Just 16, @GretaThunberg is already one of our planet’s greatest advocates. Recognizing that her generation will bear the brunt of climate change, she’s unafraid to push for real action. She embodies our vision at the @ObamaFoundation: A future shaped by young leaders like her.
— Barack Obama @BarackObama
❤️ Leaders and Leadership 💜 #YesWeCan #YesYouCan
Get to work #Resisters
#SpeakingTruthToPower Greta Thunberg condemns world leaders in emotional speech at UN Climate Action Summit #ClimateCrisis
"For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you're doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.”
"You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And that I refuse to believe.”
"The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees [Celsius], and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control.”
"Fifty percent may be acceptable to you. But those numbers do not include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of equity and climate justice. They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist.”
"To have a 67% chance of staying below a 1.5 degrees global temperature rise – the best odds given by the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] – the world had 420 gigatons of CO2 left to emit back on Jan. 1st, 2018. Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatons.”
"How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just 'business as usual' and some technical solutions? With today's emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than 8 1/2 years.:
"There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today, because these numbers are too uncomfortable. And you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.”
NPR:Transcript of Greta Thunberg's Speech
Citizens of the Earth must unite and take action ✊ #ExtinctionRebellion
Many hundreds of thousands have already died from the worsening floods, droughts, heat-waves, cyclones and disease that global warming is unleashing. The death-toll is predicted to rise to millions in just a few decades. Nearly all these climate change casualties – and those most at risk – are poor people living in the Majority World.
Climate change has been largely created by the burning of fossil fuels by industrialised nations, with the richest being the most culpable planet-cookers. As Panapase Nelisoni, from the Government of Tuvalu – one of the Pacific island-nations currently disappearing beneath the waves due to rising sea-levels – quite rightly points out: ”The industrialised countries caused the problem, but we are suffering the consequences… it is only fair that people in industrialised nations and industries take responsibility for the actions they are causing. It’s the polluter-pays principle: you pollute, you pay.”
In fact, greenhouse gas emissions – of which carbon dioxide accounts for 80% of warming, the others being methane, nitrous oxide and certain industrial gases – continue to rise in developed countries, despite their signing the Kyoto Protocol which was supposed to reduce them. Kyoto was also supposed to lead to financial support for poor countries like Tuvalu struggling at the sharp end of the climate crisis, but the international community has shown little interest. The G8 have so far pledged a shockingly inadequate $6 billion – to be disbursed through World Bank loans, forcing affected countries to pay twice for their own suffering, with the added slap in the face of stringent World Bank conditions. Compare this with the hundreds of billions chucked at bailing out the banks, with minimal conditions, and the injustice gets gut-wrenching.
Read more about Climate Justice in New Internationalist, No 419, 2009.
With its recent use by the participants in the Extinction Rebellion, the extinction symbol has become much more widely known, on its way to becoming the peace symbol of the climate movement.
The symbol above represents extinction. The circle signifies the planet, while the hourglass inside serves as a warning that time is rapidly running out for many species. The world is currently undergoing a mass extinction event, and this symbol is intended to help raise awareness of the urgent need for change in order to address this crisis. Estimates are that somewhere between 30,000 and 140,000 species are becoming extinct every year in what scientists have named the Holocene, or Sixth Mass Extinction. This ongoing process of destruction is being caused by the impact of human activity. Within the next few decades approximately 50% of all species that now exist will have become extinct. Such a catastrophic loss of biodiversity is highly likely to cause widespread ecosystem collapse and consequently render the planet uninhabitable for humans.
The symbol and a stencil template are available for download “for non-commercial purposes”.
There’s a disclaimer at the bottom of the page about merchandise, which reads in part:
No extinction symbol merchandise exists, and it never will do. The free use of the extinction symbol by individuals in their personal artwork or other forms of expression is strongly welcomed and encouraged, but any form of commercial use of the symbol is completely against its ethos and should therefore be refrained from. To reiterate, please do not use the symbol on any items that will be sold, or for any other fundraising purposes. There are no exceptions to this policy.
Here’s the thing: I want a t-shirt with the extinction symbol on it so I can signify my support (in a small way) for climate justice. If I’m reading this correctly, I can make a t-shirt for myself but not have one made for me? Or can I have a single print-on-demand shirt made for me at cost? Making my own shirt (I’d need to buy a bunch of single-use supplies) or getting a one-off printed doesn’t seem very climate-friendly at all. How about taking orders from other interested folks (like you all) and selling the shirts at cost? That seems much more climate-friendly but also firmly against the symbol maker’s strict policy.
I think we’re bumping up against an inconvenient truth about capitalism here: it is sometimes (or perhaps even often) the most efficient and least wasteful way to produce something because it’s actually a deeply collectivist endeavor. Let’s say you’re holding a climate protest, 100,000 people are coming, and those people want to bring shirts or signs or other protest equipment to the protest to “advertise” their displeasure to those watching, near and far. Is it more climate friendly for all those people to individually buy supplies and each produce their own things or would it be better to rely on a organization whose sole purpose is to produce protest supplies (using carbon-free energy and materials) and pay them more than the cost of the supplies so they can provide their employees a living wage and even advertise their services a little so they can actually remain in the protest supplies business and take even more advantage of economies of scale to keep prices down? Run it as a non-profit if you’d like. That seems far less wasteful to me than people buying one-off supplies, even on a group basis.
You might interject here that producing anything that uses any natural resources for such a protest is wasteful and unethical. I think that’s a fair point! What’s the ROI for protest materials? Is it wasteful to spend a little CO2 now to possibly save a bunch of CO2 in the future or is it smart? Gah, all I want is a shirt to express myself! Are there any simple and ethical solutions in a world that’s so densely networked and interconnected?
Forget the wares and #TakeAction. Inconvenient Truth: Humans are next!
“We are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction, with about 200 species becoming extinct each day. Humans cannot continue to violate the fundamental laws of nature or of science with impunity.” #ExtinctionRebellion
— Greta Thunberg @GretaThunberg - Oct 27, 2018
Facts about our ecological crisis are incontrovertible. We must take action, The Guardian
4th Hottest
2018 was the fourth hottest year since modern recordkeeping began. NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration work together to track temperatures around the world and study how they change from year to year. For decades, the overall global temperature has been increasing.
Over the long term, world temperatures are warming, but each individual year is affected by things like El Niño ocean patterns and specific weather events.
1.5 degrees
Globally, Earth’s temperature was more than 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the average from 1951 to 1980.
139 years
Since 1880, we can put together a consistent record of temperatures around the planet and see that it was much colder in the late-19th century. Before 1880, uncertainties in tracking global temperatures were too large. Temperatures have increased even faster since the 1970s, the result of increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Five Hottest
The last five years have been the hottest in the modern record.
6,300 Individual Observations
Scientists from NASA use data from 6,300 weather stations and Antarctic research stations, together with ship- and buoy-based observations of sea surface temperatures to track global temperatures.
605,830 swimming pools
As the planet warms, polar ice is melting at an accelerated rate. The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets lost about 605,830 Olympic swimming pools (400 billion gallons) of water between 1993 and 2016.
8 inches
Melting ice raises sea levels around the world. While ice melts into the ocean, heat also causes the water to expand. Since 1880, sea levels around the world have risen approximately 8 inches.
71,189 acres burned
One symptom of the warmer climate is that fire seasons burn hotter and longer. In 2018, wildfires burned more than 71,189 acres in the U.S. alone.
46% increase in CO2 levels
CO2 levels have increased 46 percent since the late 19th Century, which is a dominant factor causing global warming.
When did the 1% get to determine the fate of the world?
