'On highway to hell...': UN chief's scary warning at CoP27 climate change meet

More than 100 world leaders will speak over the next few days to try deal with a worsening problem that scientists’ call Earth’s biggest challenge.

The only way to “put an end to all this suffering” from “a highway to climate hell” is for the world to cooperate or perish, dozens of leaders were admonished as they gathered Monday for international climate talks.

“The planet has become a world of suffering ... is it not high time to put an end to all this suffering," Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, the summit host, told his fellow leaders. (Shutterstock)

More than 100 world leaders will speak over the next few days to try deal with a worsening problem that scientists’ call Earth’s biggest challenge. Nearly 50 heads of states or governments started to take the stage Monday in the first day of “high-level” talks at this year’s annual U.N. climate conference, known as COP27, with more to come in the following days.

Much of the focus will be on national leaders telling their stories of being devastated by climate disasters, culminating Tuesday with a speech by Pakistan Prime Minister Muhammad Sharif, whose country’s summer floods caused at least $40 billion in damage and displaced millions of people.

“The planet has become a world of suffering ... is it not high time to put an end to all this suffering," Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, the summit host, told his fellow leaders. “Climate change will never stop without our intervention... Our time here is limited and we must use every second that we have.’’

El-Sisi, who called for an end to the Russia-Ukraine war, was gentle compared to a fiery United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who said the world “is on a highway to climate hell.”

He called for a new pact between rich and poor countries to work closer together, with financial help and phasing out of coal in rich nations by 2030 and elsewhere by 2040. He called on the United States and China — the two biggest producers of climate-changing emissions — to especially work together on climate, something they used to do until the last few years.

“Humanity has a choice: cooperate or perish,” Guterres said. “It is either a Climate Solidarity Pact – or a Collective Suicide Pact.”

The fire and brimstone may not quite have the effect as they have had in past meetings.