The earth is terminally ill and unless the world takes drastic action to reduce carbon emissions, the planet will die, according to a new United Nations’ report. The report says that lack of political will is the primary obstacle to action.

Former Secretary of State John Kerry, a Democrat, and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, have launched a campaign to try to breach the partisan wall that has stalled climate action in Congress and elsewhere.

They just launched World War Zero, a bipartisan group, to try to get the public into the fight. The “zero” in the name refers to stopping carbon emissions from fossil fuels to limit global warming.

The war can’t begin too soon.

According to the U.N. report, overwhelming scientific data show that next year could be a point of no return in which the absence of any remedy for climate change dooms the earth to ever-rising temperatures that will ravage cities and lands.

The two veteran political hands are banking on the fact that climate change isn’t invisible anymore. Large numbers of Americans have noticed its effects.

A new poll by the Pew Center found that 62 percent said climate change is having at least some effect on their local community. The effects include long periods of unusually hot weather, severe floods or intense storms, harm to wildlife and their habitats, damage to forests and plant life, droughts and water shortages, more frequent wildfires and rising sea levels that erode shorelines.

This realization, highest among young people, could push climate change from an asterisk in the list of priorities of both major parties. In the 2016 elections, climate change was a mere asterisk.

During last month’s Democratic presidential debate, it warranted only a single question from moderators. Over five debates, it ranked eighth in the amount of speaking time candidates devoted to it, way behind health care, foreign policy and immigration.

Politicians in both parties need to wake up and smell the ozone. Voters need to raise the alarm to a level that even the nearly deaf among them can hear.

Young climate protesters stormed the field at last month’s Harvard-Yale football game and stopped it from resuming for about an hour. Young people filed two lawsuits that are working their way through the courts in Oregon and Washington alleging that elected officials failed to protect the public interest from the climate crisis.

World War Zero is no joke. Every American should enlist and make climate change the No. 1 issue at the polls next November.

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