The Age Of Stability Is Over, And Coronavirus Is Just The Beginning

The Conversation - Wolfgang Knorr

Troutnut / shutterstock

Author Wolfgang Knorr Senior Research Scientist, Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science, Lund University

Humanity has only recently become accustomed to a stable climate. For most of its history, long ice ages punctuated with hot spells alternated with short warm periods. Transitions from cold to warm climates were especially chaotic.

Then, about 10,000 years ago, the Earth suddenly entered into a period of climate stability modern humans had never seen before. But thanks to ever accelerating emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, humanity is now bringing this period to an end.

This loss of stability could be disastrous. If the coronavirus pandemic can teach us anything about the climate crisis it is this: our modern interconnected global economy is much more vulnerable than we thought, and we must urgently become more resilient and better prepared for the unknown.

After all, a stable climate underpins much of modern civilisation. About half of humanity depends on stable monsoon rains for food production. Many agricultural plants need certain temperature variations within a year to produce a stable crop, and heat stress can damage them greatly. We rely on intact glaciers or healthy forest soils to store water for the dry season. Heavy rains and storms can wipe out the infrastructure of whole regions.

These are the sorts of climate impacts that we know about, and have been extensively studied by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But the biggest risk may yet come from climate-related chaos that we did not expect.

Impossible heatwaves – in consecutive years

In 2018, a prolonged heat wave and drought hit much of western and northern Europe and decimated much of the potato harvest in the region. Temperatures in my native Germany reached record highs in a summer that was drier and hotter than in many parts of the Mediterranean. Climate models had predicted Europe’s most extreme heat increases would occur in Greece, Turkey and Ukraine, so the odds of such a heatwave seemed impossibly low.

The Rhine dries up: Germany, July 2019. Friedemann Vogel / EPA

Only one year on, in 2019, western Europe was struck by another “impossible” heat wave. In Germany, with temperatures topping 40°C, the record of the previous year was broken twice. Even in the Netherlands, known for its cool sea breeze even at peak summer, peak temperatures exceeded a searing 39°C.

Huge wildfires arrived decades early

A large part of Australia’s forests are concentrated in the south-east of the country. This valuable ecosystem evolved with fire and thus is supposed to burn frequently. In these natural fires, typically 1-2% of the area is consumed by flames.

Massive bushfires arrived decades before the models predicted. Mick Tsikas / EPA

Wildfire and climate models – including one I worked on myself – did predict a large increase in bushfire activity in the forests of south-east Australia. But they predicted this would happen towards the end of this century. The models certainly did not foresee that megafires wiping out as much as 20% of these forests would strike as early as 2020.

Locusts are a climate crisis

In the long term, the IPCC predicts crop yields will decrease by around 10% or more, but to date it has ignored the possibility of large-scale pest outbreaks, which can wipe out entire harvests.

At the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020, the Arabian peninsula experienced much wetter weather than normal, likely owed to ocean warming. This created conditions that enabled numbers of desert locusts to explode.

Fighting the locusts in Somaliland, March 2020. Daniel Irungu / EPA

This unusual event was followed by another, a storm that shifted most of this locust army, now several hundred billion strong, to East Africa. In Kenya, it became the worst such outbreak for more than 70 years. With the rainy season just arrived and seeds sown for the next cropping season, it is now feared that continued breeding of the locusts will create a second wave that will be far worse than the first one.

Climate scientists tend to focus on slow changes with their climate predictions. But how much the weather becomes more chaotic is notoriously difficult to predict with climate models. We also have only a very superficial understanding of how vulnerable our modern society is to climate chaos and unexpected climate-related events.

Instead of seeing the climate problem as one felt by the next generations, we need to start focusing on what could happen tomorrow, or next year. To do that, we must better understand, appreciate and acknowledge the vulnerability of modern society – and address this vulnerability at its core.

Links

• Why the Indian Ocean is spawning strong and deadly tropical cyclones
• Coronavirus shows we are not at all prepared for the security threat of climate change
• Nature’s comeback? No, the coronavirus pandemic threatens the world’s wildlife
• We climate scientists won’t know exactly how the crisis will unfold until it’s too late
• Richer countries must do more to help those already experiencing the climate crisis
• Climate scientist: our profession is letting down humanity – we must change the way we approach the climate crisis
• Weathermen of Westeros: does the climate in Game of Thrones make sense?

There’s Less Than A Decade Left Before Climate Change Becomes Irreversible—Here’s What Activists Say We Can Do About It

Hello Giggles - Morgan Noll

Scott Heins, Getty Images

In recent years, the climate change conversation has advanced beyond the “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” catchphrase.

Though individual lifestyle changes can have a positive impact over time, the youth activists at the forefront of the climate movement aren’t leading climate strikes in order to get the everyday individual to switch to reusable straws.

 They’re showing up with demands for government officials and policymakers to put people over profit, raise their voices to ask leaders to care about the future of the planet, and communicate a common message: We’re running out of time.

Zero Hour, an education-focused youth climate and environmental justice movement, has a running countdown on the homepage of its site. Less than nine years and 253 days remain on the clock.

That’s how much time is left before the worst impacts of climate change will be irreversible, according to a 2018 special report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Though so much of the climate movement is made up of children and teenaged activists who may not even be eligible to vote yet, they’re pushing for immediate government action because of this sense of urgency.

“A lot of us feel like we have no choice, because we feel like unless we do it, who else is gonna do it?” says Ivy Jaguzny, the 18-year-old press lead for Zero Hour.

If you’re not immersed in the movement, however, the information can be daunting—and it can be hard to figure out exactly what you can do. So we asked climate activists to break down the most important climate justice policies, how to check candidates on their environmental agendas, and how to join the movement.

Their answers boiled down to two main initiatives: getting the Green New Deal worked into the country’s infrastructure and getting fossil fuels out.

So, what is the Green New Deal and why does it matter?

Mike Kemp, Getty Images

The idea of a “Green New Deal” has been around for a while. Investopedia reports that Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Friedman coined the term in a New York Times column in January 2007, where he argued for a transition away from fossil fuels and toward clean, renewable energy through government action.

The name is a reference to former President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s domestic programs—the New Deal—which he designed as a response to the Great Depression.

Since the idea was first conceived, the Green New Deal has become somewhat of an umbrella term for environmental policies, with various politicians adding interpretations of the deal to their platforms. In recent years,

 Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has brought widespread attention to the Green New Deal by putting it at the center of her platform, introducing a policy package in Congress in February 2019.

The 14-page document calls for a “10-year national mobilization” plan that aims to rework current U.S. infrastructure in order to transition to 100% clean and renewable energy. Those 10 years weren’t selected at random: The plan is a direct response to that 2018 report mentioned above, and it’s a proposed answer for beating the clock—and avoiding the point of no return.

