Somini Sengupta

Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist, was scheduled to set sail from Hampton, Virginia, on Wednesday morning. This time, she will hitch a ride with an Australian couple that sails around the world in a 48-foot catamaran called La Vagabonde and chronicles their travels on YouTube.

La Vagabonde will take roughly three weeks to reach Spain, where Thunberg hopes to arrive in time for the next round of U.N.-sponsored climate talks.

“I decided to sail to highlight the fact that you can’t live sustainably in today’s society,” Thunberg said by phone from Hampton on Tuesday afternoon. “You have to go to the extreme.”

Thunberg doesn’t fly because of the outsize greenhouse gas emissions from aviation. And so her trip from Europe to the United States was also by boat — a racing yacht that set off from Plymouth, England, and arrived in New York harbor to much fanfare in August.

Thunberg had been traveling slowly across the United States and Canada — appearing on “The Daily Show With Trevor Noah” in New York, protesting alongside Sioux leaders in North Dakota, bike riding in California with Arnold Schwarzenegger and joining school strikes every Friday from Iowa City to Los Angeles. She had planned to make her way south, mainly by bus and boat, to Santiago, Chile, for the next round of U.N.-sponsored climate negotiations in December.

Her slow travel plans needed to be quickly changed. First came a wave of street protests in Santiago. Chile said the climate talks could no longer be held there. Spain offered Madrid as the venue, and Thunberg found herself suddenly needing another ride across the ocean.

“It turns out I’ve traveled half around the world, the wrong way,” she said on Twitter. “Now I need to find a way to cross the Atlantic in November… If anyone could help me find transport I would be so grateful.”

Help came from Riley Whitelum, an Australian who has been sailing around the world with his wife, Elayna Carausu. “If you get in contact with me, I’m sure we could organize something,” he responded.

In the span of a week, the voyage was organized. Whitelum and Carausu will be joined by a British professional sailor, Nikki Henderson, for this voyage. Thunberg’s father, Svante, will accompany her back across the ocean, as he did on the westward trip.

The couple’s 11-month-old son, Lenny, will also be onboard, meaning that Thunberg, who is usually the only child in rooms full of powerful adults, will not be the youngest person in the crowd. “Finally,” she said.

Thunberg’s extraordinary rise stems, in large part, from the fact that she is a child.

She was 15 when she decided she would skip school and sit in front of the Swedish parliament, holding a homemade sign that read, in Swedish, “School Strike for the Climate.” She credits her single-minded focus on climate action to what she calls her superpower: Asperger’s syndrome, a neurological difference on the autism spectrum.

Word spread of her solo act of civil disobedience. It buoyed the efforts of other young environmental activists and inspired hundreds of school strikes. Young people organized with the tool that they best know how to use: the internet, mobilizing by the millions, from Melbourne to Kampala to Bonn to New York City. Their anger, like hers, embodied the frustration of their generation at the incongruously slow pace of action in the face of definitive science.

Thunberg’s fame has grown in the United States. A collection of her speeches, most of them previously published, has been released in a new anthology by Penguin Press. Her angriest speech, delivered to world leaders at the United Nations in September, has been used in a death-metal remix. The likeness of her face is painted on a mural on the side of a building in San Francisco.

Threats of violence have come at her too, along with attacks aimed at her medical condition.

Perhaps her most famous American encounter was with President Donald Trump in the corridors of the United Nations. He didn’t see her. But she saw him, flashing icy daggers with her eyes. Asked what she was thinking in that moment, Thunberg said, “It speaks for itself.”

Thunberg said Tuesday that she hoped La Vagabonde would bring her to Spain safely and on time. After that, she was looking forward to going back home to Stockholm and hugging her two dogs. “Traveling around is very fun and I’m very privileged to have the opportunity to do so, but it would be nice to get back to my routines again,” she said.

This article originally appeared in

Greta Thunberg to Sail Again After Climate Talks Relocate

Greta Thunberg is sailing across the Atlantic, again. It’s much sooner than she had planned, but not before making her mark in the United States.

New York City smells. People talk really loudly here, they blast air conditioning, and they argue over whether they believe in climate change, while in her country, Sweden, they accept it as fact.

Also, U.S. lawmakers would do well to read the latest science on the threats posed by climate change.

