Geostorm – The Reality of Climate Change.

by Sophie Mitchell

If you’re like me, you enjoyed the scorching hot weather last week. If you’re like me, then you are also slightly scared for the future. If you’re like me, you finally want something to happen, instead of dealing with politicians who care more about money and power than the future of the planet.

To put this in perspective for you, this exact time last year, temperatures in some places across the UK reached a staggering -11 degrees Celsius. This year, temperatures soared to a record 21.2 degrees Celsius. The same week, just a year apart. To me, this is a terrifying prospect. It’s like in those climate change movies where an alarm goes off in some big room, then the next thing you know there’s a heatwave in Antarctica, Australia is covered in snow and New York has been flooded by a tsunami. This sounds widely exaggerated compared to the current situation, but what you may not know is that snow fell in LA for the first time since 1949, seventy years ago. It’s a sign of the times, and it shouldn’t be. Nine of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred since 2005. January 2019 was Australia’s hottest month ever – with averages topping 30C in a deadly heatwave. Prolonged droughts worsened California’s destructive wildfires. This is the reality of the world we live in.

Everyone is out there enjoying the sun, failing to see the bigger picture. The planet is in trouble, and it appears that no-one seems to really care. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an American politician of the Democratic party, recently said that our generation,  gen-z, had to seriously consider if we want to have children, if we want kids to grow up in a world that is falling apart around them, in a world where there is a very real possibility that they could one day not have enough food or water to survive, even in a country with a high GDP. It’s nearly a reality that we must have to accept.

Global temperatures could reach a tipping point in as little as twelve years, after which the temperature change cannot be restored, it cannot be fixed – we, as humanity, will have caused irreversible damage to our planet. And twelve years is not a long time at all. We have twelve years to work together, to try and stop our planet dying, and taking us all with it. Human activity has already made the world warmer by 1C – but scientists warn we have already “locked in” another 0.5C, and a major UN report suggests we have just 11 years to take bold action to prevent temperatures escalating beyond 1.5C. If we fail, things will get unimaginably worse. If we reach 2C, coral reefs will be all but wiped out, an additional 411 million people will suffer from water scarcity and yields of key crops will suffer. At 3C, each drought in Africa could last five years, and the Mediterranean could see 38 nights a year when the temperature fails to drop below 20C. Warming of 4C compared with pre-industrial levels would see sea levels rise by up to a metre, and global conflict and warfare could double.

The thing is, we, as young people, understand what it will be like to grow up in this ‘apocalyptic’ world. We get that stuff needs to change – stuff being the scientific word. If you’re not clear on this, then let me explain. On Friday the 15th of February 2019, more than 10,000 school students went on strike to protest climate change and the government’s lack of intervention. The UK education system condoned this behaviour, claiming that their student’s education, only a day of which they were missing, was more important than the cause for which they were protesting for. If this isn’t the best representation of how the UK deals with climate change, then I don’t know what else is. There was recently a parliamentary debate abut climate change, at which 610 MPs failed to show up. Layla Moran, the Liberal Democrat MP for Oxford West and Abingdon spoke, however, to a chamber where the seats were predominantly empty. At points, as few as 10 MPs sat on government benches, although the opposition side was more occupied. The lacklustre response to the debate from the government was in stark contrast to the condemnation by Downing Street to the thousands of children involved in the strike for climate change, calling it “truancy”. This is the state of our government when it comes to climate change – this is how much they care.

Countries are doing very little to agree with the Paris Climate Accord, something participation from America is thoroughly lacking. In fact, Donald Trump’s lack of belief in climate change is severely terrifying. His logic even more so – the cold vortex was enough to convince him that climate change wasn’t real as temperatures weren’t getting hotter, instead the opposite, a mentality that many six-year olds without any further education hold. It’s a shining example of why climate change is getting worse – with the leader of arguably one of the world’s most pollutant producing countries, amongst others, refusing to see the science and evidence right in front of him how is anything supposed to change?

What I am trying to say is, we need to be more assertive, actually get the topics that matter discussed in parliament, over things like arguing as to whether school should start later – to me that’s a very minor issue compared to the impending climate crisis. This is why I’m so passionate about the UK declaring a climate emergency, something that needs to occur. Politicians and people in power need to recognise what is going on around them, instead of burying their heads until something changes. Some argue that they have the philosophy that it won’t really affect them, they’ll be long gone by the time the planet gets warm enough to cause issues. And if that’s true, nothing is going to change until gen-z finally reach parliament and start discussing the actual ideas that are relevant to today’s society, instead of having endless arguments over Brexit – is Brexit really going to matter if we don’t have a country to live on due to climate change? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the first time we’ve seen someone get really real with a country over climate change, and actually campaign for improved climate laws. We need more people like this in positions of power, people who have a voice, in order for things to change.

That’s why I implore those future politicians to carry on campaigning, and why I implore the current politicians to listen to the voice of people and change something before it’s too late.