Greta Thunberg condemns world leaders in emotional speech at UN
Thunberg, 16, says governments have betrayed young people
‘You are not mature enough to tell it like it is. You are failing us’
Greta Thunberg to world leaders: 'How dare you? You have stolen my dreams and my childhood' -
This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be standing here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to me for hope? How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!
For more than 30 years the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away, and come here saying that you are doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.
With today’s emissions levels, our remaining CO2 budget will be gone in less than 8.5 years
You say you “hear” us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I don’t want to believe that. Because if you fully understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And I refuse to believe that.
The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5C degrees, and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control.
Maybe 50% is acceptable to you. But those numbers don’t include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of justice and equity. They also rely on my and my children’s generation sucking hundreds of billions of tonnes of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist. So a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us – we who have to live with the consequences.
To have a 67% chance of staying below a 1.5C global temperature rise – the best odds given by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the world had 420 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide left to emit back on 1 January 2018. Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatonnes.
How dare you pretend that this can be solved with business-as-usual and some technical solutions. With today’s emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone in less than eight and a half years.
There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures today. Because these numbers are too uncomfortable.
And you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.
You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us I say we will never forgive you. We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line.
The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.
Greta Thunberg, a Swedish climate activist, has told world leaders: 'I don't want you to be hopeful, I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day and then I want you to act.' In an impassioned warning to act now on climate change, Thunberg told her audience at Davos: 'Either we choose to go on as a civilisation or we don't'
'I want you to panic': 16-year-old issues climate warning at Davos – video
Our house is on fire. I am here to say, our house is on fire.
According to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), we are less than 12 years away from not being able to undo our mistakes. In that time, unprecedented changes in all aspects of society need to have taken place, including a reduction of our CO2 emissions by at least 50%.
And please note that those numbers do not include the aspect of equity, which is absolutely necessary to make the Paris agreement work on a global scale. Nor does it include tipping points or feedback loops like the extremely powerful methane gas released from the thawing Arctic permafrost.
But Homo sapiens have not yet failed.At places like Davos, people like to tell success stories. But their financial success has come with an unthinkable price tag. And on climate change, we have to acknowledge we have failed. All political movements in their present form have done so, and the media has failed to create broad public awareness.
Yes, we are failing, but there is still time to turn everything around. We can still fix this. We still have everything in our own hands. But unless we recognise the overall failures of our current systems, we most probably don't stand a chance.
We are facing a disaster of unspoken sufferings for enormous amounts of people. And now is not the time for speaking politely or focusing on what we can or cannot say. Now is the time to speak clearly.
Solving the climate crisis is the greatest and most complex challenge that Homo sapiens have ever faced. The main solution, however, is so simple that even a small child can understand it. We have to stop our emissions of greenhouse gases.
Either we do that or we don't.
You say nothing in life is black or white. But that is a lie. A very dangerous lie. Either we prevent 1.5C of warming or we don't. Either we avoid setting off that irreversible chain reaction beyond human control or we don't.
Either we choose to go on as a civilisation or we don't. That is as black or white as it gets. There are no grey areas when it comes to survival.
We all have a choice. We can create transformational action that will safeguard the living conditions for future generations. Or we can continue with our business as usual and fail.
That is up to you and me.
Some say we should not engage in activism. Instead we should leave everything to our politicians and just vote for a change instead. But what do we do when there is no political will? What do we do when the politics needed are nowhere in sight?
Here in Davos – just like everywhere else – everyone is talking about money. It seems money and growth are our only main concerns.
And since the climate crisis has never once been treated as a crisis, people are simply not aware of the full consequences on our everyday life. People are not aware that there is such a thing as a carbon budget, and just how incredibly small that remaining carbon budget is. That needs to change today.
No other current challenge can match the importance of establishing a wide, public awareness and understanding of our rapidly disappearing carbon budget, that should and must become our new global currency and the very heart of our future and We are at a time in history where everyone with any insight of the climate crisis that threatens our civilisation – and the entire biosphere – must speak out in clear language, no matter how uncomfortable and unprofitable that may be.
We must change almost everything in our current societies. The bigger your carbon footprint, the bigger your moral duty. The bigger your platform, the bigger your responsibility.
Adults keep saying: "We owe it to the young people to give them hope." But I don't want your hope. I don't want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.
I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.
This is an edited version of a speech given by Greta Thunberg at Davos this week.
The way the world manages land, produces and eats food has to change to curb global warming or food security, health and biodiversity will be at risk, a United Nations report on the effects of climate change on land said on Thursday.
The report said global population growth and changes in consumption patterns have caused unprecedented rates of land and water use. It called for big changes to farming and eating habits, but stopped short of explicitly advocating going meat-free.
