by Naomi Klein
And this is why Greta credits her autism for her clear vision of the problem and her power to speak clearly about it. “If the emissions have to stop, then we must stop the emissions,” she says. “To me that is black or white. There are no gray areas when it comes to survival. Either we go on as a civilization or we don’t. We have to change.”
Learning about the ways our climate is changing can lead to sadness, anger, or fear. But Greta discovered that she could help deal with those feelings by taking action and making a public stand—and when she did that, she became someone for many others to stand beside. Like the tiny piece of sand inside an oyster that causes a pearl to form around it, Greta’s small act of protest helped create something beautiful and strong.
A LAWSUIT FOR CHILDREN’S RIGHTS
Young people are not just taking the climate movement to the streets. They are also taking it into the courts. Can they use international law to fight climate change? Sixteen kids from twelve countries on five continents are going to find out.
In September 2019 these climate activists, ranging from eight to seventeen years old, filed a legal complaint with the United Nations under an international treaty called the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. This treaty took effect in 1989 to protect children’s rights in the countries that signed it. It says, among other things, that every child has the “right to life” and that governments “shall ensure to the maximum extent possible the survival and development of the child.”
The complaint singles out Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany, and Turkey. Among the nations that have signed the UN treaty, those five produce the highest amounts of greenhouse gases. (The United States and China emit more greenhouse gases, but the United States has not signed the Convention on the Rights of the Child. China has not signed the part of it that would allow it to be sued.)
The sixteen young people who filed the complaint say that by not doing enough to limit or prepare for climate change, the five countries have failed in their duty to protect children’s rights to life and health. It is the first UN climate complaint made on behalf of children around the world.
The next step will be for a committee of human-rights experts to review the complaint. This process could take several years. If the committee agrees with the children, it will make recommendations to the five countries on how they can meet their duty under the treaty. Although the committee does not have the power to force the countries to follow its recommendations, the countries that signed the treaty did pledge to live up to it.
The sixteen young activists are Greta Thunberg and Ellen-Anne of Sweden; Chiara Sacchi from Argentina; Catarina Lorenzo from Brazil; Iris Duquesne from France; Raina Ivanova from Germany; Ridhima Pandey from India; David Ackley III, Ranton Anjain, and Litokne Kabua from the Marshall Islands; Deborah Adegbile from Nigeria; Carlos Manuel from Palau; Ayakha Melithafa from South Africa; Raslen Jbeili from Tunisia; and Carl Smith and Alexandria Villaseñor from the United States.
Catarina Lorenzo of Brazil spoke in September 2019 about a complaint filed at the United Nations by sixteen young people who accuse multiple countries of failing to act against climate change. Carlos Manuel of Palau (left) and David Ackley III of the Marshall Islands (right) were also among the sixteen.
David, Ranton, Litokne, and Carlos know firsthand that the need for action on climate change is urgent. They live on the island nations of the Marshall Islands and Palau in the Pacific Ocean. They are surrounded by dying reefs, rising seas, and ever more violent storms. Their message to the world is that even if people don’t see climate change happening in their own home country or town, it is happening right now, and it will affect us all soon.
“Climate change is affecting the way I live,” said Litokne in the complaint. “It has taken away my home, the land and the animals.”
Carlos, from Palau, said, “I want bigger countries to know that us small island nations are the most vulnerable countries to be affected by climate change. Our homes are being slowly swallowed up by the ocean.”
No matter what the committee of human-rights experts decides about this lawsuit, kids like you have shown that they are fierce and determined defenders of life on Earth. Other young people have followed their lead and filed similar climate-related lawsuits around the world.
Now that you’ve seen some of what young people are doing to call attention to the climate crisis, you may find yourself wondering what fueled their desire to act on such a large scale. The next chapters will give you a closer look at the climate crisis and its causes. You’ll see what is driving so many kids like you to devote themselves to changing the world for the better.
CHAPTER 2 World Warmers
On Christmas Eve 2019, Antarctica got an unwanted gift—a new record. The ice-covered continent set a record for the most ice melted in a single day. Ice had turned to water on 15 percent of Antarctica’s surface. But it hadn’t been just one warm day.
December is summer in Antarctica, the melting season, because seasons in the southern half of the world are the opposite of those in the northern half. But even in summer, so much ice had never melted so quickly before. By Christmas, the summer meltwater level had been 230 percent higher than average for a month. Why? One scientist said that the continent had been “significantly warmer than average” all season.
Photos taken just nine days apart in February 2020 show how much ice had melted at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula after record high temperatures.
At the same time, far to the north, where December falls in winter, the Russian city of Moscow had a different, but related, problem: no snow.
For centuries, Moscow has been known for its winters. They are often bitterly cold, and snow usually falls before the end of the year. But in December 2019, temperatures were higher than normal. Gardens bloomed early. Children used ice rinks for soccer matches because there was no ice for hockey. City officials had to truck in tons of fake snow for a New Year’s Day snowboarding event.
