Madrid: Business and political leaders are
misleading the public by holding negotiations that are not leading to
real action against warming temperatures, which she referred to as a
climate emergency, teen climate activist Greta Thunberg says.
"The
real danger is when politicians and CEOs are making it look like real
action is happening, when in fact almost nothing is being done, apart
from clever accounting and creative PR," the Swedish 16-year-old said on
Wednesday in a speech at the plenary of the ongoing UN climate talks in
Madrid, or COP25.
Teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg has addressed the COP25 summit, criticising politicians and CEOs for their lack of response to environmental issues.
"Finding
holistic solutions is what the COP should be all about, but instead it
seems to have turned into some kind of opportunity for countries to
negotiate loopholes and to avoid raising their ambition."
The
activist, whose speech garnered wide applause, cited scientific reports
that have established that unchecked warming above 1.5 degrees Celsius
for the planet would be catastrophic.
She also said pledges to
reduce emissions were not enough, carbon needed to remain underground
and greenhouse gases responsible for rising temperatures needed to be
brought to zero.
"This is not leading, this is misleading," she said, adding "every fraction of a degree matters".
Politicians
in Madrid are grappling with outstanding issues in the implementation
of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which aims to avert catastrophic global
warming, including the spiny issue of accounting for carbon emissions.
Many countries and companies are relying
on the idea of carbon markets to meet goals to cut greenhouse gas
output and help limit temperature rises to between 1.5-2 degrees Celsius
above pre-industrial levels.
Supporters
of carbon markets say they can serve to lower the cost of reducing
emissions and enable countries to commit to more ambitious targets.
Others see them as a way to stall more aggressive action to cut
emissions.
Thunberg said many pledges to balance out emissions in
this way did not include the impact of shipping, aviation and
international trade, and called for quicker action.
TIME - Charlotte Alter | Suyin Haynes | Justin Worland
Greta Thunberg sits in silence in the cabin of the boat that will take her across the Atlantic Ocean.
Inside, there’s a cow skull hanging on the wall, a faded globe, a
child’s yellow raincoat. Outside, it’s a tempest: rain pelts the boat,
ice coats the decks, and the sea batters the vessel that will take this
slight girl, her father and a few companions from Virginia to Portugal.
For a moment, it’s as if Thunberg were the eye of a hurricane, a pool of
resolve at the center of swirling chaos. In here, she speaks quietly.
Out there, the entire natural world seems to amplify her small voice,
screaming along with her.
“We can’t just continue living as
if there was no tomorrow, because there is a tomorrow,” she says,
tugging on the sleeve of her blue sweatshirt. “That is all we are
saying.”
It’s a simple truth, delivered by a teenage girl in a fateful moment. The sailboat, La Vagabonde,
will shepherd Thunberg to the Port of Lisbon, and from there she will
travel to Madrid, where the United Nations is hosting this year’s climate conference.
It is the last such summit before nations commit to new plans to meet a
major deadline set by the Paris Agreement. Unless they agree on
transformative action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the world’s
temperature rise since the Industrial Revolution will hit the 1.5°C
mark—an eventuality that scientists warn will expose some 350 million
additional people to drought and push roughly 120 million people into
extreme poverty by 2030. For every fraction of a degree that
temperatures increase, these problems will worsen. This is not
fearmongering; this is science. For decades, researchers and activists
have struggled to get world leaders to take the climate threat
seriously. But this year, an unlikely teenager somehow got the world’s
attention.
Climate activist Greta Thunberg photographed on the shore in Lisbon, Portugal December 4, 2019. Evgenia Arbugaeva for TIME
Thunberg
began a global movement by skipping school: starting in August 2018,
she spent her days camped out in front of the Swedish Parliament,
holding a sign painted in black letters on a white background that read
Skolstrejk för klimatet: “School Strike for Climate.” In the 16 months
since, she has addressed heads of state at the U.N.,
met with the Pope, sparred with the President of the United States and
inspired 4 million people to join the global climate strike on September
20, 2019, in what was the largest climate demonstration in human
history. Her image has been celebrated in murals and Halloween costumes,
and her name has been attached to everything from bike shares to
beetles. Margaret Atwood compared her to Joan of Arc. After noticing a
hundredfold increase in its usage, lexicographers at Collins Dictionary
named Thunberg’s pioneering idea, climate strike, the word of the year.
The politics of climate action
are as entrenched and complex as the phenomenon itself, and Thunberg
has no magic solution. But she has succeeded in creating a global
attitudinal shift, transforming millions of vague, middle-of-the-night
anxieties into a worldwide movement calling for urgent change. She has
offered a moral clarion call to those who are willing to act, and hurled
shame on those who are not. She has persuaded leaders, from mayors to
Presidents, to make commitments where they had previously fumbled: after
she spoke to Parliament and demonstrated with the British environmental
group Extinction Rebellion, the U.K. passed a law requiring that the
country eliminate its carbon footprint. She has focused the world’s
attention on environmental injustices that young indigenous activists
have been protesting for years. Because of her, hundreds of thousands of
teenage “Gretas,” from Lebanon to Liberia, have skipped school to lead
their peers in climate strikes around the world.
“This
moment does feel different,” former Vice President Al Gore, who won the
Nobel Peace Prize for his decades of climate advocacy work, tells TIME.
“Throughout history, many great morally based movements have gained
traction at the very moment when young people decided to make that
movement their cause.”
Thunberg is 16 but looks 12. She
usually wears her light brown hair pulled into two braids, parted in the
middle. She has Asperger’s syndrome, which means she doesn’t operate on
the same emotional register as many of the people she meets. She
dislikes crowds; ignores small talk; and speaks in direct, uncomplicated
sentences. She cannot be flattered or distracted. She is not impressed
by other people’s celebrity, nor does she seem to have interest in her
own growing fame. But these very qualities have helped make her a global
sensation. Where others smile to cut the tension, Thunberg is
withering. Where others speak the language of hope, Thunberg repeats the
unassailable science: Oceans will rise. Cities will flood. Millions of
people will suffer.
GretaThunberg is the face of a global youth-led climate movement
“I want you to panic,” she told the annual convention of CEOs and
world leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in
January. “I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want
you to act.”
Thunberg is not a leader of any political
party or advocacy group. She is neither the first to sound the alarm
about the climate crisis nor the most qualified to fix it. She is not a
scientist or a politician. She has no access to traditional levers of
influence: she’s not a billionaire or a princess, a pop star or even an
adult. She is an ordinary teenage girl who, in summoning the courage to
speak truth to power, became the icon of a generation. By clarifying an
abstract danger with piercing outrage, Thunberg became the most
compelling voice on the most important issue facing the planet.