Dietary changes, featuring plant-based foods and sustainable animal-sourced food, could free up several million square kilometres of land by 2050 and potentially cut 0.7 to 8.0 gigatonnes a year of carbon dioxide equivalent, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in the report
The world's leading scientists are warning that human behaviour is destroying the biodiversity on which human and other life depends at a terrifyingly rapid rate.
What a ship.....no wonder 'Made in China ' is displacing North American made goods big time. This monster transports goods across the Pacific in just 5 days!! Another two will soon be commissioned.
These ships were commissioned by Wal-Mart to get their imported goods from China .
They hold an incredible 15,000 containers and have a 207 foot deck beam!
The full crew is just 13 people on a ship longer than a US Aircraft Carrier, which has a crew of 5,000.With its 207' beam it is too big to fit through the Panama or Suez Canals .
It is strictly transpacific. Cruise speed: 31 knots.
The goods arrive four days before the typical container ship (18-20 knots)on a China -to California run.
91% of Wal-Mart products are made in China .
So this behemoth is hugely competitive even when carrying perishable goods.
The ship was built in five sections. The sections are floated together and then welded.The command bridge is higher than a 10-story building and has 11 cargo crane rigs that can operate simultaneously unloading the entire ship in less than two hours.
The world's leading scientists are warning that human behaviour is destroying the biodiversity on which human and other life depends at a terrifyingly rapid rate.
We must reverse biodiversity loss to save ourselves
By David Suzuki with contributions from Senior Editor Ian Hanington
We should appreciate nature for its own sake. After all, we're part of it. We must also recognize that nature gives us what we need to stay healthy and survive. What we do to nature,we do to ourselves.
Healthy oceans and the plankton they support give us most of the oxygen we breathe and provide food for much of humanity. Trees sequester carbon, produce oxygen, filter contaminants in air and water and prevent erosion and flooding. Polar ice caps regulate global temperatures and ocean currents. From the smallest microbes to the largest mammals, biodiverse animal life keeps natural systems in balance, ensuring that everything in the food web — including us — can find sustenance.
Nature's interconnections are so wonderfully complex that we're still a long way from fully understanding them, from knowing what the consequences of a seemingly small impact on one part of an ecosystem will have on the entire system.
We can be certain, though, that we're putting all the systems that make human societies possible in great peril. We also know that the main barriers to implementing the many available and emerging solutions are lack of political will and imagination and the refusal of so many people to even acknowledge the problems we've created.
We've known for decades about climate change's devastating effects, but the fossil fuel industry has convinced politicians and media that its enormous profits are more important than life itself. Now, the world's leading scientists are warning that human behaviour is destroying the biodiversity on which human and other life depends at a terrifyingly rapid rate.
"We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide," said Robert Watson, chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.
The warning comes in "the most thorough planetary health check ever undertaken," an 1,800-page assessment involving three years of research by 455 scientists and diplomats from 50 countries, who looked at more than 15,000 academic studies, along with reports from Indigenous communities dealing daily with the crises.
The IPBES Global Assessment found, among other things, that one million of Earth's estimated eight million plant and animal species (including 5.5 million insect species) are at risk of extinction, three-quarters of terrestrial and two-thirds of marine environments have been "severely altered" and, since 1700, more than 85 per cent of wetlands have been lost — all because of human activity. The major causes include changes in land and sea use, direct exploitation of organisms, climate change, pollution and invasive alien species, driven by increasing human populations, consumption and technological change.
Loss of forest cover, wetlands, insect populations, biodiversity and more is having devastating impacts on food security, climate change adaptation and global economies. More than US$577 billion in global crops are at risk from pollinator loss alone!
The scientists offer a range of solutions and argue it's not too late to save ourselves from catastrophe with "transformative changes across economic, social, political and technological factors." But, as with climate disruption, we've already wasted a lot of time through political intransigence, denial, fear of change and lack of foresight.
Now, people — especially young people, who are inheriting this mess — are demanding action. From student climate strikes to Extinction Rebellion to calls for a "green new deal," people are letting those in the corridors of power know that time is running out and the status quo is unsustainable.
Is anyone listening? Some signs are promising. Biodiversity loss is on the G8 agenda for the first time, and countries from China to the U.K. have started looking into solutions. But in Canada, we can't even get politicians to agree on a climate solution as basic as putting a price on greenhouse gas emissions, and the current U.S. administration appears to reject any environmental protections. Now, younger, more caring voices are starting to drown out the bleating of those who stand in the way of change.
Many people are doing their part — driving and flying less, eating less meat, reducing and recycling, paying attention to the impacts of their consumer choices and more. Most importantly, they're taking to the streets and polling booths to demand progress.
Solutions are available. We must put all our efforts into reversing course now!
