'Overwhelmed' Greta Thunberg Leaves Climate March Early After Rockstar Welcome

Sydney Morning Herald - Aritz Parra | Frank Jordans

Madrid: Activists of all ages and from all corners of the planet demanded concrete action Friday against climate change from leaders and negotiators at a global summit in Madrid.
The march was led by dozens of representatives of Latin America's indigenous peoples - a mark of deference after anti-government protests in Chile, the original host of the summit, resulted in the the talks suddenly being moved to Europe for the third year in a row.
Celebrity climate activist Greta Thunberg declared from a stage that "change is not going to come from the people in power, it's going to come from the masses."
A crowd of thousands responded chanting "Greta! Greta!"

Thunberg was surrounded by supporters and police after arriving in Spain by train from Lisbon. Credit: Getty Images

Organisers claimed 500,000 people turned out for the march, but authorities in Madrid put the number at 15,000 without an immediate explanation for the disparity in the count.

Thunberg addresses a demonstration in Madrid. Her placard translates as "Strike for Climate".  Credit: AP

The Swedish teen was followed on her first day in Madrid by a swarm of cameras and reporters, as well as curious members of the public wanting to film her on their smartphones, from the very first step she took out of an overnight train from Lisbon.
Two young activists earned cheers as they abseiled from a bridge and strung out a banner saying: "Just 8 years till 1.5 degrees C. HOW DARE YOU?" - a reference to scientists' forecasts of rising temperatures and what activists complain is a lack of a convincing political response to the threat.
The crush as people tried to get a glimpse of Thunberg led her to pull out shortly after the start of the march, saying police had advised her to leave for safety's sake, and she climbed into an electric car.
A Madrid police spokeswoman who spoke on condition of anonymity because she wasn't authorised to be named in media reports said that it had only been "suggested" to that Thunberg leave after she appeared "overwhelmed" by the attention and that police never ordered the activist to abandon on safety grounds.
Earlier in the day, the 16-year-old had said at a press conference that calls for real action against climate change are still being "ignored" by political leaders despite their continuous praise of the global environmental youth movement she helped create.
Thunberg hoped the COP25 summit would lead to "something concrete" and "increasing awareness among people in general," but she said that after more than one year of student strikes"still basically nothing has happened."
"The climate crisis is still being ignored by those in power," she added.

Consensus proving 'difficult'
During the talks, which run from December 2-13, nearly 200 countries are meant to streamline the rules on global carbon markets and agree on how poor countries should be compensated for destruction largely caused by emissions from rich nations.
An official directly involved in the negotiations said that despite a few setbacks, the technical negotiations were progressing, although many issues were being left for ministerial-level meetings in the summit's second and final week.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity given the sensitivity of the discussions, added that a political declaration on greater "ambition" - a buzzword at the summit - was shaping to be "difficult to achieve."
"A summit that doesn't end with enhanced ambition would be something that nobody would understand if we take into account what the streets and science are telling us," the official said.


Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg is just 16 years old, but she has gained global attention for her frank pleas for action from the world's most powerful leaders.

The talks came as evidence mounts about disasters that could ensue from further global warming, including a study published Friday predicting that unchecked climate change could devastate fishery industries and coral reef tourism.
The study commissioned by 14 nations whose economies rely heavily on the sea says climate change could cause hundreds of billions of dollars in losses by 2050, adding that limiting global warming would lessen the economic impact for coastal countries, but that they also need to adapt to ocean changes.

Tipping point for an 'uprising'
Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said social scientists believed that when roughly 3.5 per cent of a nation's population joins "civil and non-violent uprisings" it can be enough to force change, even in a dictatorship.
In Germany, numbers at the climate demonstrations on September 20 were estimated at nearly 2 per cent of the population, and in New Zealand at 3.5 per cent, he said.
"If you start seeing an uprising ... there will be an enormous pressure for the political leadership to step up and start acting," Rockstrom said - though he noted it "can also be quite challenging along the way".

Climate activists march in silence during a 'Fridays For Future' protest in Madrid during the COP25 climate talks. Credit: Getty Images

He questioned whether, at some point, it would start to become morally unacceptable to cause people's deaths with car exhaust, as happened with cigarette smoking.
In New Delhi, at some times of the year, young people are inhaling toxic pollution equivalent to smoking 10 cigarettes a day, killing over 7000 people a year in the city, he noted.
On Friday morning, eight-year-old Indian climate striker Licypriya Kangujam, of New Delhi, headed to her country's pavilion at the Madrid talks, clutching a hand-written poster calling on India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi to pass a flagship climate change law in the current parliament session.
She said she had been protesting in front of the parliament building regularly on Fridays to press for the legislation.
She said she had come to the climate talks with her father to tell politicians and others, "you must change your way of thinking".