Along
the way, she emerged as a standard bearer in a generational battle, an
avatar of youth activists across the globe fighting for everything from
gun control to democratic representation. Her global climate strike is
the largest and most international of all the youth movements, but it’s
hardly the only one: teenagers in the U.S. are organizing against gun
violence and flocking to progressive candidates; students in Hong Kong
are battling for democratic representation; and young people from South
America to Europe are agitating for remaking the global economy.
Thunberg is not aligned with these disparate protests, but her insistent
presence has come to represent the fury of youth worldwide. According
to a December Amnesty International survey, young people in 22 countries
identified climate change as the most important issue facing the world.
She is a reminder that the people in charge now will not be in charge
forever, and that the young people who are inheriting dysfunctional
governments, broken economies and an increasingly unlivable planet know just how much the adults have failed them.
“She
symbolizes the agony, the frustration, the desperation, the anger—at
some level, the hope—of many young people who won’t even be of age to
vote by the time their futures are doomed,” says Varshini Prakash, 26,
who co-founded the Sunrise Movement, a U.S. youth advocacy group pushing
for a Green New Deal.
Thunberg’s moment comes just as
urgent scientific reality collides with global political uncertainty.
Each year that we dump more carbon into the atmosphere, the planet grows
nearer to a point of no return, where life on earth as we know it will
change unalterably. Scientifically, the planet can’t afford another
setback; politically, this may be our best chance to make sweeping
change before it’s too late.
Next year will be decisive:
the E.U. is planning to tax imports from countries that don’t tackle
climate change; the global energy sector faces a financial reckoning;
China will draft its development plans for the next five years; and the
U.S. presidential election will determine whether the leader of the free
world continues to ignore the science of climate change.
“When
you are a leader and every week you have young people demonstrating
with such a message, you cannot remain neutral,” French President
Emmanuel Macron told TIME. “They helped me change.” Leaders respond to
pressure, pressure is created by movements, movements are built by
thousands of people changing their minds. And sometimes, the best way to
change a mind is to see the world through the eyes of a child.
***
Thunberg
is maybe 5 ft. tall, and she looks even smaller in her black oversize
wet-weather gear. Late November is not the time of year to cross the
Atlantic Ocean: the seas are rough, the winds are fierce, and the small
boat—a leaky catamaran—spent weeks pounding and bucking over 23-ft.
seas. At first, Thunberg got seasick. Once, a huge wave came over the
boat, ripping a chair off the deck and snapping ropes. Another time, she
was awakened by the sound of thunder cracking overhead, and the crew
feared that lightning would strike the mast.
But Thunberg,
in her quiet way, was unfazed. She spent most of the long afternoons in
the cabin, listening to audiobooks and teaching her shipmates to play
Yatzy. On calm days, she climbed on deck and looked across the vast
colorless sea. Somewhere below the surface, millions of tons of plastic
swirled. Thousands of miles to the north, the sea ice was melting.
Thunberg
approaches the world’s problems with the weight of an elder, but she’s
still a kid. She favors sweatpants and Velcro sneakers, and shares
matching bracelets with her 14-year-old sister. She likes horses, and
she misses her two dogs, Moses and Roxy, back in Stockholm. Her mother
Malena Ernman is a leading Swedish opera singer. Her father Svante
Thunberg is distantly related to Svante Arrhenius, a Nobel Prize–winning
chemist who studied how carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases the
temperature on the earth’s surface.
Thunberg writes in her journal on the train as she travels from Lisbon to Madrid for a U.N. climate conference. Evgenia Arbugaeva for TIME
More than a century after that science became known, Thunberg’s
primary-school teacher showed a video of its effects: starving polar
bears, extreme weather and flooding. The teacher explained that it was
all happening because of climate change. Afterward the entire class felt
glum, but the other kids were able to move on. Thunberg couldn’t. She
began to feel extremely alone. She was 11 years old when she fell into a
deep depression. For months, she stopped speaking almost entirely, and
ate so little that she was nearly hospitalized; that period of
malnutrition would later stunt her growth. Her parents took time off
work to nurse her through what her father remembers as a period of
“endless sadness,” and Thunberg herself recalls feeling confused. “I
couldn’t understand how that could exist, that existential threat, and
yet we didn’t prioritize it,” she says. “I was maybe in a bit of denial,
like, ‘That can’t be happening, because if that were happening, then
the politicians would be taking care of it.’”
At first,
Thunberg’s father reassured her that everything would be O.K., but as he
read more about the climate crisis, he found his own words rang hollow.
“I realized that she was right and I was wrong, and I had been wrong
all my life,” Svante told TIME in a quiet moment after arriving in
Lisbon. In an effort to comfort their daughter, the family began
changing their habits to reduce their emissions. They mostly stopped
eating meat, installed solar panels, began growing their own vegetables
and eventually gave up flying—a sacrifice for Thunberg’s mother, who
performs throughout Europe. “We did all these things, basically, not
really to save the climate, we didn’t care much about that initially,”
says Svante. “We did it to make her happy and to get her back to life.”
Slowly, Thunberg began to eat and talk again.
Thunberg’s
Asperger’s diagnosis helped explain why she had such a powerful reaction
to learning about the climate crisis. Because she doesn’t process
information in the same way neurotypical people do, she could not
compartmentalize the fact that her planet was in peril. “I see the world
in black and white, and I don’t like compromising,” she told TIME
during a school break earlier this year. “If I were like everyone else, I
would have continued on and not seen this crisis.” She is in some ways
grateful for her diagnosis; if her brain worked differently, she
explained, “I wouldn’t be able to sit for hours and read things I’m
interested in.” Thunberg’s focus and way of speaking betrays a maturity
far beyond her years. When she passed classmates at her school, she
remarked that “the children are being quite noisy,” as if she were not
one of them.
In May 2018, after Thunberg wrote an essay
about climate change that was published in a Swedish newspaper, a
handful of Scandanavian climate activists contacted her. Thunberg
suggested they emulate the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High
School in Parkland, Fla., who had recently organized school strikes to
protest gun violence in the U.S. The other activists decided against the
idea, but it lodged in Thunberg’s mind. She announced to her parents
that she would go on strike to pressure the Swedish government to meet
the goals of the Paris Agreement. Her school strike, she told them,
would last until the Swedish elections in September 2018.
Thunberg’s
parents were less than thrilled at first at the idea of their daughter
missing so much class, and her teachers suggested she find a different
way to protest. But Thunberg was immovable. She put together a flyer
with facts about extinction rates and carbon budgets, and then sprinkled
it with the cheeky sense of humor that has made her stubbornness go
viral. “My name is Greta, I am in ninth grade, and I am school-striking
for the climate,” she wrote on each flyer. “Since you adults don’t give a
damn about my future, I won’t either.”
