BY HILLARY VIDERS
SPECIAL TO NORTHERN VALLEY PRESS
NORTHERN VALLEY AREA, N.J.—On March 15, up to 1.4 million children in 123 countries around the world took part in a global climate strike to demand that world leaders do more to address the dangers of climate change, specifically global warming.
The mass protests were sparked by 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, who has skipped school every Friday to sit outside the Swedish parliament to demand leaders act on climate change.
In New York City, 5,000 students gathered at Columbus Circle and marched to the steps of the Natural History Museum while other students held a climate change rally outside City Hall.
Eighteen-year-old Alysa Chen, the organizer of the walkout at New York City’s Bronx High School of Science, mobilized her peers as they shouted “What do we want? Change! When do we want it? Now!”
Across New Jersey, thousands of high school and college students from Ramapo College in Mahwah as well as educational institutions in Morristown, Montclair, and Princeton echoed that same sentiment as they walked out of class and rallied on campuses as well as in public venues.
In solidarity with the nationwide rally, 100 students at Dwight Morrow High School in Englewood left their classes at 9:17 a.m. and headed to the front lawn. They remained there for 30 minutes circulating flyers and holding signs with slogans such as, “There is no PLANet B,”
The spokesperson for the group, Joey Liberti Jr., president of the school’s Mission Green Club, spoke dramatically.
“Why plan for our future in schools if there won’t be a future?” Liberti Jr. asked.
In Closter, Rachel Lee, a sophomore at Northern Valley Regional High School at Demarest, and her friend Julianna Marton did the walkout in Closter as well as in New York City. Lee is the co-head coordinator of Zero Hour in New York City, the youth-led organization that advocates for climate justice.
On March 15 at 7:30 a.m., Lee and Marton positioned themselves at their strike location in downtown Closter Plaza.
“As time went by, cars honked in support, pedestrians stopped to read our signs, and some people started a conversation with us,” Lee said. “Middle schoolers on their way to schools stared at us from their cars.”
At 9:10 a.m., Lee and Marton got on the bus to New York City, where they met up with a team of school strikers to do a sit-in at the Koch Industries office building.
“Katie Eder, the climate activist leading the sit-in, wrote the name and phone number of a lawyer on our arms, just in case we were arrested,” Lee said.
Lee, along with other strikers from New Jersey, joined the Zero Hour NYC team as they gathered in front of Trump Tower.
“We were joined by fellow strikers who arrived chanting and waving their signs,” she said.
At Columbus Circle, thousands more students were joined by a crowd of journalists and news reporters. The march was led with banners saying, “Change is coming whether you like it or not,” and “Whatever it takes.”
Students marched along Central Park West, gathering in front of the Natural History Museum for the rally. There, student strikers occupied the entire museum entrance and Alexandria Villasenor, the lead organizer of the NYC School Strike, introduced a series of student speakers.
Is Global Warming already too hot to handle?
In the last 20 years, global warming has become one of the most alarming and immediate environmental issues.
Global warming is the increase of Earth’s average surface temperature due to greenhouse gases, mostly carbon dioxide, but also methane and nitrous oxide. It is called the “Greenhouse Effect” because—like a pane of glass in a greenhouse—these gases let in visible light from the sun, but prevent some of the resulting infrared radiation from escaping and re-radiate it back to the earth’s surface, causing the planet to warm up.
Ironically, in normal concentrations, these gases occur naturally and they are necessary to keep the lower atmosphere of the Earth far warmer than it would otherwise be. Without them, Earth would be somewhat comparable to the frigid environment of Mars.
However, since the start of the industrial revolution in the 1700s, the amount of greenhouse gas emissions has escalated rapidly, as humans began emitting more fossil fuels from coal, oil, and gas to run cars, trucks, and factories. With the scenario of modern life—i.e., burgeoning populations and industry—greenhouse gasses continue to increase, and there is now more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today than at any point in the last 800,000 years.
As a result, NASA reported that, just between 1906 and 2005, the global average surface temperature rose 0.6 to 0.9 degrees Celsius (1.1 to 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit), and the rate of temperature increase has nearly doubled in the last 50 years.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that the average global surface temperature could rise 1 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit (or 0.6 to 2.5 degrees Celsius) in the next 50 years, and 2.2 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit (or 1.4 to 5.8 degrees Celsius) in the next century, with significant regional variation.
If this does occur, summer temperatures in many U.S. cities will have unprecedented numbers of days with temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
World summits on climate change have had lofty ideals, but many countries do not and cannot meet their carbon reduction obligations.
The United States, the second largest source of greenhouse emissions (following China) has rolled back Obama-era climate measures and withdrew from the 2015 Paris agreement.
The IPCC found that to avoid racing past what scientists call the tipping point, 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) over preindustrial levels would require a “rapid and far-reaching transformation of human civilization at a magnitude that has never happened before.”
“There is no documented historic precedent” for the sweeping change to energy, transportation and other systems required to reach 1.5 degrees Celsius, the IPCC wrote in a report requested as part of the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
No matter how you crunch the numbers, global warming means trouble. The dying off of coral reefs worldwide and the melting of the ice caps that we’ve already seen are just the tip of the iceberg (no pun intended).
Global warming brings erratic weather patterns, like more intense and more frequent hurricanes and tropical storms driven by rising ocean surface temperatures. In coastal areas, which are usually densely populated and extremely valuable in natural resources, even a relatively small rise in sea level would contaminate groundwater supplies with salt. Flooding would take place in coastal roads, buildings, and drive millions of people from their homes. Harvests of staple foods (such as rice) which are grown on low-lying river deltas and flood plains would be substantially reduced, causing famine in many developing countries.
Global warming also causes a wide range of health problems for humans, including deaths from dangerous heat waves, asthmatic attacks from wildfires, and an increase in ticks and mosquitoes borne diseases.
Even with all the scientific data, some industry representatives and politicians still continue to debate whether the earth is even warming, and if so, how fast, by how many degrees, and what the consequences will be.
There is a growing number of citizens, however, that believe we must take immediate action. Members of our younger generation have become the standard bearers for this action. They have vowed to keep speaking with their voices and soon with their votes.
The international student strike on March 15 sent a message with very specific demands by the national group Youth Climate Strike:
• Reduce greenhouse gas emissions in line with the October 2018 IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius.
• Have action from world leaders that ensures global warming remains under 1.5 degrees Celsius.
• Government officials and world leaders enact policies and laws that help reverse the climate crisis and keep us below 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Eli Conlin, one of the student speakers from Zero Hour NYC said, “We will show the world what the power of unity does. We are America. We are the Future. Our voices will go unheard no more.”
Hillary Viders, Ph.D., author of “Marine Conservation for the Twenty First Century,” has been writing about global warming for over 40 years. She was an adjunct professor of Environmental Science at NYU’s Graduate School of Continuing Education. In the 1990s, Viders was selected to join Al Gore’s panel of experts to discuss and develop guidelines to stem global warming, and she has consulted to NOAA and the U.S. Department of Commerce on environmental issues. She is a frequent contributor to Northern Valley Press.