‘Fight Harder,’ U.N. Chief António Guterres Implores, Rousing Climate Ambassadors at COP31

Opening a climate summit that leaders from most industrialized nations chose to skip, António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, on Wednesday warned that the planet was on a “path to mutually assured destruction,” unable to wean itself from planet-warming fossil fuels and facing intensifying disasters. “Fossil fuel interests keep making a killing while killing our planet,” Mr. Guterres told world leaders gathering for the summit, known as COP31.

Mr. Guterres, who is in the final weeks of his term after leading the United Nations for a decade, urged nations to “end the addiction” to fossil fuels. His remarks sharpened the tensions for an event that often struggles to directly address the burning of fossil fuels, which is the root cause of climate change. He and others acknowledged the world has failed to meet the goal it established in the Paris agreement in 2015 to limit rising global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels.

That’s the threshold beyond which scientists say the dangers of global warming — including worsening floods, fiercer wildfires, droughts and ecosystem collapse — grow considerably. On Wednesday, leaders one by one insisted that despite rising levels of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere, it was possible, and critical, to get back on track. “Science is not telling us to surrender,” Mr. Guterres said. “It is telling us to fight harder.”

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, the host of the conference, warned, “With every minute that we fail to achieve the targets set out in the Paris agreement, the risks and costs we face continue to grow.” He blamed a “greedy mind set” of overconsumption for the failure. We are having trouble retrieving the article content. Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

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