On Aug. 20, 2018,
Thunberg arrived in front of the Swedish Parliament, wearing a blue
hoodie and carrying her homemade school-strike sign. She had no
institutional support, no formal backing and nobody to keep her company.
But doing something—making a stand, even if she was by herself—felt
better than doing nothing. “Learning about climate change triggered my
depression in the first place,” she says. “But it was also what got me
out of my depression, because there were things I could do to improve
the situation. I don’t have time to be depressed anymore.” Her father
said that after she began striking, it was as if she “came back to
life.”
Thunberg arrives in Madrid for the last U.N. climate summit before a crucial deadline in 2020. Evgenia Arbugaeva for TIME
On the first day of her climate strike, Thunberg was alone. She
sat slumped on the ground, seeming barely bigger than her backpack. It
was an unusually chilly August day. She posted about her strike on
social media, and a few journalists came by to talk to her, but most of
the day she was on her own. She ate her packed lunch of bean pasta with
salt, and at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, when she’d normally leave
school, her father picked her up and they biked home.
On
the second day, a stranger joined her. “That was a big step, from one to
two,” she recalls. “This is not about me striking; this is now us
striking from school.” A few days later, a handful more came. A
Greenpeace activist brought vegan pad thai, which Thunberg tried for the
first time. They were suddenly a group: one person refusing to accept
the status quo had become two, then eight, then 40, then hundreds. Then
thousands.
By early September, enough people had joined
Thunberg’s climate strike in Stockholm that she announced she would
continue every Friday until Sweden aligned with the Paris Agreement. The
Fridays for Future movement was born. By the end of 2018, tens of
thousands of students across Europe began skipping school on Fridays to
protest their own leaders’ inaction. In January, 35,000 schoolchildren
protested in Belgium following Thunberg’s example. The movement struck a
chord. When a Belgian environmental minister insulted the strikers, a
public outcry forced her to resign.
By September 2019, the
climate strikes had spread beyond northern Europe. In New York City,
250,000 reportedly marched in Battery Park and outside City Hall. In
London, 100,000 swarmed the streets near Westminster Abbey, in the
shadow of Big Ben. In Germany, a total of 1.4 million people took to the
streets, with thousands flooding the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and
marching in nearly 600 other cities and towns across the country. From
Antarctica to Papua New Guinea, from Kabul to Johannesburg, an estimated
4 million people of all ages showed up to protest. Their signs told a
story. In London: The World is Hotter than Young Leonardo DiCaprio. In
Turkey: Every Disaster Movie Starts with a Scientist Being Ignored. In
New York: The Dinosaurs Thought They Had Time, Too. Hundreds carried
images of Thunberg or painted her quotes onto poster boards. Make the
World Greta Again became a rallying cry.
Her moral clarity
inspired other young people around the world. “I want to be like her,”
says Rita Amorim, a 16-year-old student from Lisbon who waited for four
hours in December to catch a glimpse of Thunberg.
In
Udaipur, India, 17-year-old Vidit Baya started his climate strike with
just six people in March; by September, it was 80 strong. In Brasilia,
Brazil, 19-year-old Artemisa Xakriabá marched with other indigenous
women as the Amazon was burning, then traveled to the U.N. climate
summit in New York City. In Guilin, China, 16-year-old Howey Ou posted a
picture of herself online in front of city government offices in a solo
act of climate protest; she was taken to a police station and told her
demonstration was illegal. In Moscow, 25-year-old Arshak Makichyan began
a one-man picket for climate, risking arrest in a country where street
protest is tightly restricted. In Haridwar, India, 11-year-old Ridhima
Pandey joined 15 other kids, including Thunberg, in filing a complaint
to the U.N. against Germany, France, Brazil, Argentina and Turkey,
arguing that the nations’ failure to tackle the climate crisis amounted
to a violation of child rights.
In New York City,
17-year-old Xiye Bastida, originally from an indigenous Otomi community
in Mexico, led 600 of her peers in a climate walkout from her Manhattan
high school. And in Kampala, Uganda, 22-year-old Hilda Nakabuye launched
her own chapter of Fridays for Future after she realized that the
strong rains and long droughts that hurt her family’s crops could be
attributed to global warming. “Before I knew about climate change, I was
already experiencing its effects in my life,” she says.
The
activism of children has also motivated their parents. In São Paulo,
Isabella Prata joined a group called Parents for Future to support child
activists. Thunberg, she says, “is an image of all of this generation.”
It
all happened so fast. Just over a year ago, a quiet and mostly
friendless teenager woke up, put on her blue hoodie, and sat by herself
for hours in an act of singular defiance. Fourteen months later, she had
become the voice of millions, a symbol of a rising global rebellion.
***
On Dec. 3, La Vagabonde
docked beneath a flight path to Portugal’s largest airport. Thunberg
and her father stood on the deck, waving to the hundreds of people that
had gathered on a cold, sunny day to welcome them back to Europe. Above
their heads, planes droned, reminders of how easily Thunberg could have
crossed the ocean by air, and of the cost of that convenience: the
roughly 124,000 flights that take off every day spill millions of tons
of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. “I’m not traveling like this
because I want everyone to do so,” Thunberg told reporters after she
walked, a little wobbly at first, onto dry land for the first time in
weeks. “I’m doing this to send a message that it is impossible to live
sustainably today, and that needs to change.”
Taking her
place in front of a bank of television cameras and reporters, she went
on. “People are underestimating the force of angry kids,” she said. “We
are angry and frustrated, and that is because of good reason. If they
want us to stop being angry then maybe they should stop making us
angry.” When she was done speaking, the crowd erupted in cheers.
EUROPE: Young protesters with Extinction Rebellion take to the streets of London in October. Matt Stuart—MAPS
LEFT - NORTH AMERICA: High
school and middle school students in New York City perform a “die-in” to
demand a Green New Deal. RIGHT - ANTARTICA: Scientists support the climate
strikers from the West Antarctic Peninsula in September. Christopher Lee—VII/Redux; Dr. Kim Bernard—Oregon State University
LEFT - ASIA: Fridays for Future
activists protest climate inaction in September in Lahore, Pakistan; RIGHT - AUSTRALIA: Demonstrators bring Greta Thunberg masks to an environmental
protest in Melbourne in September. Arif Ali—AFP/Getty Images; Alana Holmberg—The New York Times/Redux
LEFT - AFRICA: Leah Namugerwa,
15, leads students, parents and farmers in a climate protest near
Kampala, Uganda; RIGHT - SOUTH AMERICA: Thousands march in Santiago, Chile,
during a Fridays for Future protest in March demanding urgent action to
prevent global warming. Sumy Sadurni—The New York Times/Redux; Martin Bernetti—AFP/Getty Images
Her speeches often go straight to the gut. “You say you love your
children above all else,” she said in her first big address at the U.N.