As The New York Times reports, the Green New Deal also “calls on the federal government to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions; create high-paying jobs; ensure that clean air, clean water, and healthy food are basic human rights; and end all forms of oppression.”

The Green New Deal is central to the platform of Sunrise Movement, a youth-powered organization dedicated to fighting climate change and creating “millions of good jobs in the process,” as its website reads.

Ritwik Tati, a 16-year-old coordinator for the South Jersey hub of Sunrise Movement, says the group is dedicated to both advocating for and educating people on the policy package.

He likes to explain, however, that the Green New Deal is a vision rather than a specific piece of legislation.

“[At Sunrise Movement,] we’re not necessarily having people unpack what the Green New Deal specifically is and what each climate policy is, but making them understand that we need an aggressive climate solution,” Tati says.

Any climate legislation that aligns with the values of the Green New Deal can be considered a part of it, Tati says. Those values include things like efforts to provide living wages for workers and protect marginalized communities, in addition to more climate-specific policies like bans on fossil fuels and fracking.

Climate activists like Tati also emphasize how important it is to understand climate change as an intersectional issue, one that is as connected to systemic racism as it is the environment.

At Zero Hour, Jaguzny says that they see the current coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic as somewhat of a “dress rehearsal,” showing all of the issues the climate crisis will exacerbate if it’s not addressed.

When we talk about the climate crisis, Jaguzny says, “we don’t talk about the people [who] are actually being hurt by this, which is working people, Black and Brown people, Indigenous people, [and] the same people [who] are being [disproportionately] affected by COVID-19.”

Like the current pandemic, Jaguzny says the climate crisis is going to put pressure on our infrastructure and healthcare system and that, if we’re not prepared, “the people [who] are most vulnerable in this country are going to be really negatively impacted.”

She believes that implementing the Green New Deal is the way to be prepared because of how it addresses the underlying systems of oppression that cause and perpetuate the crisis.

One way the Green New Deal does this is in how it plans for a just transition. The plan acknowledges the fact that many workers will lose their jobs if fossil fuel industries are taken down.

So, a just transition makes sure that these workers—many of whom are from low-income, marginalized communities—aren’t simply laid off and ignored, but are supplied with the training and resources to access jobs in the clean energy industry. The plan also pushes for those jobs to offer benefits and living wages.

If implemented, climate activists believe the Green New Deal could provide a holistic approach to reversing the climate crisis. But there’s one major thing standing in its way.

Lukas Schulze, Getty Images

“The biggest thing blocking a Green New Deal is the investment in fossil fuels,” Jaguzny says.

The environmentalism movement has long advocated for a ban on fossil fuels due to their negative impact on the environment.

When fossil fuels are burned, they release carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to the environment, making them a primary contributor to global warming and climate change, according to National Geographic. To make matters worse, fossil fuel companies are significant stakeholders in the climate conversation, which can halt any large-scale progress.

Climate activist Ayisha Siddiqa has seen this dynamic play out firsthand. Siddiqa was one of the lead organizers of the September 20th New York City Climate Strike, which attracted 250,000 people, according to Vox. “We did all of our homework,” she says. “Me and my peers worked day in, day out for three entire months planning.”

At the age of 21, Siddiqa says she’s learned things that people usually learn in their late thirties, things like: how to get a permit for an event, how to write a press release, how to lobby. She and her peers put in tireless work to gain momentum for the protests and the climate movement. Then, a few days later, the U.N. Climate Action Summit happened.

“We came in with packets of information that we wanted to say, and we were met with Instagram influencers, people teaching us how to use Photoshop and Adobe Flash Player at the U.N. And policy was not even spoken about,” Siddiqa says.

The same thing happened a few months later at COP25, the 25th United Nations Climate Change Conference. Climate activists showed up, ready to talk policy, and they were shut out from having serious conversations. And Siddiqa has a pretty a good idea for why this happened: COP25 was sponsored by some of Spain’s biggest greenhouse gas polluters and fossil fuel companies.

“If you can understand what’s happening, it’s actually very scary,” Siddiqa says. “The body of government, the place where decisions are supposed to be made, are being sponsored by fossil fuels. How in the world are you supposed to expect actual change if the same people responsible for causing the damage are [controlling the decision-making]?”

The short answer? You can’t. That’s why Siddiqa co-founded Polluters Out, an organization fighting for a conflict of interest policy that would remove the influence of the fossil fuel industry from the places where climate decisions are made.

So, what can you do to support these movements?

Brenton Geach, Getty Images

For starters, you can join them. Polluters Out, Sunrise Movement, and Zero Hour all have various options on their site for those who are interested in taking action to fight climate change. Extinction Rebellion, 350.org, and Fridays For Future are more groups with goals to fight the climate crisis.

Siddiqa also urges people to sign Polluters Out’s petition, which demands that “Patricia Espinosa, executive secretary to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), refuse funding from fossil fuel corporations for COP26.”

On a more local level, Tati recommends that people focus on getting their elected officials to sign the No Fossil Fuel Money Pledge. The pledge is intended to get politicians to refuse to take any contributions over $200 from oil, gas, and coal industry executives, lobbyists, or PACs.

Jaguzny also wants to see a commitment from the government to stop bailing out fossil fuel companies when they’re in debt and to start holding them accountable.

“Stop giving these companies tax breaks. Stop allowing them to destroy communities and not pay for it,” she says. “The effects of fossil fuels are local, like there are local communities all over the United States that are being hurt by these companies and the companies don’t do anything. They just turn away.“
So Jaguzny’s advice for individuals is to help raise awareness about how these companies are affecting their local communities and to put the pressure on their local governments to divest from fossil fuels.

When it comes to selecting a candidate to endorse or vote for, Tati says that Sunrise Movement looks for “climate champions,” candidates who support the Green New Deal and have shown a commitment to climate legislation in the past.

This election cycle, the movement has endorsed Senate candidates like Kentucky State Representative Charles Booker, former Speaker of the Colorado House of Representatives Andrew Romanoff, and Senator Ed Markey (who sponsored the Green New Deal alongside AOC).

As far as the presidential election goes, with Bernie Sanders now out of the race, Tati says, “I think it’s important that we see that a [Joe] Biden presidency is exponentially better than a Trump presidency, even if it doesn’t align with the goals of the climate movement.”

Biden doesn’t see that as top priority, however./ “Focusing on congressional elections and state legislature elections [are] more important because we may have a Democratic president in office, but none of this progressive policy can be passed without a Congress that is more progressive and is majority Democrat,” Tati says.

Below is a checklist of what Tati and Jaguzny believe a climate champion candidate should look like.