That’s what Thunberg, 16, told members of a congressional subcommittee Wednesday when she was asked to submit her testimony into the record. She submitted a report issued last October by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, spelling out the threats of global temperature rise. “I don’t want you to listen to me,” she said. “I want you to listen to the scientists.”

Her remarks lasted barely a minute. “And then I want you to take real action.”

With her typically blunt, often biting remarks, she has offered Americans a sort of unvarnished, outsider’s view of themselves. And she has used the supersize attention she has received in this country to draw attention to her American peers, those young activists who have dutifully organized for climate action in their communities without any of the limelight that she has received.

“She’s been quite selfless in this,” said Xiuhtezcatl Martínez, 19, one of the 21 plaintiffs in a landmark children’s lawsuit against the U.S. government. “I’m impressed with that.”

Martínez has joined her in a number of her public appearances in New York and Washington, including at an Amnesty International awards ceremony this week, where Thunberg insisted on being onstage with her peers, rather than by herself. “A huge part of her messaging is, ‘This is not for me,’” Martínez said.

On Wednesday afternoon, Thunberg joined her activist peers as they went to meet with the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi. She didn’t want to say much, recalled Vic Barrett, 20, of White Plains, New York, who is also a plaintiff in the children’s climate lawsuit. “She felt it was an opportunity for the U.S. youth,” Barrett said. “She’s been very clear that she doesn’t feel like all the attention needs to be on her.”

Thunberg once described herself as “the invisible girl.” She has never been fond of small talk. She still speaks very quietly and slowly. But she smiles much more than when she first began gaining media attention a year ago. She is more comfortable at banter, including with Trevor Noah, host of “The Daily Show,” who asked last week how it was to arrive in New York City after a two-week journey across the Atlantic on a solar-powered yacht.

She recalled the smell. “It was indescribable,” she said, which prompted howls of laughter from the audience, also in New York City.

On Tuesday, speaking to members of a Senate task force, she spoke directly to earnest lawmakers who had commended youth climate activists like her for their courage. “Please save us your praise. We don’t want it,” she said. “Don’t invite us here to tell us how inspiring we are without doing anything about it.”

Jamie Margolin, 17, a Seattle-based activist who had been invited to the same meeting, was glad she called them out.

“She gives very blunt observations,” Margolin said. “If I had done that, people would’ve thought I was an entitled brat.”

“She comes with an outsider’s perspective,” Margolin added.

Thunberg explained her indignation this way on a CBS “Good Morning” interview: “We cannot focus on what we can and cannot say now,” she said. “We must speak clearly about what’s happening.”

She has said she wants the global youth protests planned for Friday to be a “social tipping point.”

Her earnestness comes out occasionally, like when she speaks to her peers. She often says she could not have imagined that school strikes, which she helped to inspire, would take off in so many countries. And she often speaks publicly about being “grateful.”

“You will constantly feel like you are not doing enough,” she said last week. “That is a very dangerous feeling to feel especially when you are actually doing everything you can.”

“They are doing the impossible,” she said of her peers. “I am eternally grateful for them.”

Greta Thunberg on America: Too Much Air Conditioning, Not Enough Science

These are some of the things that Greta Thunberg has learned on her American tour.

At the same time, on the other side of the planet, wildfires raged in Australia’s record-breaking heat. Soaring air-conditioner use overloaded electrical grids and caused widespread power failures. Authorities slowed and canceled trams to save power. Labor leaders called for laws that would require businesses to close when temperatures reached hazardous levels: nearly 116 degrees Fahrenheit, as was the case last week in Adelaide, the capital of South Australia.

This is weather in the age of extremes. It comes on top of multiple extremes, all kinds, in all kinds of places.

“When something happens — whether it’s a cold snap, a wildfire, a hurricane, any of those things — we need to think beyond what we have seen in the past and assume there’s a high probability that it will be worse than anything we’ve ever seen,” said Crystal A. Kolden, an associate professor at the University of Idaho, who specializes in wildfires and who is working in Tasmania during one of the state’s worst fire seasons.

Consider these recent examples: Heat records were toppled from Norway to Algeria last year. In Australia, a drought has gone on so long that a child in kindergarten will hardly have seen rain in her lifetime. And California saw its most ruinous wildfires ever in 2018, triggering a bankruptcy filing this week by the state’s largest utility, Pacific Gas and Electric.