Links

• Greta Thunberg Rejects Environmental Prize, Saying: ‘The Climate Doesn’t Need Awards’
• The Emperor’s New Clothes: Greta Thunberg Versus The Climate Contrarians
• It's No Accident That Girls Are Leading The Climate Movement
• Timeline: Greta Thunberg's Rise From Lone Protester To Nobel Favorite
• Why Is Everyone Afraid Of Greta Thunberg?
• Greta Thunberg’s Radical Climate Change Fairy Tale Is Exactly The Story We Need
• Our Young Girls Are Bearing The Burden Of Climate Action. But Should They Be?
• Rising Voices: Young People Fight For Climate Action – Video
• How The Climate Kids Are Short-Circuiting Right-Wing Media
• Cyclone Greta Shakes Up The Climate Change Debate

Innocent Animals Cannot Do Anything About Climate Change. Only People Can.

USA TODAY - Editorial Board

As Paris climate agreement negotiators meet in Madrid this week, don't forget the animals that share earth and global warming with mankind: Our view

A koala recovers from burns on Nov. 29, 2019, in Port Macquarie, Australia. Hundreds have died in the nation's recent drought-fueled fires.

Caught by a motion-detection trail camera in the Florida wilds, a young panther manages a few steps before its wobbling hindquarters fail and its rear legs collapse to the ground. The cat, among several species stricken by some mysterious neurological ailment possibly connected to environmental changes, struggles to regain footing and continue, only for its legs to fail again steps later.
In New England states, ticks unleashed by milder winters have swarmed and withered moose populations, with tens of thousands of the blood-sucking parasites affixing to just one of the imposing animals or a calf.
Camera crews along the Siberian coast have filmed walruses cartwheeling to their death down cliffs. Forced onto dry land because of sparse Arctic sea ice, according to Netflix's "Our Planet," the animals crowd their way up rocky escarpments only to plunge off.

Human and animal suffering
As the world grows warmer, heart-breaking accounts of animal suffering have multiplied from what scientists suspect, or have established, are the direct result of man-made climate change.
For humans, the consequences of global warming are difficult to internalize because any changes seem, for the moment, to be slow or aberrational. But the impact on the world's delicate ecosystems can be catastrophic:

►Vanishing songbirds. Scientists released a study this year calculating that the wild bird populations of the United States and Canada have diminished by almost 30% since 1970. Nearly 3 billion birds are gone, including a quarter of blue jays, nearly half of Baltimore orioles, and hundreds of millions of sparrows and warblers.

►Massive antelope die-off. In three weeks, 200,000 saiga antelopes fell dead across the steppes of Central Asia in 2015, two-thirds of the world's population. Scientists recently solved the mystery when they discovered that warming temperatures might have unleashed a dormant bacterium in the animals, causing massive internal bleeding.

►Disappearing state and national symbols. Encroaching heat is driving away state birds, including Alabama's yellowhammer, the California quail, Georgia's brown thrasher, Iowa's and New Jersey's goldfinch, Minnesota's common loon, New Hampshire's purple finch, Pennsylvania's ruffed grouse and Vermont's hermit thrush. A national symbol of Australia — koalas — already threatened by human development, have died by the hundreds in the nation's recent drought-fueled fires.

Negotiating Paris climate agreement
In the past few months, ocean surges generated by ever larger storms have swept away dozens of wild horses in North Carolina. Drought has killed hundreds of elephants in Zimbabwe. And rising temperatures are causing sea turtles in some nesting areas to produce only female hatchlings.
A United Nations study this year found that a million plant and animal species risk extinction because of several human-induced factors greatly aggravated by climate change. More U.N. research recently warned that time is growing short for the world's nations to act drastically if catastrophic consequences are to be avoided.
Signatories to the Paris climate accord are gathering this week in Madrid to discuss plans for meeting emission-reduction goals. President Donald Trump has begun the process of pulling America out of the agreement, so no high-level administration officials will be attending.
While most of the focus is on how the climate emergency affects mankind, the cruelty visited upon animals that share in this planet's fate should not be overlooked. The animals can't do anything about the warming globe. People can.