A climate champion candidate:
 
1. Supports the Green New Deal
Though there is some room for interpretation with the Green New Deal, Tati says it’s important not to compromise for a less aggressive version.
This would be one that involves changes, like allowing for a more lenient timeline on reducing emissions, or one that compromises any of the fundamental values which prioritize people over profit.
For example, Tati explains that some Democrats (like Nancy Pelosi and Biden) are advocating for net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, which, according to the IPCC’s timeline, will be too late.

2. Supports a ban on fracking and divestment from fossil fuels
Fracking, short for hydraulic fracturing, is a method of extracting natural gas and oil by fracturing the earth with pressurized liquid.
Though some argue that fracking natural gas is a cleaner option than drilling for oil or coal, climate activists argue that the health risks far outweigh any comparative benefits.
According to Greenpeace, a non-governmental environmental organization, fracking can cause a serious threat to local water resources, and some of the chemicals used in the process have been identified as cancer-causing contaminants.
A 2017 study published in the journal Science Advances also found that infants born within about two miles of fracking sites are more likely to suffer from poor health.
As far as divestment from fossil fuels goes, Jaguzny wants to see candidates “acknowledging that the era of fossil fuels is ending and acknowledging that we really cannot get anywhere if we’re still hanging onto fossil fuels.”

3. Supports an economy that is driven by small businesses and localized production
“One thing that COVID-19 has made abundantly clear is that having these huge multinational corporations running the show isn’t economically sustainable, and as soon as any pressure is applied it totally falls apart in a crisis,” Jaguzny says.
She argues that an economy driven by local businesses is far more sustainable, since there’s no shipping overseas or exploitation of workers in other countries.

4. Supports universal healthcare
“Climate change is a healthcare issue,” Tati asserts. “And if we don’t have Medicare for all, the Green New Deal won’t be able to sustain itself.”
The Environmental Protection Agency put out an analysis in 2017 of the impacts of climate change on human health. The findings showed correlations with medical issues like heatstroke, respiratory illness, and an increased risk of the spread of disease.
“The severity of these health risks will depend on the ability of public health and safety systems to address or prepare for these changing threats, as well as factors such as an individual’s behavior, age, gender, and economic status,” the report reads.

5. Shows a willingness to pay for the demands of the Green New Deal
Jaguzny says she’s heard countless legislators tell her, “We can’t pay for your demands.” Based on things like the recent federal relief package and other ways she’s seen the government pull together resources, she says, “We see that and we kind of call bullshit.”
AOC has made it clear that the Green New Deal will be expensive, but she argues that the economic benefits will outweigh the costs. Though the specific costs of the policy package aren’t entirely clear, some evaluations have aligned with AOC’s argument.
For example, the Green New Deal advocates for a smart power grid for the entire country. A 2011 study by the Electric Power Research Institute found that this could cost as much as $476 billion, but it could lead to $2 trillion in benefits.

6. Uplifts marginalized voices
Tati emphasizes the importance of endorsing a candidate who gives voice to underrepresented communities, especially Indigenous communities.
“Not only did we steal land that wasn’t rightfully ours” from them, Tati says, but Indigenous communities have also historically shown a deeper connection with the environment.
“We need to make sure that their voices are represented and that they have a stake in this.”

Links

• These 7 women are the eco-warriors fighting for our future
• Going Green Without Going Mad
• Zero Hour
• IPCC - Special Report: Global Warming Of 1.5 ºC
• Why young climate activists have captured the world’s attention
• Green New Deal (pdf)
• What Is the Green New Deal? A Climate Proposal, Explained
• Sunrise Movement

The First Three Months Of 2020 Are Already Nearing Temperature Records

Quartz - Michael J. Coren

Records keep on falling

Get ready for a hot one. The first three months of 2020 are now the second-hottest on record going back to 1880, according to NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information.

That lines up with the last decade of warming. This March marks the 423rd consecutive month that temperatures have exceeded the 20th-century global average. Last year was the second hottest on record, according to NOAA, following 2016. All five of the warmest years have been recorded since 2015.

The first three months of 2020 are already nearing temperature records 

Monthly temperature anomalies above 20th-century global averages (2000-2020)

Quartz | qz.com Data: NOAA

The early heat makes it virtually certain that 2020 will place in the ranks of the hottest years. Global land and ocean surface temperatures were 2.09°F (1.16°C) above average. 

Records were set across the globe, particularly in eastern Europe and Asia, where temperatures were 5.4°F (3.0°C) above average.

How much hotter is it going to get? Global climate models have proved remarkably accurate, and the world is now running closer to those projected by Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change in 2015. 

Cities will feel the heat sooner: Temperatures in cities such as Moscow, London, Seattle are expected to shift from temperate to sub-tropical, rising 3.5° C to 6° C above normal, according to 2019 research in PLOS One.

Globally, research suggests we’ll see close to 2°C warming by the end of century, even in the most optimistic scenario. And that’s not the path we’re on.

In 2015, scientists introduced “shared socioeconomic pathways” reflecting different ways the world might evolve along key indices such as population, urbanization, and economic growth. 

We’re now far closer to what modelers refer to as the “regional rivalry — a rocky road” scenario, reflecting more nationalism and reduced cooperation. That scenario has global temperature rising more than 4 °C above pre-industrial averages.

Links

• NOAA: March 2020 global temperature second warmest on record
• 2019 was 2nd hottest year on record for Earth say NOAA, NASA
• Should we expect each year in the next decade (2019-2028) to be ranked among the top 10 warmest years globally?
• Even 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted global warming
• How hot will Earth get by 2100?

(US) The Western U.S. Is Locked In The Grips Of The First Human-Caused Megadrought, Study Finds

Washington Post - Andrew Freedman | Darryl Fears

Only one drought in the past 1,200 years comes close to the ongoing, global warming-driven event

Water levels at the Ward Creek Reservoir in Grand Mesa, Colo., have gone down in recent years because of persistent drought conditions. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)

A vast region of the western United States, extending from California, Arizona and New Mexico north to Oregon and Idaho, is in the grips of the first climate change-induced megadrought observed in the past 1,200 years, a study shows.

The finding means the phenomenon is no longer a threat for millions to worry about in the future, but is already here.

The megadrought has emerged while thirsty, expanding cities are on a collision course with the water demands of farmers and with environmental interests, posing nightmare scenarios for water managers in fast-growing states.

A megadrought is broadly defined as a severe drought that occurs across a broad region for a long duration, typically multiple decades.

Unlike historical megadroughts triggered by natural climate cycles, emissions of heat-trapping gases from human activities have contributed to the current one, the study finds.

Warming temperatures and increasing evaporation, along with earlier spring snowmelt, have pushed the Southwest into its second-worst drought in more than a millennium of observations.

The study, published in the journal Science on Thursday, compares modern soil moisture data with historical records gleaned from tree rings, and finds that when compared with all droughts seen since the year 800 across western North America, the 19-year drought that began in 2000 and continued through 2018 (this drought is still ongoing, though the study’s data is analyzed through 2018) was worse than almost all other megadroughts in this region.

