The Russian President had not come to Munich, and yet Vladimir Putin was omnipresent.

All Friday the Kremlin fed the world and thus the security conference with news about the Russian troop deployment on the border with Ukraine.

Despite the largest deployment of troops in Europe in over three decades, the conference participants left no doubt that the world could use nothing less than a new East-West conflict in view of global warming.

António Guterres started things off: "We're not currently winning the race on climate change, we're losing it," said the UN Secretary-General after his opening speech in the conference room of the "Bayerischer Hof" conference hotel.

Shortly thereafter, Johan Rockström provided a factual list of justifications in the same place.

Lorenz Hemicker

Editor in Politics

  • Follow I follow

The 56-year-old Swede has headed the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research since 2018.

The measures to reduce CO2 are insufficient.

The world is heading towards a catastrophe.

Global warming of 2.7 degrees Celsius by the end of the century is a value that the earth has not reached in the past four to five million years.

Signs of instability have already been registered at a number of the 50 scientifically determined climate tipping points such as the Greenland ice sheet, the Amazon region and the Gulf Stream.

If humanity continues as before, global warming will mean that in 2070 over three billion people will have to live in regions with an annual mean temperature of over 29 degrees, including large economies such as Brazil, Nigeria and India.

So-called cascades caused the greatest concern.

As in a game of dominoes, Rockström explained, the tipping points could overturn one another and the security risks could continue to increase.

The scientific message is: Humanity underestimates the threat.

A reorientation of the global reduction plans is urgently needed.

CO2 emissions would have to fall by more than 50 percent by 2030 and be reduced to zero emissions by 2050.

According to Rockström, the creeping climate crisis is already a planetary emergency.

Turbulent times lie ahead of mankind.

The US government's special climate envoy, John Kerry, chose no less alarming words.

"We are on the path of greatest destruction," said the former foreign minister in the discussion that followed.

Kerry explained that the Ukraine crisis poses a challenge to values, Western cohesion and international law. But the climate crisis is "something existential".

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken had previously said so.