Action against climate change must go on - even without US

UNTIL the US presidential elections in November, it seemed that the groundswell for global action against climate change was finally gaining major traction.

Last year, nearly 200 countries signed the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to under two degrees Celsius. The recent United Nations climate change conference in Morocco saw governments set 2018 as their deadline to finalise details needed to fully implement the Paris Agreement. Now, environmentalists have suffered a blow with the accession of climate sceptic Donald Trump as US president-elect. He boasts the dubious distinction of being the only global leader who does not believe that human actions caused global warming. In 2012, he charged that climate change was a hoax created by the Chinese; and in his presidential campaign, asserted that he would "cancel" the Paris Agreement.

To date, his choices of his transition team and nominees for major agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) do not inspire confidence. He appears to have assembled a team of fellow sceptics who question the science behind climate change and are likely to loosen environmental regulations that are seen to stifle investments and US competitiveness. His EPA nominee Scott Pruitt, for instance, has sought to lift constraints on the fossil fuel industry and has unsuccessfully sued the EPA to block measures to reduce smog and curb toxic emissions from power plants. All these are in defiance of scientific consensus. A review of scientific journals has found that 97 per cent of actively publishing scientists agree that climate warming trends over the past century are "extremely likely due to human activities".