 Storm collapses roof over famed Aztec temple in Mexico Mexico City (AFP) April 29, 2021 - A roof over Mexico City's Templo Mayor has partially collapsed in a hailstorm, causing minor damage to the capital's most important Aztec temple, officials said Thursday. The metal and acrylic roof over part of the site came crashing down on Wednesday night, just a day after the city's archaeological zone reopened from pandemic closures. "Despite the spectacular nature of the accident, the damage to the archaeological heritage is not great," said Leonardo Lopez Lujan, director of the Templo Mayor Project. The culture ministry said that in addition to the roof structure, the perimeter fence was damaged. "The impact on pre-Hispanic structures is minor, recoverable and restorable and specialists will take care of this," the ministry said in a statement. President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador told reporters that experts were assessing the damage and a new roof was expected to be installed over the ruins. A security guard suffered minor injuries in the collapse, authorities said. Built and rebuilt throughout the 14th and 15th centuries, Templo Mayor was the sacred heart of the Aztec capital and believed to be the site of many human sacrifices. The vast religious building was destroyed when the Spanish conquistadors razed Tenochtitlan in 1521 and built a colonial city on top of it. Archaeologists first uncovered the temple ruins in 1914, but they were not excavated in earnest until the 1970s. The historic center of Mexico City was named a UNESCO heritage site in 1987.
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The failure to halt climate change, the destruction of nature and other intertwined global crises poses an existential risk to humanity, ten Nobel laureates said Thursday following the first-ever Nobel Prize Summit.
Only profound changes in the way society produces, distributes and consumes almost everything -- starting with energy -- can forestall potentially catastrophic changes, they said in a joint statement, also signed by 20 other top thinkers.
"We need to reinvent our relationship with planet Earth," the statement said. "Without transformational action this decade, humanity is taking colossal risks with our common future."
The risks of pandemics, they noted, are now greater due to destruction of natural habitats, highly networked societies, and the spread of fake news on social networks.
The Nobel winners said societies must repair and restore the "global commons" that have allowed our species to flourish -- the climate, ice, land, ocean, freshwater, forests, soils, and rich diversity of life that regulate the state of the planet.
"There is now an existential need to build economies and societies that support Earth system harmony rather than disrupt it," they warned.
"The next decade is crucial: global greenhouse gas emissions need to be cut by half and destruction of nature halted and reversed."
The amount of CO2 humanity can emit and still cap global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius -- our "carbon budget" -- will be exhausted before 2030, scientists have calculated.
Earth's average global temperature has already gone up 1.2C compared to preindustrial levels.
At the same time, energy needs are increasing: every week until 2050 Earth's urban population will increase by about 1.3 million.
The Nobel signatories included economists Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University and Oliver Hart from Harvard, biophysicists William Moerner from Stanford and Jacques Dubochet of Lausanne University, and astrophysicist Brian Schmidt of the Australian National University.
- 'Last generation that can act' -
There is no Nobel Prize for environmental or Earth science.
"What we are doing amounts to an uncontrolled experiment on Earth's life-support system," said Earth system scientist Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and a signatory of the statement.
"We are the last generation with a reasonable chance of retaining long-term stability of critical parts of the Earth system."
The planet has sent up one red flag after another of a climate system teetering on the edge of dangerous tipping points, the statement said.
Parts of the Antarctic ice sheet may have already crossed irreversible melting thresholds, and the circulation of North Atlantic currents that ensure temperate winters in Europe has slowed.
Rainforests, permafrost and coral reefs are similarly approaching tipping points.
Widening inequality and distortions in the distribution of information have also reached the level of global crises, the Nobels cautioned.
"These supranational crises are interlinked and threaten the enormous gains we have made in human progress," they wrote.
Humanity is only now "waking up late" to these challenges but still has time to act, the statement said, outlining seven critical areas.
Biologists Linda Buck at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and Elizabeth H. Blackburn from the University of California at San Francisco, along with virologist Charles Rice from The Rockefeller University, also signed.
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