My Eco Talk Seven

The Disarming Case to Act Right Now on Climate Change

Growing up and at eight years, Greta Thunberg learnt about climate change or global warming, a thing humans created by our way of living. Humans, who are animal species, have the capacity for the earth’s climate. If burning fossil fuels is terrible and threatening our existence, why not ban it.

Greta fell ill at 11, fell into depression, stopped talking and eating and lost 10 kilos of weight in two months. Later she was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome, OCD and selective mutism, which means she only speaks when necessary.

To Greta, everything is black or white. Everybody is talking about the threat of climate change but not doing a thing about it. If the emissions have to stop, we must stop the emissions. There are no gray areas when it comes to survival. We must change.

Rich countries like Sweden need to reduce emissions by at least 15% every year to stay below a 2-degree warming target. Yet as IPCC predicts, aiming for instead 1.5-degree Celsius will significantly reduce the climate impacts.

And the media and our leaders do not talk about it nor the greenhouse gases trapped in the system. Nor that air pollution is hiding warming so that when we stop the emissions, we have another level of warming, perhaps as high as 0.5-1.1 degrees Celsius.

Furthermore, hardly anybody speaks that we are in the sixth mass extinction. Every day, up to 200 species are going extinct. The extinction rate is between 1,000 to 10,000 times higher than what is seen as typical.

Nobody is speaking about equity or climate justice, clearly stated everywhere on the Paris agreement, which is necessary to make it global. With today’s emissions speeds, every wealthy country must lower their emissions in the next 6-12 years. And that is so that people in poor counties can get a chance to raise their standards of living by building the infrastructure we have already made, like clean water, schools, roads, etc.

Countries like Nigeria India cannot do a thing about climate change if a country like the US, which has everything, is not taking action.

Today use 100 million barrels of oil daily, but nobody is talking about that.

So it’s time to stop the pep talk we have been doing in over 30 years, yet the emissions are not down and take action. The facts and the solutions are already out, yet no one is saving the future. We have to wake up and change. We can’t change the world by following the rules. Everything has to be changed.