Heat and drought extremes are consistent with scientific consensus: More greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere bring a greater likelihood of abnormally high temperatures. Also, broadly speaking, scientists say, a hotter planet makes extreme weather more frequent and more intense.

The real-life numbers bear out the climate models. Concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are higher than they have been in 800,000 years, and average global temperatures have risen. The last four years have been the hottest on record, according to the World Meteorological Organization, and the 20 warmest years on record have all come in the past 22 years. Ocean temperatures have broken records several straight years.

As for the extremely low temperatures this week in parts of the United States, they stand in sharp contrast to the trend toward warmer winters. They may also be a result of warming, strangely enough.

Emerging research suggests that a warming Arctic is causing changes in the jet stream and pushing polar air down to latitudes that are unaccustomed to them and often unprepared. Hence this week’s atypical chill over large swaths of the Northeast and Midwest.

Friederike Otto, an Oxford University climate scientist who studies how specific weather events are exacerbated by global warming, said that while not all of these extreme events can be attributed to climate change, the profound changes in the Earth’s atmosphere raise “the likelihood of a large number of extreme events.”

“This means it becomes crucial to understand well where your community is vulnerable, and this can be something that was not on the agenda without climate change,” she said.

Take Chicago, for instance. It woke up to the hazards of heat two decades ago, when a five-day heat wave in the summer of 1995 killed hundreds of people, particularly those who lived alone. The city developed a heat action plan. It planted thousands of trees, set up neighborhood cooling centers and created a text messaging system so residents could request that city officials check on vulnerable people.

Now comes a cold spell that a generation of Chicago residents has never experienced, with Wednesday night temperatures projected to dip to minus 24 degrees Fahrenheit (the city’s record low is 27 degrees below zero, recorded in January 1985). The city said it would send out five buses to cruise the streets as mobile warming centers for homeless people. It has issued instructions on how to warm pipes so they don’t freeze.

Extreme heat, though, is the bigger problem overall.

Heat records have been broken twice as often as cold records in the United States since the 2000s.

One recent study in the journal PLOS Medicine projected a fivefold rise in heat-related deaths for the United States by 2080. The outlook for less wealthy countries is worse; for the Philippines, researchers forecast 12 times more deaths. Extreme heat is already devastating the health and livelihoods of tens of millions of people, especially in South Asia.

Extreme heat also affects the nutritional value of many crops. Even some of our most precious indulgences, like coffee, are in danger as temperatures rise.

This year, heat has been a problem in both Northern and Southern hemispheres. In Alaska, warmer-than-usual temperatures forced the cancellation of sled dog races, while cities in New Zealand, where the weather is generally so temperate that most homes don’t have heating or air-conditioners, broke heat records. On Tuesday, Wellington, the capital, soared past 87 degrees Fahrenheit, the highest since record-keeping began in 1927, and Hamilton topped 91 degrees, the highest since record-keeping began in 1940.

Bob Henson, a meteorologist at Weather Underground, a forecasting service, said that in preparing for how climate change affects the weather, “we have to be prepared for a wider range of possibilities.”

Some preparation is connected to resiliency. Mayors promise to make their cities more resilient to climate change after one disaster or another. Scientists experiment with crop seeds that are more resilient to the vagaries of extreme heat and drought.

Kolden, the fire specialist, noted that as a species, we pride ourselves on being resilient. But that human trait can also have a downside. It’s why, often, even when officials tell us to evacuate from a fire zone or a flood plain, we don’t. We think we’ll make it, because we’ve made it before. Or that the forecasters are wrong.

“In our DNA, we’ve got this extreme resilience baked in,” Kolden said. “That ends up being our downfall when it comes to the changing conditions.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/29/climate/global-warming-extreme-weather.html" id="ea00b580-4595-32a4-a0c8-a2d7532333ee">The New York Times</a>.

U.S. Midwest Freezes, Australia Burns: This Is the Age of Weather Extremes

In Chicago, officials warned about the risk of almost instant frostbite on what could be the city’s coldest day ever. Warming centers opened around the Midwest. And schools and universities closed throughout the region as rare polar winds streamed down from the Arctic.