The researchers, who painstakingly reconstructed soil moisture records from 1,586 tree-ring chronologies to determine drought severity, found only one megadrought that occurred in the late 1500s was more intense.

Historical megadroughts, spanning vast regions and multiple decades, were triggered by natural fluctuations in tropical ocean conditions, such as La Niña, the cyclic cooling of waters in the tropical Pacific.

“The megadrought era seems to be reemerging, but for a different reason than the [past] megadroughts,” said Park Williams, the study’s lead author and a researcher at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University.

Although many areas in the West had a productive wet season in 2019 and some this year, “you can’t go anywhere in the West without having suffered drought on a millennial scale,” Williams said, noting that megadroughts contain relatively wet periods interspersed between parched years.

“I think the important lesson that comes out of this is that climate change is not a future problem,” said Benjamin I. Cook, a NASA climate scientist and co-author of the study. “Climate change is a problem today. The more we look, the more we find this event was worse because of climate change.”

The study is part scientific grunt work, involving sifting through drought records to find past instances of comparable conditions, and part sophisticated sleuthing that employs computer models to determine how climate change is altering the likelihood of an event like this one.

Cook said the researchers analyzed climate models for the region, which showed warming trends and changes in precipitation. They compared soil moisture with and without global warming-induced trends, “and we were able to determine that 30 to 50 percent of the current drought is attributable to climate change.”

That conclusion is a first, says Jonathan Overpeck, a climate researcher at the University of Michigan who did not participate in the new study.

“They are the first to show conclusively that we’re experiencing our nation’s first megadrought of the instrumental era,” he said via email.

“The real take home,” Overpeck said, “is that the Southwest is being baked by the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities, and the future implications are dire if we don’t stop climate change.”

Looking for a megadrought, only to find it’s already here

Fire crews look for remaining hot spots left over by the Getty Fire, which destroyed a dozen homes, during the early morning hours in Brentwood, Calif., in October. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post

In 2015, Cook took part in a study that predicted a megadrought would grip the American Southwest starting about 2050 and persist for 35 years, with a few wet years to break long dry spells.

At the time, California was experiencing a severe four-year drought. As it dragged past a fifth year, Cook and others asked a question: “Are these changes in drought patterns that we expected in the future already beginning to happen?”

They then set out to answer that question.

For the study, the authors started from scratch, analyzing tree-ring data rather than relying solely on archived information. They took apart calculations already in the record and modified them where needed. Not only was a megadrought happening, they concluded, it had been in progress since the turn of the century.

The same year that Cook and other researchers published their first study, a Stanford University scientist, Noah Diffenbaugh, led a separate study that said rising temperatures and significant declines in snow and rainfall will parch California for years to come.

Diffenbaugh, a professor and senior fellow who studies the Southwest, had also analyzed data showing that the region was becoming hotter and drier. He said Thursday’s study, which he was not involved with, is a breakthrough because of its comparison of droughts in the past two decades to those in the previous thousand years.

“Placing the two-decade period in the whole region in the context of the last millennium is very striking, very powerful,” Diffenbaugh said. “We can conclude that without the warming, this period would not have produced such a severe, regionwide drought.”

What this means for the West

Valerie Trouet, a researcher at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona, says that the megadroughts of the past brought about major societal impacts, particularly those that persisted for decades.

For example, the megadrought seen in the late 800s is thought to have instigated the downfall of the Mayan civilization. The severe drought in the 16th century may have contributed to the Chichimeca War in Mexico, during which Native Americans and European settlers fought for decades.

“All of these past megadroughts have had severe impacts,” Trouet said in an interview. “We can expect there to be societal impacts now, too.”

These effects may not be as devastating in the future, however. Modern humans have more ways to adapt, Cook said.

“There are a lot of things we can do about it. People in the West are dealing with this drought in a number of ways,” Cook said.

California has already provided a model for living in a warmer and drier region, although it has involved sacrifice at times. Amid its drought in 2015, the state took aggressive steps to preserve water and limit wildfires on thirsty land with varying success. Former governor Jerry Brown (D) imposed the first water restrictions in state history and declared that watering lawns was going to be “a thing of the past” in California.

Water utilities essentially rationed supply, telling residents to dramatically cut the minutes they showered to no longer than 12 and all but mandating more efficient machines for laundry and dish washing.

Utilities encouraged homeowners to purchase new appliances with rebates subsidized by the state, water bills spiked and penalties were imposed on any household that went over their limits. Neighbors spied on neighbors who washed cars, watered grass and sprayed driveways, all outlawed.

A swimming pool contrasts with the drought-dried landscape in East Porterville, Calif., in 2015. With access to water limited, the pool's owner doesn't drain it, instead using chemicals to keep it clean. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)

East Porterville, Calif., in the Central Valley became a town without water. A church set up a shower trailer so residents whose wells went dry could wash. The state placed water tanks outside homes so their toilets would flush. Laundering clothes, washing hands and brushing teeth became luxuries.

The drought and the drive to save water had environmental consequences, as well. It resulted in the death of trees that improved air quality, provided animal habitats and beautified urban areas across California. Urban trees joined about 12.5 million wild trees that died in dry California forests during 2015’s drought, according to the U.S. Forest Service.

Such serious drought effects happened with only about 1 degree Celsius of warming since the industrial revolution, Diffenbaugh said. “The impacts we’ve already seen from one degree of warming really highlights the intensification of what’s coming,” he said.


Extreme weather, like the polar vortex, is becoming more common as the Arctic continues to be disrupted by climate change. (Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)

Links

• Two degrees Celsius: Extreme climate change has arrived in America
• Climate change made a southwestern U.S. drought one of the worst in 1,200 years
• Climate change: US megadrought 'already under way'
• US Drought Could Last A Century As We Now Enter A Megadrought, Study Finds
• US megadrought is being made more intense by effects of climate change
• Southwest Drought Rivals Those of Centuries Ago, Thanks to Climate Change
• The western U.S. is locked in the grips of the first human-caused megadrought, study finds

(US) Think This Pandemic Is Bad? We Have Another Crisis Coming

New York Times - Rhiana Gunn-Wright

Addressing climate change is a big-enough idea to revive the economy.

A home in Baton Rouge, La., near an ExxonMobil oil refinery. Credit...Emily Kask for The New York Times

Rhiana Gunn-Wright is the director of climate policy at the Roosevelt Institute. She has worked with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the creation of the Green New Deal. Gunn-Wright was a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford in 2013.

On the last Friday in March, I lost hope. I have always believed in America: not in our inherent goodness — I am too black for that — but in our sheer animal will to survive.

