COMEDIAN, UN CHIEF TALK SUICIDE AMID CLIMATE WOES

LONDON—“Shall we all just kill ourselves?”

It was an odd title for a comedy night, but British stand-up Carl Donnelly turned out to have chosen an environmental theme with impeccable timing.

With temperature records broken daily in last week’s European heat wave, a crowd in an east London bar seemed primed to appreciate his darkly humorous riffs on the threat posed by climate change.

That foretaste of a radically hotter world underscored what is at stake in a decisive phase of talks to implement the 2015 Paris Agreement, a collective shot at avoiding climate breakdown.

With studies showing climate impacts, from extreme weather to polar melt and sea level rise outstripping initial forecasts, negotiators have a fast-closing window to try to turn the aspirations agreed in Paris into meaningful outcomes.

“There’s so much on the line in the next 18 months or so,” said Sue Reid, vice president of climate and energy at Ceres, a US nonprofit group that works to steer companies and investors onto a more sustainable path.

Suicidal

In October, the UN-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned emissions must start falling next year at the latest to stand a chance of achieving the deal’s goal of holding the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

With emissions currently on track to push temperatures more than three degrees higher, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres is working to wrest bigger commitments from governments ahead of a summit in New York in September.

Guterres said failing to cut emissions would be “suicidal.”