And while this fake snow piled up in Moscow, unusual warmth was leading to climate tragedy half a world away. On the last day of 2019, thousands of people in southeastern Australia fled to beaches to escape the flames that were tearing through their homes and communities.
Even though the southern summer was just getting started, already Australia was in the grip of yet another terrible heat wave. After three years with much less rain than usual, large areas were deep in drought. Trees and plants were bone-dry, ready to ignite. And they did. Small fires—started when lightning struck a dry tree or when people lit campfires, burned trash, or tossed cigarettes—quickly erupted into massive fires that sped through areas of dry vegetation. Plants were not the only things that burned, however. As happens with many wildfires around the world, homes, businesses, and other human-built structures were destroyed or damaged as well.
Perhaps the huge fires should not have been surprising. Just under a year earlier, Australia had started 2019 with its worst heat wave ever. In some places, temperatures had soared to above 104 degrees F (40 degrees C) for more than forty days in a row. Then, too, fires had wreaked havoc. They’d destroyed vast stretches of ancient forest in the Australian state of Tasmania, which had had the driest January ever recorded.
When 2019 ended, at least nine people in Australia had been killed by the fires. More than nine hundred homes had been destroyed, and more than 11 million acres (4.45 million hectares) of land had burned. Smoke and ash filled the air, darkening the skies even at noon. Tragically, about half a billion animals died because of the fires, including thousands of Australia’s famous koala bears. Some rare animal species may well have been pushed into extinction. (It would get worse during the following year’s fire season. By the end of March 2020, 34 people were dead, more than 3,500 homes destroyed, more than 46 million acres [18.62 million hectares] burned, and three billion animals killed, harmed, or displaced.)
Around the world, 2019 was a year of many such climate-related disasters and records.
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p; In Asia, the highest-ever number of cyclones—fierce tropical storms—had torn through countries across the Indian Ocean. In the United States, floodwaters had covered large areas in the center of the country, destroying crops and driving people from their homes.
Heat records had been set across Europe and in Alaska. July 2019 was the hottest month on Earth since people had begun keeping records of temperatures. In September, the ice that has blanketed the Arctic Ocean for thousands of years (at least) shrank to the second-smallest area ever measured.
Almost a year later, Siberia—a traditionally cold region in northeastern Russia—was sweltering. In June 2020, temperatures hit 110.4 degrees F (38 C) in the remote town of Verkoyansk. This was the highest temperature ever recorded in the Arctic. Parts of Siberia were hotter than Florida, alarming scientists around the world—and also fueling hundreds of intense wildfires.
What did all these events have in common? Heat.
HEAT AND EXTREME WEATHER
Floods and droughts, heat waves and bitterly cold winter storms—how can heat cause so many different weather events? Heat waves are easy to understand. As temperatures rise, hotter days and nights become more likely, especially during summer or in places that are naturally warm. Hot nights are especially important. When temperatures fail to drop significantly at night, heat waves keep building without relief.
But heat also affects weather by changing the relationship between the Earth’s surface and the atmosphere. As air heats up, it can hold more water vapor. Over land, warmer air draws more water out of soil through a process called evaporation, in which liquid becomes vapor—that is, gas. Water leaves plants through transpiration, a similar process. During a drought, increased evaporation and transpiration make the drought worse by drying out the soil and vegetation. The unusually dry vegetation, in turn, is at higher risk of burning in a wildfire.
Adding water vapor to the atmosphere intensifies other kinds of weather too. The extra moisture means that when rain or snow does fall, it is likely to be heavier than usual, causing floods or severe snowstorms.
Warmer air absorbs moisture from water as well as from land. As the atmosphere over the oceans grows warmer, it also grows wetter. One result of the warmer, wetter air over oceans, along with warmer water, is to make oceanic storms such as hurricanes, cyclones, and typhoons more powerful and destructive.
Increased heat also changes the behavior of the jet streams. These four fast-flowing air currents—one in each polar region and one on each side of the equator—occur where cold polar air meets warm tropical air. They usually move weather systems across the planet from west to east, but they can also twist or bulge south or north of their normal tracks. The cold Arctic region is heating up much faster than other parts of the world, which is likely weakening the northern polar jet stream, making it wavier. And as this polar jet stream twists southward, it carries frigid polar air and bitter winter weather with it. This helps explain why a planet that is getting hotter on average can still have extreme cold-weather events in some places.
And our planet is getting hotter. Sometimes this is called global warming, but “climate change” is a more useful term. That’s because not every part of the world is warming all the time. The rising temperature of our planet is an overall average.
Heat waves and storms have always happened. So have cyclones, floods, and wildfires. Now, though, we know that the warming climate is fueling extreme conditions (such as drought) and extreme weather (such as megastorms). Climate change makes deadly, destructive natural events more likely.
But climate change isn’t just about new weather records or numbers on a thermometer. The warming of the world also brings many smaller, creeping changes to plants and animals, oceans, and more. In this chapter you’ll see what scientists have learned about the world’s rising temperature and the changes that result. They are still working to fully understand these big and small changes, but the changes will touch the lives of all of us, and all life that shares our planet.
