Dahr Jamail: Children Are Demanding Dramatic Climate Action. Listen to Them.

This is an excellent and incredibly important piece by Dahr Jamail. He continuously inspires me to be in this world courageously with my mind, eyes, and heart open. May we all be inspired! And courageous, curious, and caring. Otherwise we will fail to walk beside and listen to the children, who are pleading with us to stand in protection of them and their future and all life on our Sacred Earth Mother. — Molly

By Dahr Jamail,
Truthout

What a time to be alive.

It’s a time when the industrialization of western settler-colonial culture has geo-engineered the planet to the brink of extinction of even its own species.

It’s a time when most federal governments are continuing along with a business-as-usual economic model — the same model that is literally killing life on Earth and rendering the planet unlivable.

It’s a time when this global crisis fails to be consistently reported on with the veracity and urgency it demands.

And it’s a time when children have taken it upon themselves to do whatever they can to bring awareness to the issue, and plead for adults — any adults, somewhere — to begin to behave responsibly and take the requisite action.

Even the thought of these kids taking this issue into their hearts, and walking out of classes, and carrying out protests around the world brings inevitable tears to my eyes. As a longtime climate reporter, my sadness around this issue is now combined with a deep drive to do everything in my power to walk alongside these children, and support them, and contribute what I can during this ever-worsening crisis.

There is no getting around it: The crisis is indeed worsening. This climate dispatch, like all those I have written before it, is a pulling-back of the curtain of denial that obfuscates our ability to behave with the urgency this planetary moment demands. It is simultaneously a survey of the last 30 days of the unraveling of the biosphere, alongside with the ridiculously inadequate human response to the crisis.

A recently published study in the journal BioScience proves what many of us have known for years: The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is underselling the climate crisis. The study shows that the IPCC’s language uses about the climate crisis is overly conservative, meaning that the threats we face are much greater than their reports suggest.

“The accumulation of uncertainty across all elements of the climate-change complexity means that the IPCC tends to be conservative,” study co-author Professor Corey Bradshaw, Matthew Flinders Fellow in Global Ecology at Flinders University said in a press release. “The certainty is in reality much higher than even the IPCC implies, and the threats are much worse.”

Meanwhile, marine heatwaves are now sweeping the oceans “like wildfires,” according to scientists. Their study,published in Nature Climate Change, showed the number of marine heatwave days has increased 50 percent in the 30 years leading up to 2016, compared to the period of 1925 to 1954. This is grim news, given how much humans rely on the oceans for heat, oxygen production, food, and the sequestration of atmospheric CO2.

This is on top of the fact that the last several years in a row have each been a record warm year for Earth’s oceans.

Please continue this article here: https://truthout.org/articles/children-are-demanding-dramatic-climate-action-listen-to-them/