Crisis after crisis, our country has evolved to meet the moment, even if that meant changing the way we thought the world worked or striving to upend the imbalance of power.

But on that Friday, I was on my couch working when the messages started to pour in.

Friends sent me video after video of Republican senators debating stimulus measures to address the coronavirus crisis, standing in the Senate chamber, saying that the Green New Deal — a proposal that I helped create — was the reason millions of Americans would not receive the help that they need.

I was furious. Of the nearly $2 trillion in aid proposed in that first version of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, known as the CARES Act, $500 billion went toward a business-relief fund with little to no oversight. Fifty-eight billion of this was earmarked for airlines, and a lax definition of eligible businesses created a loophole for oil and gas.

The bill included no climate protections, so the claim that it was being held up over Green New Deal provisions was absurd. And the changes proposed by Democrats — emissions reductions for airlines, limiting bailouts for fossil fuel industries, protections for airline workers — were modest.

The senators I saw did not mention those things. Nor did they mention that the airlines had requested $50 billion after spending $45 billion on stock buybacks over the past five years.

They did not mention that emissions reductions requested would not be required until 2025 or that when they were, the reductions would be less than 3 percent per year. And no one stood up and asked why corporations should be exempt from loan terms when the rest of us are not.

Why is it “opportunism” when we try to design policy that would address more than one problem at a time, but it’s “efficiency” when businesses do the same? (The final version of the CARES Act does not provide targeted funding for fossil fuels and reduced the aid for passenger airlines to $25 billion. None of the climate policies mentioned were included in the final version of the bill.)

Covid-19 and the economic collapse it has caused have laid bare how connected our problems are. Congress and the Federal Reserve are not going to lay out trillions of dollars, over and over, in perpetuity.

Refusing to include measures related to climate and environmental justice in economic stimulus packages related to the coronavirus is not neutral when there is no guarantee of other opportunities to do so later.

We need to design the stimulus not only to help the U.S. economy recover but to also become more resilient to the climate crisis, the next multitrillion-dollar crisis headed our way.

Pandemics like the coronavirus may occur more often when climate change is unabated. Warming and changing weather patterns shift the vectors and spread of disease. Heavily polluting industries also contribute to disease transmission.

 Studies have linked factory farming — one of the largest sources of methane emissions — to faster-mutating, more virulent pathogens. The same corporations that exacerbated the climate crisis are literally helping to create deadlier diseases, more quickly, in a world that keeps changing how they spread.

Similarly, the same populations that are bearing the brunt of the health and economic effects of the coronavirus are the same populations that bear the brunt of fossil fuel pollution — which, in turn, makes them more vulnerable to serious complications.

In three of the states with the highest number of Covid-19 cases — Illinois, Michigan and Louisiana — African-Americans made up 40 to 70 percent of deaths from the disease, far outpacing the percentage of black people in each state. Many of the black communities ravaged by Covid-19 are “front-line communities” — where residents live adjacent to heavily polluting industries.

If you’re black or Latinx — and especially if you’re poor — it is difficult not to live in a front-line community. Oil, gas and petrochemical industries have concentrated so heavily in low-income, majority-black-and-brown areas that black people are 75 percent more likely to live near industrial facilities than the average American.

Metro Detroit, the epicenter of Michigan’s Covid-19 outbreak, is home to steel mills, waste-processing plants and the only oil refinery in the state — all in or near low-income, black and Latinx neighborhoods.

The people most likely to die from toxic fumes are the same people most likely to die from Covid-19. It’s like we are watching a preview of the worst possible impacts of the climate crisis roll right before our eyes.

Emissions from the Marathon oil refinery in Detroit have been an ongoing concern for the neighborhoods within its range.  Credit...Erin Kirkland for The New York Times

Leaders on both sides of the aisle have argued that folding policies to address climate and environmental injustice into coronavirus-related legislative packages would distract from efforts to provide immediate relief.

But addressing climate change and environmental injustice will not diffuse efforts to address the virus and its economic fallout if we apply intersectional policies such as the Green New Deal.

They are designed to address connected issues in a way that protects the most vulnerable while building a more just and sustainable economy. Some states have already begun to connect the coronavirus to climate action. New York, for example, passed the Accelerated Renewable Energy Growth and Community Benefit Act on April 3.

The legislation comes on the heels of the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act — sometimes referred to as New York’s Green New Deal. And if New York’s response is any indication, none of this appears to have detracted from efforts to stop the spread of the coronavirus.

Addressing climate change doesn’t have to slow down the economic recovery, either. In fact, it can push it forward. No one knows the depth of the recession, but it is hard to see how we will put the 16 million people who have filed for unemployment back to work without significant public investment.

If history is any indication, rebounding from an economic disruption this large requires an equally large spike in demand and production.

Outside of war, climate change is the only issue large enough to provide such a spike. Now is the time to create policies that provide immediate relief to communities, such as federal assistance to transition homes and businesses to renewable energy; give “green” fiscal aid to states; and fuel economic recovery with the creation of federally funded green jobs. But none of this can happen so long as our leaders keep convincing themselves that the greatest country in the world cannot walk and chew gum at the same time.

A climate-focused economic recovery — much less a coronavirus response that acknowledges the climate crisis — could require a new Congress and a new president, a tall order in an America this divided.

But maybe it is time to stop acting as though politics is a force of nature when we are facing actual and deadly forces of nature. It’s past time to elect leaders who are fit to handle the crises we face, instead of hoping for problems small enough to fit the leaders we have.

The Americans I know would like to survive, even if it means our country has to evolve — which many of us have been ready for long before the pandemic.

Links

• How Climate Change Increases Our Risk For Pandemics
• U.S. airlines want a $50 billion bailout. They spent $45 billion buying back their stock.
• House Democrats would give airlines, contractors $40 billion bailout
• How might climate change affect the spread of viruses?
• Climate change and health: Impacts and risks
• Unpacking New York's Big New Climate Bill: A Primer

(AU) We Just Spent Two Weeks Surveying The Great Barrier Reef. What We Saw Was An Utter Tragedy

The Conversation - Terry Hughes | Morgan Pratchett

Author supplied

Authors Terry Hughes Distinguished Professor, James Cook University Morgan Pratchett Professor, ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University

The Australian summer just gone will be remembered as the moment when human-caused climate change struck hard. First came drought, then deadly bushfires, and now a bout of coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef – the third in just five years.

Tragically, the 2020 bleaching is severe and the most widespread we have ever recorded.

Coral bleaching at regional scales is caused by spikes in sea temperatures during unusually hot summers. The first recorded mass bleaching event along Great Barrier Reef occurred in 1998, then the hottest year on record.

Since then we’ve seen four more mass bleaching events – and more temperature records broken – in 2002, 2016, 2017, and again in 2020.

