Igold of the 48e Cesar ceremony, Friday February 24, Nina, 24, young climate activist from the Last Renovation collective, entered the stage. She stood calmly, wearing a T-shirt that read “We have 761 days left” [« il nous reste 761 jours »]. Within seconds, the antenna was cut off and security guards seized it and carried it out of the room. A priori, few viewers and even fewer Ahmed Sylla and Léa Drucker, who animated the sequence, understood what it was about. The inscription referred to the latest IPCC report in which scientists warn us that to stay below 1.5°C of global warming, humanity still has 761 days.
In short, global emissions have been rising continuously for decades (apart from a small pause related to Covid-19) and if they have not started to decrease by then, we will cross this fateful threshold with irreversible consequences. This does not mean that the battle will be lost (every fraction of a degree counts), but it will set us on a very perilous path. At the moment, we are heading for a global temperature increase of around 3°C by the end of the century. And the French State is already developing plans for adaptation to +4°C.
Don’t get us wrong, it’s not about figures or concepts, but about human lives, our common future. It is for this reason that Nina and other activists are constantly seeking to alert us peacefully.
At + 3 or + 4 ° C in France, we will live the summer of 2022 every year, with its heat waves, its droughts, its mega-fires, its extreme precipitation, its deaths. In August, one hundred French towns were temporarily deprived of drinking water. At + 3 or + 4°C on the planet, 3.5 billion people would find themselves in territories that have become uninhabitable. Water and food would run out, geopolitical tensions for resources could multiply and the armed conflicts that go with it. Our economies would be very seriously weakened and our living conditions irreparably deteriorated.
French cinema too shy
Therefore, the battle that is engaged is that of the habitability of our planet. In a way, and even if it is absurd to prioritize suffering and emergencies, it is the priority of the XXIe century. If the climate changes irreversibly, all the other problems will unfortunately seem trivial to us.
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