Climate Change Conference in Poland last December. “And yet you are
stealing their future in front of their very eyes.” The address went
viral almost immediately. Over the course of the past year, she has
given dozens of similar admonitions—to chief executives and heads of
state, to thought leaders and movie stars. Each time, Thunberg speaks
quietly but forcefully, articulating the palpable sense of injustice
that often seems obvious to the very young: adults, by refusing to act
in the face of extraordinary crisis, are being foolish at best, and
corrupt at worst. To those who share her fear, Thunberg’s blunt honesty
is cathartic. To those who don’t, it feels threatening. She refuses to
use the language of hope; her sharpest weapon is shame.
In
September, speaking to heads of state during the U.N. General Assembly,
Thunberg pulled no punches: “We are in the beginning of a mass
extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of
eternal economic growth,” she said. “How dare you.”
Mary
Robinson, the former President of Ireland who served as the U.N. climate
envoy ahead of the Paris climate talks, spent years arguing that
climate change would destroy small island nations and indigenous
communities. The message often fell on deaf ears. “People would just
sort of say, ‘Ah yeah, but that’s not me,’” she tells TIME. “Having
children say, ‘We have no future’ is far more effective. When children
say something like that, adults feel very bad.”
Cutting
through the noise has earned Thunberg plenty of detractors. Some
indigenous activists and organizers of color ask why a white European
girl is being celebrated when they have been working on these same
issues for decades. Thunberg herself sometimes appears frustrated at the
media attention placed on her, and often goes out of her way to
highlight other activists, especially indigenous ones. At a press
conference in Madrid just before the mass march, she implores
journalists to ask questions “not just to me,” but to the other Fridays
for Future organizers on stage with her. “What do you think?” she asks
the others, in an effort to broaden the conversation.
Some
traditional environmental groups have also complained that the radical
success of a teenage girl playing hooky has overshadowed their less
flashy efforts to write and pass meaningful legislation. “They want the
needle moved too,” says Rachel Kyte, dean of the Fletcher School at
Tufts University and a veteran climate leader. “They would just want to
be the ones that get the credit for moving it.” On the record, no major
environmental group would say anything remotely negative.
Beata, Greta, their
mother Malena Ernman and father Svante Thunberg with their two dogs Roxy
and Moses; Greta, right, with her younger sister Beata in an undated
family. Photo courtesy of Thunberg-Ernman Family
Some of her opponents have attacked her personally. Online trolls
have made fun of her appearance and speech patterns. In Rome, someone
hung her in effigy off a bridge under a sign reading Greta is your God.
In Alberta, the heart of Canada’s oil-drilling region, police had to
step in to protect her after she and her father were followed by men
yelling, “This is oil country.” Maxime Bernier, leader of the far-right
People’s Party of Canada, tweeted that Thunberg is “clearly mentally
unstable.” (He later walked back his criticism, calling her only a
“pawn.”) Russian President Vladimir Putin dismissed Thunberg entirely:
“I don’t share the common excitement,” he said on a panel in October.
President Donald Trump mocked her sarcastically on Twitter as “a very
happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future.”
After she tweeted about the killings of indigenous people in Brazil, the
country’s President Jair Bolsonaro called her an insulting word
that roughly translated to “little brat.” Thunberg has taken those
criticisms in stride: she has co-opted both Trump and Bolsonaro’s
ridicule for her Twitter bio.
It’s not always easy. No one,
and perhaps particularly a teenage girl, would like to have their looks
and mannerisms mocked online. But for Thunberg, it’s a daily reality.
“I have to think carefully about everything I do, everything I say, what
I’m wearing even, what I’m eating—everything!” she tells TIME during a
train ride to Hamburg, Germany, last spring. “Everything I say will
reach other people, so I need to think two steps ahead.” Sitting next to
her father, she scrolls past hateful comments—the head of a Swedish
sportswear chain appeared to be mocking her Asperger’s—then shrugs them
off. So many people have made death threats against her family that she
is now often protected by police when she travels. But for the most
part, she sees the global backlash as evidence that the climate strikers
have hit a nerve. “I think that it’s a good sign actually,” she says.
“Because that shows we are actually making a difference and they see us
as a threat.”
***
It’s hard to quantify the
so-called Greta effect partly because it’s mostly been manifest in
promises and goals. But commitments count as progress when the climate
conversation has been stuck in stasis for so long. In the U.S.,
Democrats have long given lip service to addressing global warming even
as they prioritized other issues, while many Republicans have simply
denied the science altogether. In countries now establishing a middle
class, like China and India, leaders argue they should be allowed to
burn fossil fuels because that’s how their richer counterparts got
ahead.
Those debates end up papering over what is an urgent
challenge by nearly every measure. Keeping global temperature rise to
1.5°C would require elected officials to act both immediately and
dramatically. In the developed world, a rapid transition away from
fossil fuels could sharply raise gas and heating prices and disrupt
industries that employ millions of people. In the global south, reducing
emissions means rethinking key elements of how countries build their
economies. Emissions would have to drop 7.6% on average every year for
the next decade—a feat that, while scientifically possible, would
require revolutionary changes.
But the needle is moving. Fortune
500 companies, facing major pressure to reduce their emissions, are
realizing that sustainability makes for good PR. In June, the airline
KLM launched a “Fly Responsibly” campaign, which encouraged customers to
consider abstaining from non-essential air travel. In July, the head of
OPEC, the cartel that controls much of the world’s oil production,
called climate strikers the “greatest threat” to his industry, according
to the AFP. In September, workers at Amazon, Facebook and other major
companies walked out during the climate strikes. And in November, the
president of Emirates airline told the BBC that the climate strikers
helped him realize “we are not doing enough.” In December, Klaus Schwab,
the founder and CEO of the World Economic Forum, published a manifesto
calling on global business leaders to embrace a more responsible form of
capitalism that, among other things, forces companies to act “as a
steward of the environmental and material universe for future
generations.”
Hans Vestberg, the CEO of the telecom giant
Verizon, says that companies are feeling squeezed about climate from all
sides. “It’s growing from all the stakeholders,” he says. “Our
employees think about it much more, our customers are talking much more
about it, and society is expecting us to show up.”
Thunberg has urged
leaders and influencers to commit to climate action. She has met with
Christine Lagarde, the Pope and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau,
Al Gore, President Barack Obama and appeared on Ellen. Photos - Lagarde, Trudeau: AP; Gore, Pope Francis: Courtesy of Greta Thunberg; Obama: Obama Foundation; Degeneres: NBC
Governments are making promises too. In the past year, more than
60 countries said they would eliminate their carbon footprints by 2050.
