The phrase made scientists jump. During his speech on December 31, Emmanuel Macron surprised, seeming to discover the extent of global warming.
“Who would have imagined at this moment [il y a un an, le 31 décembre 2021] that, thinking of getting out of a planetary epidemic with great difficulty, we would have to face in a few weeks, unimaginable challenges: [….] [tels que] the climate crisis with spectacular effects again this summer in our country? “, thus launched the president during his wishes to the French.
FAKE OFF
Several scientists recalled that the works warning about global warming and its consequences are old. “The Giec had warned for thirty years”, reacted like this Christophe Cassou, climatologist and one of the authors of the sixth IPCC report. Since 1990, this group of experts has published authoritative reports on global warming, its causes and its evolution. In May 2021, the World Meteorological Organization said there was a “90%” chance that at least one of the next five years would exceed 2016, the hottest year on record.
On Saturday evening, Emmanuel Macron also congratulated himself on having “taken the decisions to more than halve our greenhouse gas emissions by 2030” while France chaired the Council of the European Union between January and June 2022. While the President made a shortcut here by attributing to France the success of exchanges involving several EU players, he did not specify how this objective, which is more ambitious than the low carbon strategy adopted by the France, would be reached. The High Council for the Climate had called last year for a “jolt”, because “major risks of not achieving the objectives set by France for the reduction of greenhouse gases persist”.
During his speech, the President returned to the war in Ukraine, again arguing that the Russian invasion was difficult to envisage at the end of 2021. The tension was however already high at this time On November 20, Kyrylo Boudanov , the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, said Russia had amassed 92,000 troops on Ukraine’s borders and the country was planning an attack for late January or early February.
At the end of November, the Secretary General of NATO also warned of a concentration of Russian troops on the border, while the United States multiplied warnings during the last months of the year. Emmanuel Macron himself, in November, expressed to Vladimir Putin his “deep concern about the developments in the Ukrainian situation” and encouraged him to lower tensions, which had already risen in the spring of 2021 with Russian troop movements. near Ukraine.