This year, February had the highest monthly sea surface temperatures ever recorded on the Great Barrier Reef since the Bureau of Meteorology’s records began in 1900.

Source: Australian Academy of Science.

Not a pretty picture

We surveyed 1,036 reefs from the air during the last two weeks in March, to measure the extent and severity of coral bleaching throughout the Great Barrier Reef region. Two observers, from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, scored each reef visually, repeating the same procedures developed during early bleaching events.

The accuracy of the aerial scores is verified by underwater surveys on reefs that are lightly and heavily bleached. While underwater, we also measure how bleaching changes between shallow and deeper reefs.

Of the reefs we surveyed from the air, 39.8% had little or no bleaching (the green reefs in the map). However, 25.1% of reefs were severely affected (red reefs) – that is, on each reef more than 60% of corals were bleached. A further 35% had more modest levels of bleaching.

Bleaching isn’t necessarily fatal for coral, and it affects some species more than others. A pale or lightly bleached coral typically regains its colour within a few weeks or months and survives.

The 2020 coral bleaching event was the second-worst in more than two decades. ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies

But when bleaching is severe, many corals die. In 2016, half of the shallow water corals died on the northern region of the Great Barrier Reef between March and November. Later this year, we’ll go underwater to assess the losses of corals during this most recent event.

Compared to the four previous bleaching events, there are fewer unbleached or lightly bleached reefs in 2020 than in 1998, 2002 and 2017, but more than in 2016. Similarly, the proportion of severely bleached reefs in 2020 is exceeded only by 2016. By both of these metrics, 2020 is the second-worst mass bleaching event of the five experienced by the Great Barrier Reef since 1998.

The unbleached and lightly bleached (green) reefs in 2020 are predominantly offshore, mostly close to the edge of the continental shelf in the northern and southern Great Barrier Reef. However, offshore reefs in the central region were severely bleached again. Coastal reefs are also badly bleached at almost all locations, stretching from the Torres Strait in the north to the southern boundary of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.

CC BY-ND

For the first time, severe bleaching has struck all three regions of the Great Barrier Reef – the northern, central and now large parts of the southern sectors. The north was the worst affected region in 2016, followed by the centre in 2017.

In 2020, the cumulative footprint of bleaching has expanded further, to include the south. The distinctive footprint of each bleaching event closely matches the location of hotter and cooler conditions in different years.

Poor prognosis

Of the five mass bleaching events we’ve seen so far, only 1998 and 2016 occurred during an El Niño – a weather pattern that spurs warmer air temperatures in Australia.

But as summers grow hotter under climate change, we no longer need an El Niño to trigger mass bleaching at the scale of the Great Barrier Reef. We’ve already seen the first example of back-to-back bleaching, in the consecutive summers of 2016 and 2017. The gap between recurrent bleaching events is shrinking, hindering a full recovery.

For the first time, severe bleaching has struck all three regions of the Great Barrier Reef. ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies

After five bleaching events, the number of reefs that have escaped severe bleaching continues to dwindle. Those reefs are located offshore, in the far north and in remote parts of the south.

The Great Barrier Reef will continue to lose corals from heat stress, until global emissions of greenhouse gasses are reduced to net zero, and sea temperatures stabilise. Without urgent action to achieve this outcome, it’s clear our coral reefs will not survive business-as-usual emissions.

Links

• I studied what happens to reef fish after coral bleaching. What I saw still makes me nauseous
• 'This situation brings me to despair': two reef scientists share their climate grief
• Attention United Nations: don't be fooled by Australia's latest report on the Great Barrier Reef
• (AU) Scientists Trial Cloud Brightening Equipment To Shade And Cool Great Barrier Reef
• Big Parts Of The Great Barrier Reef Are Dying
• More Than Half Of Remote Reefs In Coral Sea Marine Park Suffered Extreme Bleaching
• (AU) Great Barrier Reef Found To Be Coral Bleached From North To South For First Time
• Rescuing The Great Barrier Reef: How Much Can Be Saved, And How Can We Do It?
• Climate Crisis May Have Pushed World's Tropical Coral Reefs To Tipping Point Of 'Near-Annual' Bleaching
• (AU) Great Barrier Reef’s Latest Bleaching Confirmed By Marine Park Authority
• (AU) Climate Change The Biggest Threat To Great Barrier Reef: Ley

Greta's World

Rolling Stone - Stephen Rodrick

How one Swedish teenager armed with a homemade sign ignited a crusade and became the leader of a movement 

Jack Davison for Rolling Stone

There is persona and there is reality in Greta Thunberg. It is Valentine’s Day in her hometown of Stockholm, but there’s only wind, no hearts and flowers. A few hundred kids mill about, with a smattering of adults. If there were not signs reading “Our Earth, We Only Have One,” it could be mistaken for a field trip to the ABBA museum.

But where is Greta? I find a scrum of reporters interviewing a child in a purple puffer jacket, pink mittens, and a homemade-looking knit hat. It takes me a minute to realize that it’s Greta. She is 17, but could pass for 12. I can’t quite square the fiery speaker with the micro teen in front of me. She seems in need of protection.

Of course, this is emphatically wrong. Greta Thunberg has Asperger’s, which, she says, gives her pinpoint focus on climate minutiae while parrying and discarding even the smallest attempt at flattery. We stand near the Swedish Parliament house, where less than two years ago Thunberg started her Skolstrejk för klimatet, School Strike for Climate.

Back then, it was just Greta, a sign, and a lunch of bean pasta in a reusable glass jar. Then it was two people, and then a dozen, and then an international movement. I mention the bravery of her speeches, but she waves me away. She wants to talk about the loss of will among the olds.

“It seems like the people in power have given up,” says Thunberg, taking her hat off and pushing back her mussed up brown-blond hair. She remains on message despite the tourists and teens taking her picture and mugging behind us. “They say it’s too hard — it’s too much of a challenge. But that’s what we are doing here. We have not given up because this is a matter of life and death for countless people.”

It was my second encounter with Greta in three weeks. Back in January, before the Coronavirus brought the world to its knees, forcing Greta to move her Friday protests online, she was in Davos, Switzerland, for the annual conference of the World Economic Forum, where billionaires helo into the Swiss resort town and talk about solving the world’s problems without making their lives any harder. Thunberg had appeared last year and made her now iconic “Our House Is on Fire” speech, in which she declared the climate crisis to be the mortal threat to our planet. Solve it or all the other causes — feminism, human rights, and economic justice — would not matter.

“Either we choose to go on as a civilization or we don’t,” said Thunberg with cold precision. “That is as black or white as it gets. There are no gray areas when it comes to survival.”

The speech made Thunberg the unlikely and reluctant hero of the climate crisis. She crossed the ocean in a sailboat — she doesn’t fly for environmental reasons — to speak before the United Nations. She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year, conjuring the manic jealousy of Donald Trump, who called the honor “so ridiculous” and suggested she go to the movies and chill out.