Voters in Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Austria and
Sweden—especially young people—now list climate change as their top
priority. In May, green parties gained seats in the European Parliament
from Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and more. Those victories helped
push the new European Commission president to promise “a Green Deal” for
Europe. In the U.S., a recent Washington Post poll found that
more than three-quarters of Americans now consider climate change a
“crisis” or a “major problem.” Even Republican lawmakers who have long
denied or dismissed climate science are taking note. In an interview
with the Washington Examiner, Republican House minority leader
Kevin McCarthy acknowledged that his party “should be a little bit
nervous” about changing attitudes on climate.
At the
individual level, ordinary people are following Thunberg’s example. In
Sweden, flying is increasingly seen as a wasteful emission of carbon—a
change of attitude captured by a new word: flygskam, meaning
“flight-shame.” There was an 8% drop in domestic flights between January
and April according to Swedavia, which runs the nation’s airports, and
Interrail ticket sales have tripled over the past two years. More than
19,000 people have signed a pledge swearing off air travel in 2020, and
the German railway operator Deutsche Bahn reported a record number of
passengers using its long-distance rail in the first six months of 2019.
Swiss and Austrian railway operators also saw upticks on their night
train services this year.
The Greta effect may be growing,
but Thunberg herself remains unmoved. “One person stops flying doesn’t
make much difference,” she says. “The thing we should look at is the
emissions curve—it’s still rising. Of course something is happening, but
basically nothing is happening.”
***
Last
spring, before she became a global icon, Thunberg enjoyed a semblance of
calm and privacy. Now it’s bedlam wherever she goes. On the night train
from Lisbon, she hides in the on-board kitchen to escape the lenses of
dozens of cameras; when she is finally able to sneak into her cabin, she
uses the moment of peace to write in her journal. When her train
arrives in Madrid the next morning, the platform is again packed
cheek-to-jowl with television cameras and reporters. Before stepping off
the train and facing the pack, she wonders out loud how she can
navigate the chaos. Even after she makes it inside the U.N. climate
summit, she’s swarmed. Photographers jostle through throngs of teenagers
in green face paint chanting “Gre-TA, Gre-TA!” while others erupt in a
spirited call-and-response: “What do we want? Climate justice! When do
we want it? Now!”
A few yards away from the commotion, in
one of the official conference spaces, a speaker stands in front of a
handful of other adults and chuckled. Behind her, a screen shows a
Power-Point presentation: “How do we empower young people in climate
activism?”
Thunberg’s lonely strike outside Sweden’s
Parliament coincided with a surge of mass youth protests that have
erupted around the world—all in different places, with different
impacts, but fueled by a changing social climate and shifting economic
pressures. In Hong Kong, young activists concerned by Beijing’s
tightening grip on the territory sparked a furious pro-democracy
movement that has been going strong since June. In Iraq and Lebanon,
young people dominate sweeping demonstrations against corruption,
foreign interference and sectarian governance. The Madrid climate summit
was moved from Chile because of huge protests over economic inequality
that were kicked off by high school students. And in the U.S., young
organizers opposed the Trump Administration on everything from
immigration to health care and helped elect a new wave of equally young
lawmakers.
Thunberg first began skipping school in August 2018, sitting in front of Swedish Parliament to demand climate action. Michael Campanella—Getty Images
On Dec. 6, tens of thousands of people flooded Madrid to join Thunberg’s call for global action on climate change. Evgenia Arbugaeva for TIME
The common thread is outrage over a central injustice: young
people know they are inheriting a world that will not work nearly as
well as it did for the aging adults who have been running it. “It’s so
important to realize that we are challenging the systems we are in, and
that is being led by young people,” says Beth Irving, 17, who came from
Wales to demonstrate for sweeping changes on climate policy outside the
U.N. summit. Thunberg is not aligned with any of these non-climate youth
movements, but her abrupt rise to prominence comes at a moment when
young people across the globe are awakening to anger at being cut a raw
deal.
The existential issue of climate
puts everyone at risk, but the younger you are, the greater the stakes.
The scale of addressing climate change—the systemic transformation of
economic, social and political systems—-animates young progressives
already keen to remake the world. Karin Watson, 22, who came to the
climate summit as part of a delegation from Amnesty International Chile,
describes a tumultuous, interconnected and youth-led “social explosion”
worldwide. She cannot disentangle her own advocacy for higher wages
from women’s rights and climate: “This social crisis is also an
ecological crisis—it’s related,” she says. “In the end, it’s
intersectional: the most vulnerable communities are the most vulnerable
to climate change.”
In the U.S., Jaclyn Corin, 19, one of
the original organizers of the March for Our Lives anti-gun violence
movement, framed the challenges at stake. “We can’t let these problems
continue on for future generations to take care of,” she says. “Adults
didn’t take care of these problems, so we have to take care of them, and
not be like older generations in their complacency.”
These
disparate youth movements are beginning to see some wins. In Hong Kong,
after months of sometimes-violent protests by young people resisting
Beijing’s authoritarian rule, the pro-democracy parties won major
victories in the local elections in November. In the U.K., young people
are poised to become one of the most decisive voting blocs, and
political battle lines are drawn by age as well as class. One poll shows
that more than half of British voters say the climate crisis will
influence their votes in the coming elections; among younger voters,
it’s three-quarters. In Switzerland, the two environmentalist parties
saw their best results ever in the elections in October, and much of
that support came from young people who were voting for the first time.
In the U.S., the Sunrise activists have helped make climate change a
central campaign issue in the 2020 presidential election. In September,
the top 10 candidates for the Democratic nomination participated in a
first-of-its-kind prime-time town hall on the issue.
“Young
people tend to have a fantastic impact in public opinion around the
world,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres told TIME. “Governments
follow.”
On Dec. 6, the tens of thousands of people
flooding into Madrid to demonstrate for climate action pour off trains
and buses and sweep in great waves through the heart of the city. Above
their heads, the wind carries furious messages—Merry Crisis and a Happy
New Fear; You Will Die of Old Age, I Will Die of Climate Change—and the
thrum of chants and drumming rise like thunder through the streets. A
group of young women and teenage girls from Spain’s chapter of Fridays
for Future escort Thunberg slowly from a nearby press conference to the
march, linking their arms to create a human shield. Once again, Thunberg
was the calm in the eye of a hurricane: buffeted and lifted by the
surging crowd, cacophonous and furious but also strangely joyful.
