Youth action could save the world from climate dangers

The students have done their homework. They understand the causes and risks of climate change

SKOLSTREJK FÖR KLIMATET

That is what it said in black ink on the placard that Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old Swede, held when she first sat outside the country’s parliament on a Friday last August. It means ‘School Strike for Climate’.

Thunberg was sitting in protest, demanding her country’s politicians act against climate change and bring the country in line with the Paris Agreement goals and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Since then, she has missed school almost every Friday and held the same placard, sitting in front of the Swedish parliament. This was the start of the ‘Fridays for Future’ movement. On March 15, last Friday, school children from over 2,000 locations in 120+ countries around the world signed up to join her protest, including hundreds of students in over 50 locations in India.

What started as a one-person strike had turned into a global demonstration of more than one million young people, making it the biggest single day of climate action ever. There were participants from a meteorological observatory called

Neumayer Station

III in Antarctica and from a small town called Longyearbyen in Svalbard in the Arctic.

The turnout was breathtaking.

Global temperature records maintained by multiple research institutes, including NASA and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, show that the world’s average surface temperature has already increased by slightly more than 1° C relative to pre-industrial levels. It is also rising by about 0.2°C per decade.

Climate scientists a unequivocally agree that this is due to human activities emitting more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. They trap heat and increases the planet’s temperature. There is enough evidence now to show that rising temperatures are causing increasingly frequent and more intense heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, floods and other extreme weather events around the world. All of that will take a heavy toll on natural ecosystems and human settlements alike.

Unless we take drastic measures, the situation will only get worse. Current climate models predict that, during the 21st century, the world’s average surface temperature will rise by 1.8-4° C if we continue with business as usual. The students have done their homework. They understand the causes and risks of unabated climate change and the human disruption of ecosystems.

Through their schoolstrike, the students are demanding that their governments wake up to the climate crisis and take action. They are also asking adults around the world to join their movement and raise their voices. We are already seeing the effects of the ‘Fridays for Future’ demonstrations around Europe and the US.

Shortly before the March 15 global strike, Peter Kalmus, Kate Marvel, Michael Mann, Katharine Hayhoe and Kim Cobb – all prominent climate scientists – wrote an open letter declaring their support to the student strike. They wrote: Students’ demands for bold, urgent action are fully supported by the best available science. They need our support, but more than that, they need all of us to act. Their future depends on it; and so does ours. The letter was signed by 240+ other climate scientists.

After the global strike, António Guterres, the UN secretary general, wrote in The Guardian: My generation has failed to respond properly to the dramatic challenge of climate change. … Despite years of talk, global emissions are reaching record levels and show no sign of peaking. The concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is the highest it has been in (three million) years.

It’s possible that this is the social tipping point that the world needs to deal with the effects of climate change. It is only just that the children of the world are leading the way for their adults. Many of them know that they will be 18 soon and eligible to vote, so their protest is also a notice to the government, demanding that sustainable growth be put on – and kept – on the agenda.

“This (protest) will be continued until the government acts on (climate change),” the protesting students pledged. “One Friday of every month.”

The best thing adults could do right now is to educate themselves on climate breakdown.

—thewire.in

Pushp Bajaj recently completed his PhD at the University of California, San Diego. Siddhant Arya is a writer focusing on the science and impact of climate change