In Davos, the illuminati prattled on about planting a trillion trees, even as we are still clear-cutting actual trees from the Amazon all the way to Thunberg’s beloved Sweden. This did not amuse nor placate the hoodie-wearing Greta. She seemed irritated and perhaps a little sick; she canceled an appearance the day before because she wasn’t feeling well. She was in no mood for flattery and nonsense. So when Time editor Edward Felsenthal asked her how she dealt with all the haters, Greta didn’t even try to answer diplomatically.

“I would like to say something that I think people need to know more than how I deal with haters,” she answered, before launching into details from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report. She mentioned that if we are to have even a 67 percent chance of limiting global temperature change to under 1.5 C, the point where catastrophic changes begin, we have less than 420 gigatons of CO2 that we can emit before we pass the no-going-back line. Thunberg stated that, at the current rate, we have eight years to change everything.

Thunberg’s face was controlled fury. This was the persona: an adolescent iron-willed truth teller. The Davos one-percenters clapped and rattled their Rolexes. It has become a disconcerting pattern for Thunberg appearances that would be repeated at the European Commission: Greta tells the adults they are fools and their plans are lame and shortsighted. They still give her a standing ovation. A few minutes later, she was gone and the audience dispersed into a fleet of black BMWs and Mercedes, belching diesel into the Alpine sky.

Greta Thunberg illustration by Shepard Fairey. Based on a photograph by Markus Schreiber/AP Images/Shutterstock

My Greta travels featured a Vancouver-Zurich round trip and then an L.A.-Stockholm trip. In between, I fly from Vancouver to L.A. for another story. It’s the job, but I take stock in horror and calculate that my three flights burn more carbon than the yearly usage of the average citizen of more than 200 countries. I torch the atmosphere so I can hear others praise the girl who won’t fly.

“The phrase ‘A little child shall lead them’ has come to mind more than once,” Al Gore tells me in Davos, before sharing his favorite Greta moment. It was at the U.N. summit last fall. “She said to the assembled world leaders, ‘You say you understand the science, but I don’t believe you. Because if you did and then you continue to act as you do, that would mean you’re evil. And I don’t believe that.’” Gore shook his head in wonderment. “Wow.” He then gives a history lesson: “There have been other times in human history when the moment a morally-based social movement reached the tipping point was the moment when the younger generation made it their own. Here we are.”

Activist-actress Jane Fonda was so inspired by Greta that she has been hosting a series of Fire Drill Fridays. “I was just filled with depression and hopelessness, and then I started reading about Greta,” Fonda tells me one winter afternoon in Los Angeles. “She inspired me to get out there and do more.”

But in Stockholm, the world of presidential taunts, former vice presidents slathering praise, and Oscar winners rhapsodizing seems far away.

Outside of the Parliament building, Greta tells me she doesn’t worry about her safety despite Trump and others speaking cruelly about her on social media. (According to her mother, locals have shoved excrement into the family mailbox.) Later in February, she would march in Bristol, England, and be met by social media posts suggesting she deserved to be sexually assaulted.

“It’s just the people with 10 accounts who sit and write anonymously on Twitter and so on,” Greta says. “It’s nothing you can take seriously.”

Still, all is not rotten. America has come up with the Green New Deal. In Trumplandia, that seems like a beacon of hope, right?

Nope.

“If you look at the graphs to stay below the 1.5 degree Celsius global average temperature and you read the Green New Deal, you see that it doesn’t add up,” says Thunberg with some impatience. She references her Davos speech about how the world only has 420 gigatons of CO2 to burn over the next eight years or the 1.5 goal becomes impossible. “If we are to be in line with the carbon-dioxide budget, we need to focus on doing things now instead of making commitments like 10, or 20, 30 years from now. Of course, the Green New Deal is not in line with our carbon-dioxide budget.”

Meanwhile, the main criticism of the Green New Deal at home is that it moves too fast in getting the United States to zero carbon emission by 2050. But Greta doesn’t do politics.

“At least it has got people to start talking about the climate crisis more,” says Thunberg in a tone that suggests the slightest of praise. “That of course is a step in the right direction, I guess.”

There’s more to say, but now it’s time to march. The children’s crusade forms into a regimented mob. Greta moves to the front and holds a Skolstrejk för klimatet banner with some other teens. The taller kids lift it too high, and she nearly vanishes. All you can see is Greta’s winter hat and her gray eyes. That’s enough.

Al Gore was right. A child leads us.

Technically, Greta Thunberg’s childhood continues for another year. But she hasn’t been a kid for some time. She is one of two daughters of Malena Ernman, an opera-singer-turned-Eurovision-contestant, and Svante Thunberg, an actor. According to the family’s book, Our House Is on Fire, the bohemian clan has endured a scroll of psychological disorders beginning with Malena, who suffered from bulimia and still deals with ADHD. Greta’s younger sister, Beata, was diagnosed with OCD and ADHD, and has an acute noise sensitivity, which has meant at times the rest of the family eating in a guest room with plastic plates to keep noise to a minimum. When Beata went to dance class, Malena wasn’t allowed to move during the two-hour session lest Beata have a tearful meltdown.

Greta battled her own life-threatening demons. When she was 11, she stopped eating and rarely spoke to anyone outside of her family for months. Sometimes she would come home after being bullied at school — recess was spent hiding out in the bathroom — and either spend hours petting her dogs or crying at her own pain. She lost 20 pounds as her parents chronicled her food intake. (“Five pieces of gnocchi in two hours.”)

Somehow, it was Greta turning her weakness into strength that made her a global icon. According to Malena, Greta fell silent after seeing a film in school depicting floating armies of plastic infesting our oceans. Other students were horrified, but quickly returned to their iPhones and talk of upcoming ski trips. Not Greta. She fell silent and obsessed over the climate’s demise.

“I felt very alone that I was the only one who seemed to be worried about this,” Greta tells me in Stockholm. “I was the only one left in this sort of bubble. Everyone else could just continue with their lives as usual, and I couldn’t do that.”

Greta read all she could and sometimes went online and battled with climate deniers, oft exclaiming triumphantly, “He blocked me,” to her parents. She eventually wrote an essay on the climate crisis for a Swedish newspaper. Eco-activists contacted her, and Greta mentioned the inspiration she took from the school strikes after the Parkland, Florida, mass shooting, and suggested a climate version. The activists showed little interest. Greta didn’t care and slowly broke out of her cocoon.