It
takes them an hour just to reach the main demonstration. When Thunberg
finally approaches the stage, she climbs in her Velcro shoes to a
microphone and begins to speak. The drums fall silent, and thousands
lean in to listen. “The change is going to come from the people
demanding action,” she says, “and that is us.” From where she stands,
she can see in every direction. The view is of a vast sea of young
people from nations all over the world, the great force of them surging
and cresting, ready to rise. —With reporting by Ciara Nugent/Copenhagen; Dan Stewart and Vivienne Walt/Paris
The Fijian Prime Minister has taken a veiled swipe at Australia in his opening speech to the United Nations climate change conference, saying some countries were only paying "lip service" to climate science.
Fijian Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama speaks at the COP25 conference in Madrid. Picture: Getty Images
Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama appeared to target Australia's push to count its emissions reductions under the Kyoto Protocol in meeting the Paris Agreement in the speech in Madrid overnight.
"Instead of taking ambitious steps forward, we're seeing backwards attempts to re-write the Paris Agreement and bring in credits that have already been created under the Kyoto Protocol," Mr Bainimarama said.
Australian officials said recently they believe Australia is the only country seeking to use so called "carry-over credits" from its emissions reduction commitment under the Kyoto Protocol to meet its commitments under the current Paris Agreement.
According to the Australian government, the country's "over-achievement" of its commitments under the previous Kyoto agreement can be counted towards the current reductions target.
It's been reported up to 100 countries are seeking to have this disallowed under the agreement to come from the current conference in Madrid.
"The Pacific is concerned that humanity is on the cusp of a terrifying scenario: the abandonment of science," Mr Bainimarama said.
"While our climate change projects have to be science-driven and evidence-based in order to be approved, certain actors are happy to pay lip service and not meet the demands that well-established science has revealed.
"Worse still, others have put on blinders, and are denying the very existence of an immense wealth of information and science."
Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction Angus Taylor is representing Australia at the international climate change conference. Picture: Sitthixay Ditthavong
Mr Bainimarama also said the world "must adjust course to avert catastrophe".
Energy and Emissions Reduction Minister Angus Taylor didn't address the carryover credits explicitly in his own speech at the beginning of the high-level segment of the conference, but focused on technological innovation and talked up Australia's emissions reductions.
"On recently released forecasts we expect to beat our 2020 targets by 411 million tonnes, which is around 80 per cent of a full year of emissions," he said.
"We can only reduce emissions as fast as the deployment of commercially viable technologies allow," Mr Taylor said.
"This means we need to get the right technology to the marketplace when and where it is needed."
Australia has joined a coalition of countries and businesses called the Leadership Group for Industry Transition, Mr Taylor announced at the opening of the high level segment of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Mr Taylor called for a "clear path" to help countries deliver their goals.
"We need to finalise arrangements for Paris Agreement carbon markets that give us confidence that traded carbon units represent genuine emissions reductions."
Like our Pacific neighbours, we recognise oceans are critical to health, wealth and survival. Australia is a world leader in ocean protection and sustainable use. Energy and Emissions Reduction Minister Angus Taylor
Mr Taylor's speech included Australia's funding commitments to the Pacific.
"Like our Pacific neighbours, we recognise oceans are critical to health, wealth and survival. Australia is a world leader in ocean protection and sustainable use," he said.
Climate and Energy Director at the Australia Institute Richie Merzian is at the conference and said some other attendees at the conference were shocked Mr Taylor hadn't mentioned the unprecedented bushfires currently burning across three Australian states.
"They were really surprised [it wasn't mentioned] with the climate impacts ravaging the country, when it's a standard feature in the UN to relate on personal experience as a way of galvanising both empathy and ambition," Mr Merzian said.
The Prime Minister of Tonga Pohiva Tu'i'onetoa told the conference climate change was the single greatest regional threat to Pacific Island countries, detailing the record rates of coastal erosion, overflow and flash flooding in the tiny nation.
"These are further compounded by the rising in sea-level, three times higher, than the global average, and tropical cyclones that are increasing in intensity, and at a rate that undermines our capacity to respond to, and recover from," Mr Tu'i'onetoa said.
"Tropical Cyclone Gita which hit Tonga, in February 2018, is a strong testament to this increase."
It's not the first time the Fijian Prime Minister has spoken out against what he views as Australia's inaction on climate change. In a speech made in Canberra in September, Mr Bainimarama called for Australia to be "far more ambitious" on climate change and listen to the science.
Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg is a master of staying on topic.AAP/Julian Smith
As bushfires rage and our cities lie shrouded in smoke, climate change is shaping as a likely topic of conversation at the family dinner table this Christmas.
Such discussions can be fraught if family members hold differing
views. You may not all agree on the urgency of dealing with climate
change – or indeed whether it is happening at all.
When I teach the art of argumentation – a core skill of critical thinking – I tell my students about the concept of “point at issue”. This is what the argument is about and should be the focus of rational discussion.
But when debating emotive and controversial topics such as climate change, the point at issue can become lost.
So what to do? We can learn much from Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg – a master of staying on topic.
Family discussion about politics can be fraught - especially climate politics.Flickr
A simple, unwavering message
Thunberg is in the Spanish capital Madrid this week for COP25 – a major conference of nations signed up to the Paris climate agreement.
Thunberg’s solo school strikes in Sweden last year sparked a global movement. But in typical rational style, Thunberg told supporters in Madrid the protests have “achieved nothing” because global emissions are still rising.
Thunberg’s public statements consistently communicate a few key points:
the planet is warming, we are responsible and we need to fix it
hope is fine, but it is pointless without action
economic concerns are irrelevant in the face of collapsing ecosystems
if we do not fix this, future generations will remember us for our failures.
A smoke haze covering the east coast is bringing climate concerns to the fore.Stephen Saphore/AAP
Each
time Thunberg speaks, these issues are centre-stage. She is not
distracted by rhetoric, straw-man arguments, personal abuse, or by
condescension or appeals to economic theory.
For example in a TED talk in March, Thunberg responds with uncommon clarity to those who seek to put the burden of action back on her:
Some people say that I should study to become a climate scientist so
that I can “solve the climate crisis.” But the climate crisis has
already been solved. We already have all the facts and solutions.
Note how the burden is placed back where it belongs: on those who have the power to act now.
Thunberg also refuses to be distracted by patronising comments. When
meeting with the US Senate’s climate crisis taskforce in September, she
was commended for her enthusiasm and replied:
Please save your praise. We don’t want it […] Don’t invite us here to
just tell us how inspiring we are without actually doing anything about
it because it doesn’t lead to anything.
To claims she should be in school rather than protesting, Thunberg says:
Why should any young person be made to study for a future when no one
is doing enough to save that future? What is the point of learning
facts when the most important facts given by the finest scientists are
ignored by our politicians?
