Climate change is no longer a distant threat. The evidence of climate change is all around us.

Every day, new stories and scientific studies pour in documenting impacts of climate change we are already experiencing.

The message is clear: Climate change is not an abstract problem for the future.

Climate change is happening now and we are causing it. We are living with the reality of it, right here and right now.

Its effects are spinning out every single day across the planet. The impacts are wide-ranging, and increasingly intruding upon all aspects of our lives –

from increasing extreme weather events to rising sea levels that threaten densely populated coasts to the increasing instability of food and water supplies to our suffering health.

Hundreds of thousands of people are already dying from climate-related deaths each year. And it is not just people that are being hurt. Millions of species around the globe are seeing their world dramatically altered for the worse.

Climate change poses the greatest threat in human history to the natural systems that sustain life on Earth, and the crisis is only deepening.

Thank you, Mr. Secretary General, your excellencies, ladies and gentleman, and distinguished guests.

I am honored to be here today. I stand before you not as an expert but as a concerned citizen, one of the 400,000 people who marched in the streets of New York on Sunday, and the billions of others around the World who want to solve our climate crisis.

As an actor I pretend for a living. I play fictitious characters often solving fictitious problems.

I believe humankind has looked at climate change in that same way: as if it were a fiction, happening to someone else’s planet, as if pretending that climate change was not real, would somehow make it go away. But I think we all know better than that now.

Every week, we are seeing new and undeniable climate events, evidence that accelerated climate change is here now. We know that droughts are intensifying, our oceans are warming and acidifying, with methane plumes rising up from beneath the ocean floor. We are seeing extreme weather events, increased temperatures, and the West Antarctic and Greenland ice-sheets melting at unprecedented rates, decades ahead of scientific projections.

None of this is rhetoric, and none of it is hysteria. It is fact. The scientific community knows it, industry and governments know it, even the United States military knows it. The chief of the US navy’s Pacific command, admiral Samuel Locklear, recently said that climate change is our single greatest security threat.

My friends, this body – perhaps more than any other gathering in human history – now faces that difficult but achievable task. You can make history … or be vilified by it.

To be clear, this is not about just telling people to change their light bulbs or to buy a hybrid car. This disaster has grown beyond the choices that individuals make. This is now about our industries, and our governments around the World taking decisive, large-scale action.

Now is our moment for action.

We need to put a pricetag on carbon emissions, and eliminate government subsidies for coal, gas, and oil companies. We need to end the free ride that industrial polluters have been given in the name of a free-market economy, they do not deserve our tax dollars, they deserve our scrutiny. For the economy itself will die if our ecosystems collapse.

The good news is that renewable energy is not only achievable but good economic policy. New research shows that by 2050 clean, renewable energy could supply 100% of the World’s energy needs using existing technologies, and it would create millions of jobs.

This is not a partisan debate; it is a Human one. Clean air and water, and a livable climate are inalienable human rights. And solving this crisis is not a question of politics. It is a question of our own survival.

This is the most urgent of times, and the most urgent of messages.

Honoured delegates, leaders of the World, I pretend for a living. But you do not. The people made their voices heard on Sunday around the World and the momentum will not stop. And now it is your turn, the time to answer the greatest challenge of our existence on this planet … is now.

I beg you to face it with courage. And honesty.

Thank you.