Who could ever imagine that Greta Thunberg, (in photo above) a fifteen year old girl from Sweden, a girl with special needs - autism, A.D.H.D, and other conditions - would ever be asked to address a global climate change conference? But just this past week, she did just that. She spoke to nearly 200 delegates from around the world assembled in Katowice, Poland, to develop a "rule book" to further implement the famous Paris Agreement and share stories about what is working in their countries and what is not.
Greta's address was so uncompromising, so powerful, that you can find it on Youtube.
"You have ignored us in the past, and you will ignore us again," she said. "You say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future before their very eyes....You speak only about green, eternal, economic growth because you are too scared of being unpopular. You only talk about moving forward with the same bad ideas that got us into this mess even when the only sensible thing to do is pull the emergency brake. You are not mature enough to tell it like it is."
She has told the New Yorker, when it did a profile on her, "Our biosphere is being sacrificed so that rich people in countries like mine can live in luxury. It is the suffering of many that pay for the luxuries of few."
Greta is very young, but she's already spent years working as a climate activist - and she credits her neurological differences with her incredible ability to focus on this one political issue. "I see the world a bit different, from another perspective," she explained to Masha Gessen, staff writer for the New Yorker. "I have a special interest. It's very common that people on the autism spectrum have a special interest.... I can do the same thing for hours." (from "Greta Thunberg, the Fifteen year Old Climate Activist Who Is Demanding A New Kind of Politics," Masha Gessen, The New Yorker, Oct. 2, 2018.)
Greta developed her special interest in climate change when she was nine years old and in the third grade. "They were always talking about how we should turn off lights, save water, not throw out food," she told Gessen. "I asked why, and they explained about climate change. And I thought this was very strange. If humans could really change the climate, everyone would be talking about it and people wouldn't be talking about anything else. But this wasn't happening."
So Greta focused her formidable concentration on researching climate change. What she discovered is that we basically live in a greenhouse. Life on earth depends on energy coming from the sun. About half the light reaching earth's atmosphere passes through the air and clouds to earth's surface, where it is absorbed and then radiated upward in the form of infrared heat. About 90% of this heat is then absorbed by greenhouse gases and radiated back toward the earth's surface. In other words, a layer of greenhouse gases - water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide - acts as a thermal blanket for the earth, absorbing heat and warming the earth to a life-supporting average of 59 degrees Fahrenheit (15 degrees Celsius.)
However, human activities are changing the natural greenhouse. For example, over the last century, the burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil has increased the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Most climate scientists agree the main cause of the current global warming trend is human expansion of the "greenhouse effect" - global warming that results when the atmosphere traps heat radiating from Earth toward space.
In its Fifth Assessment Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of 1,300 independent scientific experts from countries all over the world under the auspices of the United Nations, concluded there's a more than 95% probability that human activities, such as human-produced greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, have warmed our planet, have caused much of the observed increase in Earth's temperatures over the past 50 years. They have also ruled out the possibility that current global warming could be explained by changes in energy from the sun.
Because of this global warming, the Panel concluded, the world's populations will see major consequences as early as 2040: more droughts, more wildfires, more catastrophic hurricanes, more poverty, higher temperatures. That's only twenty-two years. The amount of global warming we've already seen - 1 degree Celsius, 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit - has upended the Arctic, is killing coral reefs, and may have begun to destabilize a massive part of Antarctica. Smaller island nations are already in danger because of rising seas. The only answer is for all the world's nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Yet some nations' emissions have even gone up.
Greta took her research unconditionally to heart and began spreading the word. "She has stopped eating meat and buying anything that is not absolutely necessary. In 2015 she stopped flying on airplanes - "a waste of carbon" - and a year later, her mother, (a well known opera singer), followed suit, giving up an international performing career. The family has installed solar batteries and has started growing their own vegetables on an allotment outside the city." (Gessen) The family rides bikes much of the time and uses an electric car when necessary.
But Greta felt the need to take her message even further. Inspired by the protests staged by American students in response to the Parkland shooting, she decided to stage her own very public protest. "Before the country's parliamentary election on September 9, 2018, she went on strike and sat on the steps of the parliamentary building, in Stockholm, every day during school hours for four days a week; she now spends her Fridays on the steps of Parliament. She is demanding that the government undertake a radical response to climate change." (Gessen)
A number of members of parliament came out on the steps to express support for her position, though, like her parents, they want to see her back in school. One unexpected outcome was that people brought her food, and this autistic child with limited food tastes suddenly discovered that she likes falafel and noodles.
The ripples from her protest moved ever wider. In the Fall, Greta was asked to come to Finland to address the largest climate rally in Helsinki history, and then she went to London for the launch of a new civil disobedience movement called Extinction Rebellion. In November, inspired by her example, thousands of Australian students marched out of school demanding that their government be more proactive on eliminating coal production and turning to green energy.
Bill McKibben, writing about Greta Thunberg for Sojouner's magazine (Jan. 2019) says,
"Part of her appeal is her completely straightforward and no-nonsense take on our predicament. 'Some people say that we should study to become climate scientists so that we can 'solve the climate crisis,' she said recently. 'But the climate crisis has already been solved. We already have all the facts and solutions. All we need to do is to wake up and change.' Which is essentially true. The engineers have brought down the price of solar and wind power to the point where there is no logical reason not to be deploying them at rapid pace; only inertia and the illogical power of the fossil fuel industry, keep us from making progress."
Wake up and change! Wasn't that Jesus' call to his followers? Wasn't that St. Paul's call to early Christians? Isn't this a call to us to begin the conversion of mind and heart so vitally necessary to take up our holy responsibility to care for creation before many species - including ours - become extinct? What a massive sin that would be!
In the 1400's, St. Joan of Arc, a teenager, turned around the course of the 100 Years War between France and England. Joan led French troops against the English and recaptured the cities of Orléans and Troyes. This enabled Charles VII to be crowned as king in Reims in 1429. One can imagine Joan saying something similar to "Wake up and change!" to those demoralized troops to get them to move. Today we have a God-given autistic teenager, Greta Thunberg, to rejoice over, as she leads us in our battle against climate change.
Bill McKibben says it so well: "Clearly our leaders have done little, if anything, despite plenty of warning from scientists. The rest of us have not roused ourselves sufficiently to force their hand. God works in mysterious ways, and if it takes a child to lead us, then so be it."