Climate crisis needs action

“Why should we go to school if you won’t listen to the educated?” chants angry youth, asking for political leaders to take action for climate change. 

Inspired by the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist, Greta Thunburn, who skips class on a weekly basis to stage peaceful protests outside Sweden’s Parliament, thousands of students are streaming out of their schools across Europe to draw attention to climate change. 

The movement Youth Strike 4 Climate and Fridays For The Future was founded in Britain as a result of Greta’s cries of help for the government to address the issue and has become a rapidly growing movement around the world since, propelled by social media amongst teenagers. 

Children as young as six to college students are filling up the streets, stopping the traffic stand-still and demanding change for the future. 

The concern for climate change has grown rapidly with the beginning of 2019, when people transformed the 10-year challenge into a tool to spread awareness on environmental destruction by bringing two identical photos of the nature, 10 years apart from each other in the same frame. The photos paint a really sad image in one’s mind, alongside stressing on the reality that we must do something before it is too late. 

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states, “Taken as a whole, the range of published evidence indicates that the net damage costs of climate change are likely to be significant and to increase over time.” 

Although President Donald Trump refuses to acknowledge what is visible to the eye, observations indicate environmental destruction as a result of climate change are increasing each day, and this rapid increase will keep causing more and more trouble, as cleared with nine snow-days since the beginning of second semester. 

NASA states the threats of climate change in the near future in their official website, such as the rise in sea levels, increase in global temperature, increased intensity of hurricanes, ice-free arctic and more, alongside, “Humans have caused major climate changes to happen already, and we have set in motion more changes still. Even if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, global warming would continue to happen for at least several more decades, if not centuries.” 

So, if the action that needed to be taken many years ago has still not been taken and is rapidly coming closer to a point of time of which it will be extremely harmful and impossible to stop, what is it that we’re waiting for?

The students rushing the streets in their uniforms are asking the exact same question, but instead of wasting their precious time waiting for an answer, they have considered saving the planet a mission and responsibility. They have boldly stated that it is their future, so it should be their decision: that the world needed human change, not climate change, and that there is no planet b. 

We have very little time to make this change, and it is time to hit the brakes hard because if we aren’t going to be the leaders for a greater change, then why are we studying for a future we won’t even have?