[MCN] Greta Thunberg named on Nature's list of "10 people who mattered to science" in 2019

[Lance Olsen]

About Nature’s 10
Nature’s 10 is the journal’s annual list of ten people who mattered in science this year. They might have achieved amazing discoveries, brought attention to crucial issues, or even gained notoriety for controversial actions. Although not an award or a ranking, Nature’s 10 highlights individuals who had a role in some of the year’s most significant moments in science.

All 10 are described here
https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-019-03749-0/index.html <https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-019-03749-0/index.html>

Greta Thunberg description

At a US congressional hearing on climate change in September, Greta Thunberg slid a slim bundle of papers across the table towards lawmakers. It was a special report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, predicting dire consequences as the world warms. “I don’t want you to listen to me, I want you to listen to the scientists,” she told the legislators. “I want you to unite behind the science and I want you to take real action.”

Scientists have spent decades warning about climate change, but they couldn’t galvanize global attention the way that Thunberg did this year. The Swedish 16-year-old has outshone them — and many are cheering her along.

“Some may wonder why a teenage girl should get more credit and attention for publicly lamenting a well-known dilemma than most climate researchers get for years of hard work and effort,” says Sonia Seneviratne, a climate scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. But Thunberg is candid and her outrage unvarnished, and that is powerful, says Seneviratne. “As scientists, we normally don’t dare to express the truth in such heartfelt simplicity.”

Many researchers hail Thunberg in particular for focusing attention on climate change and its catastrophic impacts. What she has achieved should motivate climate researchers to carry on with their science despite slow political action, says Seneviratne.

“Greta has inspired scientists along with activists and policymakers,” says Angela Ledford Anderson, director of the Climate and Energy programme at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington DC. In July, German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced sweeping measures to reduce carbon emissions, and acknowledged that the protests Thunberg ignited “drove us to act”.

But perhaps Thunberg’s biggest influence will be on the next generation of scientists, Anderson says. “Her mobilization of young people shows the rising generation expects science to inform policy,” she says, “and may inspire many to become scientists themselves.”

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A core question: What is “resilience”?

2018 — “Resilience is a popular narrative for conservation and provides an opportunity to communicate optimism that ecosystems can recover and rebound from disturbances.” (Emily S. Darling and Isabelle M. Côté, Science, March 2, 2018). 

2014 — “Emerging from a wide range of disciplines, resilience in policy-making has often been based on the ability of systems to bounce back to normality, drawing on engineering concepts. This implies the return of the functions of an individual, household, community or ecosystem to previous conditions, with as little damage and disruption as possible following shocks and stresses”  (Tanner et al, Nature Climate Change,  December 18, 2014). 

1938 — Resilience. 1- The act or power of springing back to a former position or shape. 2. The quantity of work given back by a body that is compressed to a certain limit and then allowed to recover itself, as a spring under pressure suddenly relaxed.”  (Funk & Wagnall’s New Standard Dictionary of the English Language, vol.2, M-Z 1938)




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