Thunberg says she has Asperger’s syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). She describes it as a “superpower” which has “definitely helped me keep this focus”.
Research has found that people with ASD have a heightened ability to focus on some tasks and in particular, to identify “critical” information.
Greta Thunberg has autism spectrum disorder, and describes it as her ‘superpower’AAP
Back to the dinner table
We may not have Thunberg’s natural aptitude for staying on topic. But
we can apply the lessons to our own conversations with friends and
family.
Let’s say I’m having an argument with a cranky uncle about renewable
electricity. I might argue that we should transition to wind and solar
energy because it generates less carbon dioxide than burning fossil
fuels.
My uncle might respond by saying I shouldn’t use any energy at all.
Maybe he’ll say “then stop driving cars” or “don’t turn on your TV”.
But this response is not addressing the point at issue – that
renewable energy generates less carbon than fossil fuels. It is talking
about something else: that any use of power is bad. Really, it’s not so much about using power as how that power is generated.
Moving off the point at issue is a classic “strawman” attack, when the argument is misrepresented and argued from that point.
Keeping the argument on track, and keeping it both civil and productive, is a key skill in critical thinking. It is helped by:
making sure everyone is clear about what the point at issue actually is
bringing the conversation back to the point when it strays, or at
least acknowledging that we are now talking about something else
calling out any misrepresentation of the point.
This will help keep the integrity of the argument intact and avoid it degenerating into an exchange of ideological blows.
If you need extra help, my colleagues and I have produced a paper to help analyse the rationality of climate denial claims. It also helps you find the point at issue, and stay on it.
This is a skill worth developing in discussion with friends and
family. In the maelstrom of ideology surrounding climate change in this
post-truth world, keeping a rational focus is critical.
Frank Jotzo is a professor at the Australian National
University’s Crawford School of Public Policy. He is representing the
ANU as an observer at the UN climate conference.
Here at the 25th UN climate conference in Madrid, Australia’s plan to
use leftover Kyoto credits is seen as an attempt to conceal that the
government is not trying to meet the Paris target. We could do so much
better.
The government expects national emissions in 2030 to be 16
per cent lower than in 2005, the headline Paris target is a 26 per cent
reduction. The actual target is framed as an aggregate reduction during
the 2020s, nevertheless a large gap remains. This is to be filled with
"carry-over credits" from the Kyoto Protocol, the climate treaty that
preceded the Paris Agreement.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued a sober warning in Madrid which other nations are taking seriously. Credit: Getty
Whether
the Paris rules will allow the use of Kyoto credits is under
negotiation right now. A ban is proposed as an option in the latest
negotiating text, but it seems unlikely to come through. The Australian
government has too much riding on it, and UN decisions are by consensus.
We
are the only country planning to “carry over”. Almost all countries
that care are opposed to it. It reminds the world of the “Australia
clause” which the Howard government pushed through at the 1997 Kyoto
summit, allowing Australia to count land-use change reductions. It is
what created the Kyoto carry-over credits in the first place.
The
Australian delegation will insist on "carry-over" and this will come at
a diplomatic cost. Australia will need to ask a favour from almost all
other nations in a forum where the nation now has little to offer, and
which the Prime Minister disparaged in recent speeches. It may affect
bilateral relationships more broadly. It has come up in the free trade
agreement negotiations with the European Union.
The reason is that
many of our trading partners take seriously the warning by UN
Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to the Madrid conference: "We need a
rapid and deep change in the way we do business, how we generate power,
how we build cities, how we move, and how we feed the world. If we don’t
urgently change our way of life, we jeopardise life itself."
The
expectation is that the 2030 targets will be strengthened, not watered
down. Australia should pledge to meet the Paris target without Kyoto
credits, or greatly increase the ambition of Australia’s target. It
would be best to do both.
This is
possible with pragmatic policies for electricity, transport, buildings
and agriculture. Helping the transition from coal power to renewables
along will see continued reductions in electricity sector emissions.
Facilitating the shift to electric vehicles will cut emissions and
improve urban air quality. Building energy efficiency can be improved.
Cleaner and more efficient technologies can be used in industry and
agriculture. Marginal grazing lands can be planted to increase carbon
stocks.
Actually cutting emissions would help position Australia
to succeed economically in the future low-emissions world economy. There
is a grand vision of Australia as a large-scale zero emissions energy
exporter based on our renewables advantage, but this will work only if
we are seen as a constructive player on climate.
The
Madrid talks also present an opportunity to create an international
approach that allows countries to work together to cut emissions, and to
share the credit.
The main game at the Madrid climate talks
is to agree rules for international trading of emissions reductions,
while avoiding double-counting. The Paris Agreement also allows
government-to-government initiatives. Australia should help elaborate
and then implement a system for sharing the credit for bilateral
initiatives to cut emissions. Japan’s "joint crediting mechanism" can be
a model.
Obvious
opportunities are for Australia to help with more effective forest
management, for example in Indonesia, PNG, Vanuatu and the Solomons.
Throughout the Pacific, there are opportunities to replace diesel-based
electricity generation with renewable energy systems. Australian
funding, on top of existing aid, could help make it happen. The
resulting emissions reductions could be shared between our neighbours
and Australia.
It could help heal
relationships with Pacific countries, following the debacle over climate
change at the Pacific Islands Forum. Combined with meaningful action to
cut emissions at home, it would signal that Australian ingenuity can be
used to address climate change, not just for creative accounting.
As
the developed country most affected by climate change, it is in our
interest to lead by example, not to be seen as a recalcitrant.
Report finds sweeping changes underway across the Arctic
Permafrost, seen at the top of the cliff, melts into the Kolyma River outside Zyryanka, Russia, on July 4. Melting permafrost is altering Siberia's landscape and economy. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)
The
Arctic is undergoing a profound, rapid and unmitigated shift into a new
climate state, one that is greener, features far less ice and emits
greenhouse gas emissions from melting permafrost, according to a major
new federal assessment of the region released Tuesday.
The
consequences of these climate shifts will be felt far outside the
Arctic in the form of altered weather patterns, increased greenhouse gas
emissions and rising sea levels from the melting Greenland ice sheet
and mountain glaciers.
The findings are
contained in the 2019 Arctic Report Card, a major federal assessment of
climate change trends and impacts throughout the region. The study
paints an ominous picture of a region lurching to an entirely new and
unfamiliar environment.