“I thought what the Parkland students did was so brave,” says Thunberg. “Of course, it was not the only thing that got me out of that feeling. I did it because I was tired of sitting and waiting. I tried to get others to join me, but no one was interested and no one wanted to do that. So I said, ‘I’m going to do this alone if no one else wants to do it.’ ”

So in August 2018, Greta and her father bicycled down to the Swedish Parliament, across the cobblestone street from where Greta and I now stand. She propped up the first Skolstrejk för klimatet sign, which she’d made from scrap wood. Greta also wrote up an information sheet with climate data and a hint of the defiant humor that eventually led her to make her Twitter profile read, “A teenager working on her anger management problem,” after Trump told her to chill out. Her bio was simple:

“Because you grown-ups don’t give a damn about my future, neither do I. My name is Greta, I am in ninth grade, and I am going on strike from school for the climate.”

Photograph by Jack Davison for Rolling Stone

Her dad left, and she sat alone. She posted a couple of images to Instagram. It was passed on by a few of her followers. Then a reporter noticed. And then local activists from Greenpeace. Within two months, there were hundreds of fellow travelers, and the news spread through Scandinavia to Europe and on to America. Within a year, climate student strikes attracted tens of thousands, from London to New York.

Greta’s rise was the activist version of a perfect storm. Her ascension from bullied Swedish student to global climate icon has been driven by both a loss and a regaining of hope. It is not a coincidence that her ascent happened immediately in the aftermath of the election of Trump. It’s impossible to see a Greta-like phenomena emerging during the Obama-driven run up to the Paris climate talks, when it actually looked like nations of the world were getting their shit together to deal with global warming. It became obvious after Trump and the Paris implosion that 30 years of rhetoric and meetings had created very little except more talk.

And then you had the natural disasters. California could not stop burning. Floods ravaged Europe. We now watch glaciers melt and collapse in real time. The dawn of 2020 brought the Australian calamity, with images of scorched earth, koalas and kangaroos burned alive, and the death of a way of life.

The irony of the Greta Age is that we now have options, but refuse to take them. Clean-energy technology has evolved to a point where old arguments that fossil fuels remain the cheapest way to create energy are now obviously nonsense. The cost of clean energy is no longer a barrier to change. Over the past decade, it became an obvious truth: Burning fossil fuels no longer made economic sense anywhere, anytime. What remains is the power and influence of the energy conglomerate superpowers to maintain the status quo. No politician has the courage to face them down. By 2018, it became even clearer that politicians could not be trusted. Talk was wasted. Companies would continue to put profits before nature. We were on our own.

And that’s when Greta came along.

Thunberg’s perceived psychological weakness became her superpower. Her flat, affectless, blunt voice was the perfect counterpoint to the bureaucratic bullshit of the climate negotiators. It cut through all the gobbledygook about offsets and the economic necessity of coal and cost curves of solar power. She put it in simple human language: We are losing our planet. Unlike many activists before her, she is not political. She is not interested in reforming the process. Her voice is unabashedly and explicitly moral — “How dare you.”

“I think she is extraordinary in her determination,” says Eva Jones, an American high school senior who recently spent a week protesting for climate justice in Davos. “When you hear her speak, she doesn’t do vanity interviews. It’s never like, ‘So what do your friends think about this?’ She’s like, ‘No, I don’t want to talk about my friends, I want to talk about the crisis.’ She’s absolutely insane about getting reporters and getting politicians and getting whoever’s talking to her back to the subject.”

All of this from a teenager who sometimes still wears her hair in pigtails.

Thunberg and her fellow protesters head toward Medborgarplatsen (Citizen Square), in central Stockholm. They pass over a bridge by the harbor, where massive renovations are being done so the city can host even more waste-multiplying mega cruise ships. The kids chant in Swedish, “What do we want? Climate justice! When? Now! When? Now, now, now!” At the square, the squirrelly tweens play tag and are entertained by a rapper in a ski mask (some things don’t translate).

Eventually, Greta takes the stage. She speaks in her native Swedish, and her tone is faster and more emotional than in English. She mentions that temperatures in Sweden have been 5 to 10 degrees Celsius above normal this winter, and how globally 19 of the past 20 years have been the warmest on record.

“I have been on the road and visited numerous places and met people from all over the globe,” says Greta. “I can say that it looks nearly the same everywhere I have been: The climate crisis is ignored by people in charge, despite the science being crystal clear. We don’t want to hear one more politician say that this is important but afterward do nothing to change it. We don’t want more empty words from people pretending to take our future seriously.”

She pauses, and her face goes grim. “It shouldn’t be up to us children and teenagers to make people wake up around the world. The ones in charge should be ashamed.”

The crowd chants, “Greta, Greta, Greta.…”

She must hate that.

Greta keeps moving. In January, it was Davos. This week it is Stockholm. Next Friday is Hamburg. It’s a debilitating schedule since she doesn’t fly. Greta says it won’t go on forever. And she’s right. Within a few weeks, the world would shut down for the coronavirus, with Greta and her father both falling ill (neither of them was tested for the virus, but she said she thought it was “extremely likely” that they had it, given her schedule). Besides, she is nearing the end of her gap year, between high school and university. “I really hope that we can solve this thing now because I want to get back to studying,” says Thunberg, shivering a bit in the Stockholm wind. I can’t tell if she is joking or is having a rare moment of optimism.

Still, she is so small, and the world is so big. I wonder how she continues forward as the world pays lip service and not much else.

For the first time, Thunberg softens.

“I’m very weak in a sense,” says Thunberg quietly. “I’m very tiny and I am very emotional, and that is not something people usually associate with strength. I think weakness, in a way, can be also needed because we don’t have to be the loudest, we don’t have to take up the most amount of space, and we don’t have to earn the most money.”

A friend comes over and whispers in her ear. It’s time to go, maybe home for a silent walk with her two dogs, Moses and Roxy. But she isn’t quite finished.

“We don’t need to have the biggest car, and we don’t need to get the most attention. We just need to…”

Mighty Greta’s voice trails off as if she is lost in thought or searching for the right word in English. Then, she looks up, locks eyes, and smiles for the first time.

“We need to care about each other more.”



Links

• Greta Thunberg Says EU Is 'Pretending' To Tackle Climate Change Crisis
• Greta Thunberg Clashes With US Treasury Secretary In Davos
• Greta Thunberg: Climate Activism Has Made Her 'Very Happy', Says Father
• Greta Thunberg And Mass Protests Defined The Year In Climate Change
• 'How Is This Possible?': Greta Thunberg Weighs In On Australia's Bushfire Crisis
• Governments, Business 'Misleading' On Climate, Teen Activist Greta Thunberg Said
• Expect Family Talks About Climate Change This Christmas? Take Tips From Greta Thunberg
• 'Overwhelmed' Greta Thunberg Leaves Climate March Early After Rockstar Welcome
• Greta Thunberg Catches Lift To UN COP25 Climate Summit In Madrid With Australian Sailing Couple