In the United States, Donald Trump responded to freezing weather gripping the nation by tweeting “Global warming? Please come back fast, we need you!” Scientists at the United States’ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration tweeted back to Trump “Winter storms don't prove that global warming isn't happening.” Trump then followed up by naming a climate change skeptic to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board.
In Europe, high school students are fed up with Trump, his enablers, and adults who fail to take up the challenge to stop the decimation of the Earth and reverse climate change. Last month European high school students in Belgium, Germany, France, Sweden, and Switzerland began a series of weekly school boycott days demanding international action to reverse global warming and climate change. A Belgium demonstration had over 100,000 participants. In France, an online student petition quickly drew over two million signatures. In Germany students carried signs reading “Climate S.O.S.” In Sweden the school strike movement is called “Fridays For Future.”
A 16-year-old Swedish teenager, Greta Thunberg, has drawn worldwide attention to the student actions. Thunberg is credited with initiating the school strike movement to raise awareness of global warming in August 2018 She has taped a TED Talk on the need for a global response to climate change, and addressed the January 2019 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland with a call for immediate, coordinated, and sustained action.
At Davos. Greta Thunberg opened her speech declaring: “Our house is on fire. I am here to say, our house is on fire. According to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), we are less than 12 years away from not being able to undo our mistakes. In that time, unprecedented changes in all aspects of society need to have taken place, including a reduction of our CO2 emissions by at least 50%.”
Thunberg accused political and economic leaders at the World Economic Forum of bragging about their “success stories. But their financial success has come with an unthinkable price tag. And on climate change, we have to acknowledge we have failed. All political movements in their present form have done so, and the media has failed to create broad public awareness.” She argued that “there is still time to turn everything around,” because Homo sapiens have not yet failed.” She concluded: “Adults keep saying: We owe it to the young people to give them hope.” But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.”
In the United States teachers often worry about involving their students in these types of civic or political actions. But state and national social studies standards actually support getting students involved. National Council for the Social Studies Standards explain that “Civics enables students not only to study how others participate, but also to practice participating and taking informed action themselves.” New York State social studies frameworks propose measuring student understanding by whether a “Student effectively engages and affects the targeted audience and/or community in significant ways through an appropriate course of informed action.”
As Greta reminds us, we need to “act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.”
Watch Greta Thunberg’s TED Talk.
Watch Greta at the World Economic Forum.
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