[MCN] Nature August 14, 2019 EDITORIAL : "The youth climate movement’s members are brave, and they are right."

[Lance Olsen]

Nature  August 14, 2019 EDITORIAL 
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02425-7 <https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02425-7>

Teenage activists and an IPCC triumph
The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a well-timed blueprint for action. Decision makers must now pay attention — a nascent youth movement is showing them how.

Excerpt

Young people care about climate

As each of the UN conventions faces continuing challenges, the IPCC can at least be assured of support from the next generation. It has garnered a following among the growing international youth climate movement. Members keenly absorb every new report, including participants in the school strike for climate, led by Swedish teenage activist Greta Thunberg.

Thunberg makes a point of name checking the IPCC and quoting paragraph and page numbers in speeches, as she did in an address to the French parliament at the end of last month.

As government delegates get ready for Delhi, Nairobi and New York, they must prepare to answer why, if children can understand the meaning of the IPCC assessments, adults cannot do the same?

The youth climate movement’s members are brave, and they are right. It has been almost three decades since the three UN conventions — on biodiversity, climate and desertification — were agreed at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. And it has been 31 years since the IPCC was created to advise decision makers. Yet environmental promises have not been matched by meaningful action.

Politicians must act now.

Nature 572, 283 (2019)

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“A new area of study is the field that some of us are beginning to call social traps. 
The term refers to situations in society that contain traps formally like a fish trap, 
where men or whole societies get themselves started in some direction or some 
set of relationships that later prove to be unpleasant or lethal and that they see 
no easy way to back out of or to avoid."

John Platt. Social Traps. American Psychologist, August 1973

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“Our results indicate that terrestrial ecosystems are highly sensitive to temperature change and suggest that, 

without major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere, terrestrial ecosystems worldwide 

 at risk of major transformation.”

Nolan et al. Past and future global transformation of terrestrial ecosystems under climate change. Science 31 August 2018 

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