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RIO DE JANEIRO- Disasters are the new midwives of history. But in order to play this role, they need to be catastrophic, like the accidents in Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011 that led governments to suspend and even abolish their nuclear energy programs.

To spur real action on climate change, a disaster would have to be serious enough to change people’s minds, but not so great as to be uncontrollable, according to Martin Lees, Rector Emeritus of the United Nations University for Peace,

“Urgent and deep cuts” in greenhouse gas emissions are needed to curb global warming and its impacts, stresses the statement “Action to Face the Urgent Realities of Climate Change”, presented at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) by the Climate Change Task Force (CCTF).

The CCTF was convened in 2009 by former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev (1985-1991) and is made up by 20 former world leaders, climate scientists and experts, including Lees.

Emissions are currently rising at a rate above the worst case scenario foreseen by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which projected an “intolerable” increase in global average temperature of over six degrees by 2100.

However, IPCC scientists are probably “underestimating the pace and intensity of climate change” due to caution and the complexities of peer review, warns the CCTF statement.

Despite these warnings, the issue of climate change was barely addressed at Rio+20, held in Rio de Janeiro 20 years after the Earth Summit hosted by the same city. The outcomes of the 1992 summit included international conventions on climate change, biodiversity and desertification.