A tornado left a trail of destruction in Joplin, Missouri, in May 2011. Climate change will likely make such extreme weather disasters more frequent and severe.
This is called climate disruption—climate change that disrupts, or breaks up, the way things have been all over the world. It brings new conditions that can be hugely destructive. The good news is that we know what is causing climate change. And because we have this knowledge, we also know what we can do to slow it down or stop it.
EARTH TODAY
Wherever in the world you live, you and other young people today have something in common. You are seeing climate disruption happen and worsen as you grow up.
During the twentieth century, the temperature across all the world’s land and sea surfaces averaged 57.0 degrees Fahrenheit (13.9 degrees Celsius). In early 2020, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported that the global average temperature in 2019 had been 1.71°F (0.95°C) warmer than that. In fact, 2019 was Earth’s second-warmest year on record, after only 2016. The twenty-first century is setting a lot of heat records. Nine out of the ten warmest years on record have happened since 2005, five of them since 2015.
You might not even notice if the temperature on a summer afternoon went up by less than one and a half degrees Fahrenheit, or less than a degree Celsius. So if Earth warmed by just that much in 2019, is it a big deal?
It is.
To raise Earth’s average yearly surface temperature even a little bit takes a huge amount of heat, because the ocean can store a lot of heat energy before that energy affects the surface temperature. That’s why a small rise in average surface temperature represents a big increase in stored heat. “That extra heat,” says NOAA, “is driving regional and seasonal temperature extremes, reducing snow cover and sea ice, intensifying heavy rainfall, and changing habitat ranges for plants and animals—expanding some and shrinking others.”
Greenland, for example, is a massive island between the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. It is mostly covered by a thick ice sheet. Over a span of five days in the summer of 2019, Greenland’s ice sheet lost fifty-five billion tons of water. The ice melted and flowed into the ocean. That was enough water to cover the state of Florida five inches deep! Scientists had not expected Greenland’s ice to melt at that rate until 2070. Just a small change in temperature can have big consequences.
This is climate change and disruption in action. More than that—it is a call to climate action.
CLIMATE CHANGE BEFORE HUMANS—AND NOW
Climate change is our biggest challenge, but it is not new. The Earth’s climate has changed many times. Around twenty thousand years ago, for example, much of the Northern Hemisphere was covered with ice sheets. We call this the Ice Age, but it was just the most recent ice age in the most recent geological period.
Over the last two million years, glaciers have formed in the northern reaches of the planet, then melted away, only to advance and retreat again and again. Because these vast glaciers held so much of Earth’s water in the form of ice, sea levels dropped as much as 410 feet (125 meters) when the ice was at its peak, then rose again as the ice melted.
Earlier, during the time of the dinosaurs, Earth was much warmer than it is today. From 145.5 to 65.5 million years ago, there was little ice. Fossils show that warm-weather plants and animals thrived in the polar regions. And many scientists think that earlier still, before about 635 million years ago, our planet went through several periods of “Snowball Earth,” or at least “Slushball Earth.” It was blanketed with ice and snow, although open water may have remained near the equator.
Paleoclimatology—the science that deals with ancient climates—studies this history of past climate changes on Earth. Paleoclimatologists say that most of those changes have been caused by small shifts in Earth’s orbit. These movements altered the way the sun’s energy was distributed across the planet’s surface. Some past climate changes, though, may have been caused by massive natural events here on Eart
h, such as eras of widespread volcanic eruption that went on for thousands or even millions of years. In addition to creating some of the rock and lava layers of the modern world, these eruptions filled the atmosphere with gases and particles, which also reduced the amount of heat energy at the planet’s surface.
If climate change is part of our planet’s history, what makes today’s rising temperatures an emergency?
This time is different because of us.
Human civilization flowered after the last Ice Age ended. Everything about our lives is rooted in the conditions our species has known for the past twelve thousand years or so. Those conditions are changing rapidly. Keeping up with them will be the biggest challenge our civilization has faced.
But the key difference between today’s climate crisis and the ancient climate changes is that we are causing this one. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) researchers report that much of the current warming trend, maybe all of it, is human-caused: “Most of it is extremely likely (greater than 95 percent probability) to be the result of human activity since the mid-20th century.”
Our actions—burning fossil fuels, but also cutting down forests and raising a lot of livestock to eat—are changing the atmosphere in a way and at a speed that is outside its natural course. These activities of ours are adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
A greenhouse is a building that traps and holds heat, so that people can grow flowers or fruits inside it even when the weather outside is too cold. Greenhouse gases work the same way, but on a global scale.
A lot of the heat energy that reaches Earth from the sun reflects off the planet and back into space. Certain gases in the atmosphere, though, trap some of that heat near the planet’s surface. When those gases increase, more heat is kept, and temperatures go up. The rising temperatures, in turn, lead to the droughts, storms, wildfires, melts, and other features of our current climate crisis.