result of an achievement but of the way we approach the challenge. There are global challenges that we must overcome in this century. And we must be able to handle them successfully."
"But now it is not enough just to be an optimist. You have to be a stubborn optimist because there will be many challenges, many business systems will have to be changed in a way that we haven't even imagined yet, and there will be many barriers that we can expect. The answer can never be 'I'll just sit at home and wait for things to happen'. It just doesn't work anymore. We need to be stubborn and determined and know that the quality of life of our children and tens of generations after them depends on what we decide and do today and in the next ten years."
"I invite you all to join a growing family of stubborn optimists. All the challenges are ahead of us." Figures concluded.
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Right now, science and research in particular, are under attack by the distorters of the truth, and the arrogant and ignorant president of the United States is at their head.
We know enough, in order to know what needs to be done at a high level of probability - a substantial and dramatic reduction in the use of fossil fuels (including gas), a reduction, the size of the human population and its stabilization at a level suitable for the renewal of resources, draconian laws to preserve the natural environment including marine reserves. Changing the form of the global economy to a sustainable economy, changing the form of production and consumption to circular production and consumption and more. The question is whether the politicians, tycoons, religious leaders will agree to this, under public pressure that is just beginning to form. I try to be optimistic…
It is not the climate that we must fix, but the weak knowledge we have of the absolute laws of nature. Both the known and the hidden (hidden from us due to our disability).
Because our desire is the root, the source. And everything that comes after it is only a result of that desire, the concentration of our research should be concentrated on those exceptions and corrections on that desire and because Israel is the head of that entire system. They must be the pioneers in the field.