David Attenborough may be 94 but the world-famous naturalist isn’t showing any signs of slowing down.
In fact, Sir David is busier than ever, convincing the world to take action on climate change.
Appearing on ABC’s 7.30, the British broadcaster and environmentalist told host Leigh Sales the global population was “heading for disaster”.
“More of us are living more comfortably than ever in history … Humanity by and large has taken what it wants from the natural world and taken its own construct, its own surroundings, which we tend to think of our world and now we are realising that it isn’t our world, actually, we don’t control as much as we think we do, and we are heading for disaster,” he said.
Attenborough was on the current affairs program to promote the release of his latest film, A Life On Our Planet, on Netflix from October 4.
Attenborough said the melting of the polar ice caps was the most pressing threat and admitted it was “anybody’s guess” what the consequences would be.
“For the first time now you can sail from the Pacific into the Atlantic and across the North Pole in the summer and before long it looks as though you are going to be able to do that the year round.
“If you are going to have all of those thousands of tonnes of freshwater in the icecaps, melting and going into the sea, rising the sea level, changing the salinity, changing the climate and the way the winds circulate around the world, you are interrupting and changing a fundamental rhythm that our world has lived with for centuries – millennia – and what the consequences will be is anybody’s guess.”
“To be blunt, messages like yours have so far failed – political leaders have failed to act decisively, the public is insufficiently motivated to force them to do so. Why do you think that is, and what‘s the answer?” Sales asked.
“We ourselves are concerned with what happens tomorrow, that what seems urgent and if someone says, ‘look a little farther down the road, oh, yes, we ought to be doing something about that’. Then, something else happens, and we need to deal with that tomorrow, and this problem has been delayed again, and yet again, and yet again, and if we deal with it tomorrow it will be too late.”
Attenborough also created an Instagram late last week to urge action on climate change, quickly gaining more than a million followers if his first few hours.
This article originally appeared on Over60.