Kerry: Climate Deniers Think Water from Melting Ice Caps ‘Will Spill over Sides of Flat Earth’

"So we gather this week in Paris, knowing that the Conference of the Parties, this Conference of the Parties, may be the best chance we have to correct the course of our planet. And we gather to chart a new path – a sustainable path – to prevent the worst, most devastating consequences of climate change from ever happening.

The stakes, I know, are not lost on any of you sitting here – that’s why you’re here in the first place. The fact is that climate change affects every human, in every country, on our planet. And if any challenge requires global cooperation and effective diplomacy, this is it. And no one is more aware of this than the COP community – you, the men and women who for years have been sitting at the negotiating tables, organizing side events and demonstrations, and advocating for effective action, and reporting on the negotiations and helping the rest of the world to know what is happening and what is not happening.

Now, I know there are still a few who insist that climate change is one big hoax – even a political conspiracy. My friends, these people are so out of touch with science that they believe rising sea levels don’t matter, because in their view, the extra water is just going to spill out over the sides of a flat Earth. They’re wrong, obviously.

For the benefit of those who may still question the 97 percent of peer-reviewed studies on climate change, let me just underscore: You don’t need to be a scientist to know that the Earth is round; that the Sun rises in the east and sets in the west; and that gravity is the reason that objects fall to the ground. You can pick a hundred different examples of simple things that happen every day that reflect science and determinations of science. And you don’t need to be a scientist, as some assert, to see that our planet is already changing in real, measurable, and alarming ways.

Consider: The past decade, the hottest on record; the one before that, the second hottest on record; the one before that, the third hottest on record.

Nineteen of the twenty warmest years in history have occurred in the past two decades. And this year is on track to be the warmest of all – including last July, which was the hottest month ever recorded.

And in my travels as Secretary of State, let me tell you, I have seen firsthand what this means. I visited the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, where flooding is threatening the rice paddies that have sustained the region economically and physically for centuries. When I was younger, I served there in a battle between two ways of life – and today, ironically, the battle is between life itself and the full force of nature.

Earlier this year President Obama and I traveled to Alaska, which is also on the front line of this struggle. I met with Alaska natives who have been forced to uproot their communities in search of safer ground. President Obama walked to and stood at the base of a glacier that has receded a mile and a quarter since 1815, and 187 feet last year alone.

In recent years, what we used to think of as extreme weather has become the new normal. It’s hard to even turn on the news without hearing about a particularly devastating storm, a drought, a flood, or a wildfire. And some of those storms are storms that we used to experience once every 500 years. Now they’ve become once every 25 years or even more frequently. In November, the city of Chennai in India experienced the rainiest month in its history. Nearly 300 people died as a result of those floods, 18 who perished after a generator – a generator at a hospital flooded and damaged the facility’s oxygen supply. So let me just make it clear the United States stands with our Indian friends and we have extended support and assistance to help address the devastating impact of these floods.

But sadly, record-breaking events like these aren’t confined to one country or to one region. They’re happening everywhere. And taken together, they are warning signs that no rational person should ignore. What’s really disturbing is that this is exactly what the scientists told us would happen. The science has been warning us for decades, screaming at us. And we know also that if we just continue down the current path with too many people sitting on their hands, waiting for someone else to take the responsibility, guess what? The damage is going to increase exponentially.

So, to cut to the chase, unless the global community takes bold steps now to transition away from a high-carbon economy, we are facing unthinkable harm to our habitat, our infrastructure, our food production, our water supplies, and potentially to life itself. Make no mistake. If a global community cannot come together and refuses to rise to this challenge, if we continue to allow calculated obstruction to derail the urgency of this moment, we will be liable for a collective moral failure of historic consequence. And we are not just responsible to ourselves; we are responsible to the future, and our kids and our grandkids will surely ask how we, together, could possibly have been so blind, so ideological, and even so dysfunctional that we fail to act on facts that were confirmed by so many scientists in so many studies over such a long period of time, and documented by so much evidence.

My friends, we would have no excuse at all, no excuse at all. And that is why we have to act within the next 36 to 48 hours."