I agree with many contributors to this thread who thinks that Greta is taking an unnecessary risk in her timing and maybe choice of
boat. I which her best luck, there is at least one very competent sailor in the crew. But the reason I am writing is some of the absurd posts about climate change. I know that one should not feed the trolls, but there may be persons that get confused by some of the arguments. I think that the only reasonable thing is to do like Greta says: Trust the science.
I have retired now, but I worked 14 years with
research on energy conservation in buildings and got a PhD and wrote some 40 articles and
research reports. I remember attending an international conference in Sarajevo in 1989. There was a keynote speaker, a senior American professor who said that the risk for climate change was substantial and it was a wise
insurance policy to invest in energy conservation. Political leaders like Margarete Thatcher said similar things at the second IPCC conference the same year.
In 1990 I moved away from scientific
work and got a position as director for
Environment and Nature Conservation at a County administration board in
Sweden. From 2000 I was also responsible for
work on Energy conservation and Climate Adaption. I retired 2015. So I have followed the development of science and policy in fields related to Climate Change for 40 years.
I am appalled by some of the contributions in this thread. Writers who pretend that they have facts that are unknown to established science and falsify
current consensus on the risk for drastic climate change. 98-99 % of all active scientist in the field agree on the basics of Climate Change and believe that the risks are very grave, just as Greta says. Up until 2000 there were scientists who argued that the models were not good enough and more data and research were needed before one should take action against Carbon release because of the costs. But in the last 10 years there have been so much data that shows Climate Change is real. Many of the changes are also faster than the rather conservative forecasts from IPCC. The changes in ice coverage at high latitudes are alarming and the extremely warm summers shows what is coming within decades. There is ample data that shows how nature is changing and species are moving north. This creates stress and together
wind land use and pesticides biodiversity is threatened and some scientist believe that this is an even greater threat than Climate Change.
My view is that the
current situation is truly alarming and the most likely scenarios look very grim.
In
Sweden there is a common acceptance for the basic scientific facts, even the far right has stopped being climate deniers. However there is disagreement on what to do. But that is reasonable, there should be a political discussion about what actions to take. However we are not doing enough, even in Sweden we need to do much more.
To have a political and ideological discussion on basic scientific facts is to me not the rational way to handle our future. But I know that others think differently. But you can’t vote about the law of gravity or other natural laws.
I wish that I am wrong but there are absolutely no science data that show Climate Change to be non existent.