Europe space chief warns over political wavering on climate
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Europe’s top space official has urged wavering politicians not to abandon European leadership in combating climate change, saying record heatwaves and vegetation fires provide “really alarming” evidence of the pace of global warming.
“It is clear that climate change is very visible and is really causing enormous changes to our planet,” Josef Aschbacher, director general of the European Space Agency and a leading expert on environmental observation, told Reuters.Greece, Italy, Spain and most recently Portugal have grappled with record-breaking temperatures and wildfires this summer.The World Meterological Organization said July had the highest global average temperature for any month on record.”This is really alarming,” Aschbacher said. “It just confirms that climate change is the biggest threat to our planet, to humankind, and will remain so for the next decades and we do need to do everything we can to mitigate the effects.”Until 2021, when he stepped up to run the 22-nation agency, Aschbacher ran ESA’s flagship Earth observation satellite activities including Copernicus, which the Paris-based agency says is the world’s largest environmental monitoring effort.
