President Biden’s special climate change envoy John Kerry said humans only have nine years left to make drastic changes in order to avoid catastrophic climate patterns.
“The scientists told us three years ago we had 12 years to avert the worst consequences of climate crisis. We are now three years gone, so we have nine years left,” Kerry said during a CBS interview Friday.
Kerry told CBS that the situation is so dire that even the administration’s ambitious climate change agenda and the terms of the Paris climate agreement will no longer be sufficient to avoid a potential catastrophe.
“Even if we did everything that we said we were going to do when we signed up in Paris, we would see a rise in the Earth’s temperature to somewhere around 3.7 degrees or more, which is catastrophic,” Kerry said. “There is no room for B.S. anymore. There’s no faking it on this one.”
Kerry pointed to the historic winter weather plaguing Texas and other areas of the country this year as being a result of climate change, warning that such patterns would become the new normal if humans don’t take action.
“I think it’s a very appropriate way to think of it, so it is directly related to the warming, even though your instinct is to say, wait a minute, this is the new Ice Age. But it’s not,” Kerry said. “It is coming from the global warming, and it threatens all the normal weather patterns.”
“Obviously, we want to prevent this from becoming the new normal to the degree that we can,” Kerry said.
As former President Barack Obama’s secretary of state in 2016, Kerry signed on to the Paris climate accords. He was brought into the new administration by Biden to continue that work, with the president already announcing that the United States was rejoining the accords after a hiatus mandated by former President Donald Trump.
But Kerry has already faced criticism from Republicans in his new role, especially after taking a private jet to Iceland to receive a climate change award.
Kerry downplayed the controversy, calling private air travel the “only choice for someday like me.”
