Skye Curren, Editor
@esccourant
Since the beginning of the year, 15-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thurnberg has not been going to school on Fridays. Instead, she sits outside the Swedish Parliament holding a sign that says, “Skolstrejk för Klimatet.” Why? Because Greta Thunberg is one of the many youth activists who refuses to be silent in the face of climate change. She has inspired protests all over the world—students in Poland, Belgium, Germany, Australia, Scotland are leaving school and sitting outside their government buildings, demanding action on climate change.
So why are the youth leading the movement to take action regarding climate change? For one, climate change is going to have more effect on our generation than any other generation who can lead a protest. Second, it seems that preceding generations do not realize the severity of the situation. According to The Guardian, there will be a temperature change of 1.5 degrees Celsius if no change is made in the next 11 years. The Paris Climate Agreement, while it was a movement in the right direction, aims to limit temperature change to two degrees Celsius. This half a degree difference may not seem like a big difference, but it will have devastating effects.
According to The Guardian, this one half of a degree could mean more water stress and food scarcity, 10 million more people relocated as a result of rising sea levels, and an increase in ocean acidification. This increase would leave coral reefs with around a one percent chance of survival and would greatly decrease species diversity overall.
11 years from now, the world will be radically different. It will be a world where clean drinking water is a luxury commodity, a world where mega storms could become the norm, and a world where millions of people will become climate change refugees. According to a new study conducted by Boris Worm, PhD of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, reported in CBS, saltwater fish could become extinct as soon as 2048. “This isn’t predicted to happen. This is happening now,” Nicola Beaumont, PhD said.
Climate change is something that will happen; it’s something that is happening. Since the industrial revolution, the earth has already warmed one degree Celsius and the effects are clear: our world has seen more intense storms like Hurricane Harvey, Maria, and Florence, less water overall, and an increased number of droughts in California, South Africa, Pakistan, Australia. The Washington Post reports that, in the South Pacific, people living on the Carteret Islands have already been forced to evacuate because of rising sea levels and countries like Kiribati and the Maldives do not have much time left before their islands will be underwater.
Despite all of this, it seems that no one is doing anything. Less than a week ago, the nation found itself faced with more extreme weather. According to the New York Times, this weather was brought on by an arctic warming at two times the global average. Researchers Dr. Jennifer Francis and Dr. Judah Cohen think that the increased ‘hot spots’ and the changing jet stream cause the polar vortex to break down in mid-to-late winter, and bring it down south. So, how did our government react? President Trump tweeted that it “wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!” because it was so cold, despite the fact that, if it he looked at any sort of scientific report, he would have known that the polar vortex was caused by global warming.
Trump has also pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement and has removed environmental protections under the premise of “creating more jobs.” The Paris Climate Agreement was not by any means radical enough, but it would have done something. In comparison, we are now doing nothing. If we continue to do nothing, Earth’s temperature will rise more than two degrees Celsius and our planet will soon become uninhabitable.
It angers me when I hear phrases like, “most of the jobs we’re preparing kids for don’t exist yet.” In reality, if we don’t act soon, it is true that today’s kids will not have stable jobs for the most of their lives. However, it will not be a result of a lack of preparation. It will be caused by a never-ending climate disaster.
Similarly, when people say “our kids will have better lives than their parents,” I can’t help but think that, if we don’t act now, today’s children will have significantly worse lives than their parents. This will also be a result of climate change. I think this reflects a major problem in the way our media covers politics. Our media acts as if the planet will last long enough that the only thing that matters is that our institutions stay strong.
If we continue to treat climate change as a non-issue, or worse, as a debate, then we will never solve anything. We need to re-evaluate how we treat climate change as an issue, and we need action.
