United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned Tuesday that the “climate crisis” threatens the lives of humans all over the world due to rising sea levels and flooding.
Calling for the world to take “urgent climate action now,” the U.N. alarmist-in-chief said on X that he was in the Polynesian kingdom of Tonga “to issue a global S.O.S.: Save our seas on rising sea levels.”
Guterres went on to contend that global average sea levels “are rising at rates unprecedented in the past 3,000 years” and that relative sea levels in the Southwestern Pacific “have risen even more than the global average.”
“Greenhouse gases, overwhelmingly generated by burning fossil fuels, are cooking our planet,” he said with his characteristically melodramatic style. “And the sea is taking the heat — literally.”
“Rising seas are a crisis entirely of humanity’s making, a crisis that will soon swell to an almost unimaginable scale,” the Portuguese socialist argued, adding, “If we save the Pacific, we also save ourselves.”
A few days in Tonga offered me a front row seat to how people here have to endure the impacts of the climate crisis on a regular basis:
— António Guterres (@antonioguterres) August 27, 2024
From torrential rains & flash floods to rising sea levels forcing families to relocate.
The world must take urgent #ClimateAction now. pic.twitter.com/tNdmJP35WW
Contrary to Guterres’s histrionic claims, recent studies suggest that despite some rise in sea levels, many islands have not shrunk — as alarmists predicted — but have been stable or even grown.
In a June 26 article titled “The Vanishing Islands that Failed to Vanish,” New York Times climate reporter Raymond Zhong chronicled the surprising find that atoll nations — like the Maldives, the Marshall Islands, and Tuvalu, which seemed doomed to vanish — somehow have not.
Nonetheless, Guterres has continued urging wealthier nations to pay climate reparations for the consequences of climate change in developing countries.
He has also repeated, in ever more hyperbolic fashion, his warnings of an impending climate apocalypse.
“I will never forget the climate-related carnage I saw after apocalyptic flooding submerged a third of Pakistan,” the U.N. chief stated in 2023 on X. “I call on donors & international financial institutions to make good on their funding pledges in support of recovery efforts as soon as possible.”
The “climate emergency is threatening the very survival of communities & economies that depend on tourism,” he said while calling for “green investments” and “investing in sustainable tourism.”
Guterres has also argued that humanity must urgently find solutions to global warming because it “has opened the gates of hell.”
“Horrendous heat is having horrendous effects,” Guterres warned in opening remarks at the U.N. Climate Ambition Summit in New York in 2023. “Distraught farmers watching crops carried away by floods; sweltering temperatures spawning disease; and thousands fleeing in fear as historic fires rage.”
The “era of global warming has ended, the era of global boiling has arrived,” he said (emphasis added), asserting that the “dog days of summer are not just barking, they are biting” and adding that the “climate breakdown has begun.”
