Message to Angela Merkel: Europe can save the world.

But Germany and France must take the lead.Juraj Mesiacutek is the climate and energy advisor to the Slovak Foreign Policy AssociationIt is extremely difficult for the common people of Europe to be heard by a top European leader.

Even more so for those who, like half of all Europeans, come from the smaller EU member states. Occasional visits by major leaders to their countries provide at least a glimmer of an opportunity to be heard.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel will visit Slovakia on February 7. The issues the Slovak, Czech, Hungarian and Polish politicians will bring to the table will focus on local agendas and desires.

Such is the nature of provincial politics and the short-term perspectives of our current democracies.If things were different, the Visegrad leaders would instead ask Angela Merkel to push for and head the slow European Union towards a leadership role in what is probably the most important task of this generation.

To save the world's climate and with it our civilisation. No one else in the world can do it, only Europe.

But Europe can only do so with determined German and French leadership.The world needs your leadershipThese two countries once gave us Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur, the men who saved the world from the plague of infectious diseases.

Today, the world needs Germany and France to provide leadership in averting our path towards self-destruction.Back in 1995, when Berlin hosted the first of the 24 annual global conferences on climate change that have taken place to date, atmospheric CO2 concentration was 360 ppm.

Today, it is 410 ppm and rising.These numbers clearly do not ring a warning bell in Brussels, Berlin, Paris, Warsaw, or in Bratislava, but they are unprecedented in the geological history of the Earth.

Masses of students and children on the streets of German, French, Dutch and Belgian towns demanding action on climate change seem to understand the danger. Does Angela Merkel?As a trained physicist you certainly could.

The Global Warming 1.5 degC report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in October 2018 concluded that to keep temperature rises below 2degC, humankind must reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 45 percent by 2030, compared to 2010. This is totally unrealistic without a massive and urgent effort that exceeds by orders of magnitude such projects as Manhattan, Apollo and the Marshall Plan, projects which saved democracy for the world, put the first people...