Links

• Six animal species and how they are affected by climate change
• Climate change is having a devastating impact on Australian wildlife
• 10 ways climate change is affecting Australia’s wildlife, according to science
• Impacts of climate change on biodiversity 
• Spiders Are Threatened By Climate Change – And Even The Biggest Arachnophobes Should Be Worried
• Esperance Logs First Verified Sea Snake Sighting, But Expert Says Warming Oceans May Bring More
• The Animals That Will Survive Climate Change
• Why The Polar Bear Is An Indisputable Image Of Climate Change
• Golden Bowerbirds' Building Prowess Helps Scientists Monitor Climate Change, And Alarm Bells Are Ringing
• Fixing Australia’s Extinction Crisis Means Thinking Bigger Than Individual Species

Leading Scientists Condemn Political Inaction On Climate Change As Australia 'Literally Burns'

The Guardian - Lisa Cox

Climate experts ‘bewildered’ by government ‘burying their heads in the sand’, and say bushfires on Australia’s east coast should be a ‘wake-up call’ 

Firefighters battle a bushfire near Braidwood, New South Wales, on Friday. Scientists are perplexed that as bushfires have intensified on Australia’s east coast, political commentary on climate change has ‘very much died down’. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian 

Leading scientists have expressed concern about the lack of focus on the climate crisis as bushfires rage across New South Wales and Queensland, saying it should be a “wake-up call” for the government.
Climate experts who spoke to Guardian Australia said they were “bewildered” the emergency had grabbed little attention during the final parliamentary sitting week for the year, which was instead taken up by the repeal of medevac laws, a restructure of the public service, and energy minister Angus Taylor’s run-in with the American author Naomi Wolf.
Escalating conditions on Thursday and Friday led to dozens of out-of-control bushfires, including in the NSW’s Hawkesbury region, where a fire at Gospers Mountain merged with two other blazes burning in the lower Hunter on Friday.
Sydney has been blanketed with a thick smoke haze that health officials said had led to a 25% increase in people presenting in emergency departments for asthma and breathing problems.

Smoke haze from bushfires blanket Sydney Harbour. Health officials have reported a 25% spike in hospital emergency admissions for breathing problems. Photograph: Steven Saphore/EPA 

Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, a climate scientist with the University of NSW’s Climate Change Research Centre, said she was “surprised, bewildered, concerned” that the emergency had prompted little discussion from political leaders this week.
“Here we are in the worst bushfire season we’ve ever seen, the biggest drought we’ve ever had, Sydney surrounded by smoke, and we’ve not heard boo out of a politician addressing climate change,” she said.

The government chooses the points they want to discuss in the parliament and the fact they haven’t chosen to discuss [bushfires] sends a message to me. Mark Howden

“They dismissed it from the outset and haven’t come back to it since.
“They’re burying their heads in the sand while the world is literally burning around them and that’s the scary thing. It’s only going to get worse.”
Mark Howden, the director of the Australian National University’s Climate Change Institute and a vice-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said while the fires were raging on, “the commentary in terms of climate change has very much died down”.
“Yesterday they did a public service reshuffle, or there was medevac, or the ‘union-busting’ bill,” he said.
“The government chooses the points they want to discuss in the parliament and the fact they haven’t chosen to discuss it sends a message to me.
“Essentially, it’s a question of priorities, that’s how I interpret it.”
Howden said the general public had already joined the dots about the rising number of extreme weather days that brought heat, wind and dry conditions and high fire danger.
He said all of the indicators of fire danger were starting to change and the effects of this were evident through increased frequency of fires, larger fire areas, more severe fires, fires burning in ecosystems not prone to fire and a longer fire season.
Euan Ritchie, a wildlife ecologist at Deakin University, said he was “deeply concerned” that the extent and severity of the current fires meant that ecosystems that shouldn’t be burning – such as rainforests in NSW – were on fire.
“It’s another example of failure to act on climate change, which is hurting people’s lives as well as nature,” he said.
“There needs to be increased attention on the impact of climate change and it’s relationship with fire and how that threatens humans as well as nature and the environment.”

 Firefighters work to protect a property in Kulnura as the Three Mile fire approaches Mangrove Mountain in NSW on Friday. Photograph: Dan Himbrechts/EPA 

Martin Rice, the head of research at the Climate Council, said the devastating fire conditions predicted by emergency leaders this year when they requested a meeting with the prime minister, Scott Morrison, were unfolding.
He said Morrison had still failed to meet with emergency leaders, however both Taylor and the emergency services minister David Littleproud have now done so.
Rice said the government was “failing to respond” to the climate crisis and to the “health emergency” created by toxic air around greater Sydney.
“This has to be a wake-up call to the federal government,” he said.
Rice said the Reserve Bank, medical practitioners, councils and mayors, emergency leaders and students were just some of the people who had made recent public pleas for a response.
“All walks of life in Australia are demanding action,” he said.

Links

• The big smoke: how bushfires cast a pall over the Australian summer
• Smoke alarm: political inaction on climate change is adding to our suffocating atmosphere
• Bushfires: Sydney schools cancel sports and outdoor workers lay down tools over hazardous air
• Revealed: 'monumental' NSW bushfires have burnt 20% of Blue Mountains world heritage area
• Australia bushfires factcheck: are this year's fires unprecedented?
• We need to protect nature to stand any chance of tackling climate chaos
• Australian businesses, unions and farmers say Paris agreement requires zero emissions