The New York Times published a Thursday op-ed by Greta Thunberg and three fellow climate activists that blamed the older generation for “the mess” they made, adding that young people will “suffer” the consequences.
The piece responded to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to which U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called a “code red for humanity” and cited evidence that the crisis is largely caused by human activity.
“For children and young people, climate change is the single greatest threat to our futures. We are the ones who will have to clean up the mess you adults have made, and we are the ones who are more likely to suffer now,” the activists wrote. “Children are more vulnerable than adults to the dangerous weather events, diseases and other harms caused by climate change, which is why a new analysis released Friday by UNICEF is so important.”
UNICEF’s “Children’s Climate Risk Index” Friday report titled “The Climate Crisis is a Child Rights Crisis” analyzed the negative impact that climate change is currently having on children, particularly the exposure of “environmental hazards, shocks and stresses.” These hazards include “heat waves, cyclones, air pollution, flooding or water scarcity,” the NYT essay said.
”It finds that virtually every child on the planet is exposed to at least one climate or environmental hazard right now.”
Adriana Calderón, Farzana Faruk Jhumu, Eric Njuguna and me write in NYT as @UNICEF publish their Children’s Climate Risk Index.https://t.co/J1fc9ZCLMW
— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) August 20, 2021
“The fundamental goal of the adults in any society is to protect their young and do everything they can to leave a better world than the one they inherited,” they continued. “The current generation of adults, and those that came before, are failing at a global scale.” (RELATED: Greta Thunberg Tweets How Penises Are Getting Smaller Due To Pollution, Recruits For Climate Strike)
“We are in a crisis of crises. A pollution crisis. A climate crisis. A children’s rights crisis. We will not allow the world to look away.”
Thunberg became world known for her speech to the U.N. regarding the crisis at the December 3, 2018 U.N. Climate Summit. On September 23, 2019, 500 notable scientists wrote a letter to Gutteres, standing in contradiction to the Swedish teenage activist’s claims.
“There is no climate emergency. A global network of 500 scientists and professionals has prepared this urgent message. Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific,” the scientists wrote. “Scientists should openly address the uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real benefits as well as the imagined costs of adaptation to global warming, and the real costs as we’ll as the imagined benefits of mitigation.”
The U.N. is set to hold a Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland from Oct. 31-Nov. 12, its website said. The activists wrote that young people “stand with the scientists and will continue to sound the alarm.”