Editor's Note: (Emma Thompson is a writer and actor from the UK. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion at CNN. Tune in for the CNN Democratic Presidential Candidate Town Hall: Climate Crisis, Wednesday, 5 PM to midnight. )
(CNN) We have weaponized our planet.
All over the world life forms are experiencing weather that attacks rather than sustains.
Unseasonal heat that kills, rain that instead of sweetening, inundates and destroys, hurricanes that devastate.
This is climate change.
We are in it. It is all around us and set to get worse.
Everything depends on what we do now.
Half of the man-made CO2 in the atmosphere was emitted in the last few decades -- after scientists, governments and oil companies all knew where fossil fuels were taking us. Since Al Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth," we have produced more emissions than ever before.
Warnings from scientists have gone unheeded by those who have the power to change course.
Billions have been spent on misinforming the public and on lying about the truth of our situation. Why? In order to protect the interests of the few who gain from the exploitation of the planet's resources.
Now, after the five hottest years on record, as the Amazon burns and Greenland melts, the world is waking up to the fierce urgency of the climate emergency we have created.
Again, everything depends upon what we do now.
Incremental change is not enough.
Personal commitments, whilst vital, are not enough. We need to come together, talk to each other about our fears, and then act, and act collectively.
This is what climate change looks like
An iceberg floats in a fjord near the town of Tasiilaq, Greenland, in June 2018. Greenland is often considered by scientists to be
ground zero of the Earth's climate change. The massive island is mostly in the Arctic, which is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. Melting ice from Greenland's ice sheet is the largest contributor of all land sources to the rising sea levels that could become catastrophic for coastal cities around the world. "Seeing the size of these icebergs in the water was like looking at entire city blocks floating around," Reuters photographer
Lucas Jackson said.
A neighborhood is flooded in Beaumont, Texas, a day after
Hurricane Harvey came ashore in August 2017. The Category 4 storm caused historic flooding. It set a record for the most rainfall from a tropical cyclone in the continental United States, with 51 inches of rain recorded in areas of Texas. An estimated 27 trillion gallons of water fell over Texas and Louisiana during a six-day period. "Warmer sea water from our changing climate is causing tropical storms to be more wet and powerful," photographer
George Steinmetz said.
Peia Kararaua, 16, swims in a flooded area of Kiribati's Aberao village. Kiribati is one of the countries most affected by sea-level rise, photographer
Vlad Sokhin said. During high tides many villages become inundated, making large parts of them uninhabitable. This photo was taken in an area that, when dry, is a soccer field. "Prior to this, a man moved his vehicle from the lower part of the field to the higher point, and the vehicle ended up being parked on an 'island' when the water came," Sokhin said. "Young people started swimming there and playing when I took this shot. It was strange to see such a scene: happy kids swimming along the remains of the dead palm trees."
A woman walks through a cactus field in a drought-stricken area of western Somaliland, a breakaway state from Somalia. "In 2016 I came across a group of women washing their clothes in a roadside puddle — the only water they could find," photographer
Nichole Sobecki said. "We spoke for a while of the challenges they faced, of the animals they'd lost in the drought, and the wells that had dried up. Somalia has long been a place of extremes, but climate and environmental changes are compounding those problems and leading to the end of a way of life."
Jorgen Umaq and his dogs traverse an icy area near Qaanaaq in northern Greenland. It is one of the northernmost towns in the world. Because ice thickness there has been declining, hunters like Umaq can't travel as far as they could before, said photographer
Anna Filipova. "Navigating this terrain was dangerous and difficult," she said. "We needed to manually move the sledge and twice needed to rescue the dogs who had fallen into the cracks in the sea. ... Each year, people lose their lives on the sea ice because of fast-changing conditions."
Bangladesh was recently ranked by research firm Maplecroft as the country
most vulnerable to climate change, due to its exposure to threats such as flooding, rising sea levels, cyclones and landslides as well as its susceptible population and weak institutional capacity to address the problem. This aerial photo, taken by
Ignacio Marin, shows where some homes used to be before the river washed them away. "From where I was standing, at the riverbank, it was hard to imagine that there were nine houses where I could only see water," Marin said. "So I decided to fly the drone. Only then, watching the area from above, I realized the scale of the disaster."
Sheep graze in the dry, dusty fields of Farmersville, California. "This image was made in 2014 while working on a short film about the ongoing drought in California," photographer
Ed Kashi said. "Tens of thousands of acres of arable land was turning to dust, massive orchards were being ripped out due to a lack of irrigation water, and farmers and ranchers who for generations had worked this land were wondering if their way of life was sustainable." Intense droughts like the one that plagued California this decade are
becoming more likely due to global warming.
Oil refineries are seen in Carson, California, in this 2017 photo taken by
Edward Burtynsky for The Anthropocene Project, which explores how humans have contributed to climate change and the state the planet is in today. Part of
the project includes a film, "Anthropocene: The Human Epoch," that opens September 25 in 100 theaters across the United States.
Two people are seen at an ice cave entrance on the Rhone Glacier in the Swiss Alps. Every summer, the glacier is covered with huge sheets of white fleece blankets to slow down its melting, according to photographer
Orjan F. Ellingvag. "The fleece-covered cave attracts more and more tourists worried about global warming and wanting to see the remnants of a dying glacier," Ellingvag said.
A wildfire burns in Tocantínia, Brazil, in September 2018. In the Cerrado region, wildfires are common for two reasons, said photographer
Marcio Pimenta. One is extreme heat. The other is farmers clearing space for soybeans and livestock.
This aerial photo shows Ejit, an islet in the Marshall Islands, in 2015. The islands are threatened by rising seas. "I flew a drone above the island showing just how precarious its location is: Homes clinging to the edge of an eroding coastline as unrelenting waves chisel away at what remains," said
Josh Haner, a photographer with The New York Times. "After I saw what was happening on Ejit, I realized that climate change is not something nebulous that will only start affecting us in the future, but rather something happening right now. Residents are being forced to make the most difficult decision: Do they stay and build sea walls to buy some more time, or do they relocate?"
Big government and corporate power have to be harnessed. The US and China, the two most powerful nations and the ones that cause the most damage through their emissions, can lead the way. They will have to cooperate. This is a new politics -- a system-change for nothing less than the survival of the planet and all life forms that exist upon it.
We are a planet-changing species, and that ability to control our environment can be used for good. It can replace the engines of pollution with clean machines and systems that can share our world with wildlife and wilderness.
We can use the power of the wind, the waves and the sun. Remember, no one ever fought a war over the wind. We can plant many more trees. Millions of them.
We can be smart and sensitive with the choices we make including for our food and the packaging we wrap it in. If we use more renewable energy, eat less meat and insulate our homes we can lighten our footprint on planet Earth.
We can begin to live with nature rather than declare war on it.
By doing that we will be healthier and happier.
Fifty years ago, before only a few knew what was going on in our atmosphere, we had already left it behind to leave our footprints on the moon. That's what we're capable of.
But we only have one home, one place in the universe that can sustain human life, and it's the Earth.
We wrote this story, and we are in charge of how it turns out.
Everything depends upon what we do now.