French press review 9 September 2017

The battle for climate change - is anyone listening to the message delivered by the trail of death and destruction left by Hurricane Irna?

The big issue monopolizing the attention of the commentators is climate change, in the wake of the trail of death and destruction acorss the Caribbean left bvy Hurricane Irma.

The papers quote experts at the US National Hurricane Center as saying that Irma had maximum sustained winds of 260 kilometers per hour and was moving west at 20 kilometers per hour, also posing an increasing threat to the US state of Florida.

Le Parisien keeps a head count of the dead in the French Island of Saint Martin now revised at ten with 7 residents still missing.

The paper says the tourist resorts of Saint Martin and near-by Saint Bathelemy which have been on red alert since Irna struck probably avoided the worse as another Hurricane Réné about to make landfall downgraded to a category 4 storm.

Le Parisien also reports that while the authorities in the French islands struggle to restore wate and electricity supplies, they are facing another problem, namely looters operating in the dark, and stealing from shops and private homes.

"Nightmarish episodes like Hurricane Irna ought to serve as a wakeup call", argues Le Figaro. According to the conservative publication rich and powerful nations can no longer exclude themselves from addressing the climate emergency as Hurricanes know no frontiers.

In an editorial Le Monde argues that since the election of a climate skeptic like Donald Trump as US president, global warming has become an open wound for the American people.

For La République des Pyrénées, watching Donald Trump continue “climate negativism” is like rubbing salt in the American wound, at a time pro-climate change activists have multiplied their campaign for action against the ecological disasters that have hit the United States between the 2012 and 2016.

The paper notes that it is double the number of catastrophes experienced by the United States in a quarter of a century.

Such strong indicators call for deep changes in the in-put matrices warns the regional publication.

This, it explains, probably justifies why French President Emmanuel Macron has invited his peers to a new Climate summit in Paris scheduled on December 12.

L'Est républicain holds that two years after the Paris Accords, the global battle against climate change is camping in an impasse as such grand solemn rituals bringing together the powerful of the Planet sound more like loud incantations in a vacuum.

Les Dernières Nouvelles d'Alsace regrets the timidity of the evaluation social consequences of climate disasters, despite the naming by the Davos Forum of global warming as the greatest threat to the stability of the Planet.

According to Le Télégramme high ocean temperatures are clearly a proven aggravating factor to cyclonic activity even if some sceptics continue to deny.

For the publication, the notion that the equilibrium of terrestrial atmosphere which enables us to live in acceptable conditions will remain fragile whatever man does, is to the role of a sorcerer’s apprentice without a possibility of a U-turn.

Le Républicain Lorrain blames it on the absence of someone capable of conjuring a devine will, in a profit-minded world inhabited by malignant leaders and reckless people.

The paper wonders who they will blame in one, ten or a hundred centuries if the Planet breaks up throwing out diabolic artefacts never produced by mankind.