Scientists are alarmed that this earth, frozen for millennia, is now
thawing. And the pace of the thaw is picking up. (William Neff/The
Washington Post)
Especially noteworthy is
the report’s conclusion that the Arctic already may have become a net
emitter of planet-warming carbon emissions due to thawing permafrost,
which would only accelerate global warming. Permafrost is the
carbon-rich frozen soil that covers 24 percent of the Northern
Hemisphere’s land mass, encompassing vast stretches of territory across
Alaska, Canada, Siberia and Greenland.
There has
been concern throughout the scientific community that the approximately
1,460 billion to 1,600 billion metric tons of organic carbon stored in
frozen Arctic soils, almost twice the amount of greenhouse gases as what
is contained in the atmosphere, could be released as the permafrost
melts.
Warming temperatures allow microbes
within the soil to convert permafrost carbon into the greenhouse gases —
carbon dioxide and methane — which can be released into the air and
accelerate warming. Ted Schuur, a researcher at Northern Arizona
University and author of the permafrost chapter, said the report “takes
on a new stand on the issue” based on other published work, including a study in Nature Climate Change in November.
Taking
advantage of the new studies — one on regional carbon emissions from
permafrost in Alaska during the warm season, and another on winter
season emissions in the Arctic compared to how much carbon is absorbed
by vegetation during the growing season — the report concludes
permafrost ecosystems could be releasing as much as 1.1 billion to 2.2
billion tons of carbon dioxide per year. This is almost as much as the
annual emissions of Japan and Russia in 2018, respectively.
“These observations signify that the feedback to accelerating climate change may already be underway,” the report concludes.
“Each
of the studies has some parts of the story. Together they really paint
the picture of — we’ve turned this corner for Arctic carbon,” Schuur
said. “Together they complement each other nicely and really in my mind
are a smoking gun for this change already taking place.”
The
report notes there is still considerable uncertainty about carbon
emissions estimates given the relatively limited observational
measurements. But it also warns that the Arctic region — which is
warming at more than twice the rate of the rest of the world — may
already have become the global warming accelerator many have feared.
The findings come just as U.N. climate negotiators meet in Madrid
to address the need for more ambitious cuts in greenhouse gas
emissions, and would mean the world faces an even steeper challenge in
meeting the targets outlined in the 2015 Paris accord.
Schuur
said the carbon being emitted by the Arctic amounts to less than 10
percent of fossil fuel emissions each year. “So it’s a small addition to
what humans are already producing,” he said.
However, that number is likely to grow with time, as the Arctic continues to warm. “We’ve crossed the zero line,” Schuur said.
“We
don’t think the Arctic is going to emit so much more emissions that it
will make fossil fuel emissions irrelevant,” but any extra emissions
complicate the already difficult task of slashing them to net zero by
mid-century to limit global warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius,
he said.
Merritt Turetsky, an ecologist at the
University of Guelph in Ontario who was not involved in the Arctic
Report Card, said three new discoveries support its conclusion.
New
information on fall and winter carbon, as opposed to summer when plants
are active in the far north, “shows much greater ecosystem losses of
carbon to the atmosphere than we expected,” she said in an email. “So
our biosphere in the North is leakier than we thought because soils are
remaining warm and respiring both carbon dioxide and methane.”
She said wildfires are pushing farther north into the boreal forests, which also release stored carbon.
Studies in the past few years have shown that permafrost can respond rapidly to warming and increased rainfall.
“We
know little about abrupt permafrost thaw, and it occurs at local
scales, so [it] is difficult to scale up. But our best estimate shows
that abrupt thaw has the potential to double the climate impacts of
traditional measurements of permafrost thaw,” Turetsky said.
Radical ice loss in the Bering Sea: ‘We fear for our young people’
The
broader Arctic Report Card shows the region is undergoing extensive
changes in the marine environment as well as frozen lands. The Bering
Sea, in particular, has seen “disquieting” shifts in the past two years,
according to the report. What happens here is crucial for the U.S.
economy, given that the region accounts for about 40 percent of the
nation’s annual fish and shellfish catch, worth more than $1 billion.
For
the past two years, the maximum sea ice extent in the Bering Sea has
been at record lows, at about 30 percent of the long-term mean from 1980
through 2010, the new report finds.
This is
due to a few factors, including unusually mild, southerly winds during
winter that pushed sea ice northward and transported warm, moist air
into the Pacific portion of the Arctic. In addition, the late freeze-up
of the bordering Chukchi Sea in the previous fall seasons helped delay
ice formation in the northern Bering Sea, and warm ocean temperatures
from low sea ice conditions slowed the advance of new ice as air
temperatures cooled.
Sea ice in the Bering Sea grew rapidly in mid-November but has slowed dramatically in the past 10 days. As of Monday extent in @NSIDC data is similar to recent years. The trend though is dramatic: barely a third of what was typical Dec 02 in the early '80s. #akwx@Climatologist49pic.twitter.com/OqIiEBaKVn
The wintertime ice retreat
is crucial, since it causes ripple effects on fisheries by affecting
frigid waters that sink near the bottom of the continental shelf. As ice
retreats, taking this cold water with it, a mass migration of fish
species is underway in the Bering Sea. Arctic species such as Pacific
cod and walleye pollock are moving north, replaced by southern species
such as northern rock sole.
In the southeastern
Bering Sea, warming has accelerated to the point that the “cold pool” —
the frigid, salty water that provides a barrier between its southern
stretch and its northern, Arctic region — shrank from covering 56
percent in 2010 to 1.4 percent in 2018. It only inched up to 6.3 percent
this year.
“I don’t think it was on anyone’s
radar that it could disappear,” said Lyle Britt, who oversees the NOAA
Fisheries Bering Sea bottom trawl survey, of the cold pool.
Britt
said he and other researchers are still analyzing the area’s fish to
determine how many have migrated from southern waters.
“This
is a big change to the ecosystem,” he said. “We have a lot of work to
do with genetics just to make sure we know where the fish is coming
from.”
Mellisa Johnson, an Inupiat who is
executive director of Bering Sea Elders Group, said coastal Bering Sea
communities are grappling with how reduced sea ice has cut their access
to meat from seals, walrus and bowhead whales.
“We have to continue to look for alternative food sources,” she said in an interview.
To
illustrate the swiftness and complexity of the changes indigenous
communities are seeing, she said people are “having to create new words
to depict what is going on with our changing environment,” citing a new
type of plant that has shown up in the region as air and ground
temperatures have warmed.
Alaska has had its
hottest year to date in 2019, with no sea ice visible from the shoreline
in Nome as of Dec. 9, which is highly unusual for this time of year.
“We
fear for our young people; we worry that they will grow without the
same foods and places that we have known throughout our lives,” says a
chapter written by a group of indigenous representatives in the Arctic
Report Card. “We are no longer able to reliably predict the weather,”
the report states, citing the reduced use of knowledge passed down from
one generation to the next.