That is one of the principal conclusions of a comprehensive report that sets out targets on how to feed the world in a way that’s good for human health and the health of the planet. Its lightning-rod recommendation is around beef and lamb, the two forms of livestock that require enormous amounts of land and water and produce heaps of methane.

The report suggests a dramatic reduction in red meat consumption for people who eat a lot of it, like Americans and Canadians, but not the world’s poor, who need more animal protein for better health — like children in South Asia.

Written by 37 scientists from 16 countries and published Wednesday in the medical journal The Lancet, in conjunction with an advocacy group called the EAT Forum, the report was funded by the Wellcome Trust and Stordalen Foundation. In addition to the recommendations on meat, it calls for curbing food waste, a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, and overhauling agriculture so it does not worsen deforestation and the depletion of scarce water.

“It’s not a blanket approach, but when you look at the data there are certain individuals or populations that don’t need that much red meat for their own health,” said Jessica Fanzo, a professor of food policy at Johns Hopkins University and a co-author of the report. “There’s a real inequity. Some people get too much. Some people get too little.”

People in North America eat more than 6 times the recommended amount of red meat, the report said, while countries in South Asia eat half of what’s recommended.

Agriculture accounts for roughly a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions, much of them produced by the raising of cattle and lamb. With the world’s population projected to rise to 10 billion by 2050 and prosperity allowing many more people to afford meat and dairy, scientists and policymakers are paying more attention to the question of feeding the planet without destroying it.

One recent study by the World Resources Institute recommended that people in Europe and the United States reduce their meat consumption. But like the Lancet report, it, too, suggested that reducing the carbon footprint of food would also require rapid changes in farming methods to allow farmers and ranchers to grow far more food on existing agricultural lands while cutting emissions.

The Lancet report pointed to a broader problem of disparity: More than 800 million people do not get enough to eat worldwide, the report noted, and many more “consume low-quality diets that cause micronutrient deficiencies and contribute to a substantial rise in the incidence of diet-related obesity and diet-related noncommunicable diseases.”

The report took pains to say that it was not trying to prescribe to people what to eat or how to eat. It laid out global targets for what constitutes a healthy diet, based on an average intake of 2,500 calories a day. That includes 14 grams, or about half an ounce, of beef or lamb a day. That is roughly the equivalent of a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder every eight days.

The report said the largest share of daily calories, 35 percent, should come from whole grains, including rice, wheat and corn, and starchy tubers like potatoes and cassava. The recommendations included unsaturated fats, milk, cheese and nuts, and lots of green vegetables. Overall, the guidelines called for a doubling of global consumption of fruits, nuts, vegetables and legumes, and cutting the consumption of red meat in half.

The meat reduction recommendation received immediate pushback. Even before the release of the Lancet report, the Animal Agriculture Alliance, an industry group, issued a statement extolling the benefits of meat and dairy. It said cutting animal protein could “risk worsening malnutrition, increasing food waste, and distracting from the highest priorities for addressing greenhouse gas emissions.” The group echoed the Lancet report’s recommendation to reduce food waste.

Likewise, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, in a statement, called beef “nourishing and sustainable.”

The Lancet report also made clear that individual consumer choices would not be enough to avert what the authors called “catastrophic damage to the planet.” It urged governments to encourage healthy food choices and ensure access to nutritious food. It also suggested that global agriculture policy emphasize not just producing more food, but more “nutritious plant-based foods,” though it acknowledged that, in some places, animal farming can be good for the ecosystem.

It recommended policies to curb deforestation and to protect at least 10 percent of marine areas from fishing. To tackle food waste, it suggested help for farmers in poor- and middle-income countries to better store their crops and get them to market while still fresh. In rich countries, it encouraged better shopping habits and improved “use by” labels.

“The evidence says we can do it,” said Tim Lang, a professor of food policy at the City University of London and a co-author of the report. “There’s an immense diversity of what people can eat. It’s not prescriptive.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="bda2f547-2394-405e-8d18-60052d9dae85" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/16/climate/meat-environment-climate-change.html">The New York Times</a>.

New diet guidelines to benefit people and the planet: More greens for all, less meat for some

The report suggests a dramatic reduction in red meat consumption for people who eat a lot of it, like Americans and Canadians, but not the world’s poor, who need more animal protein for better health — like children in South Asia.

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Somini Sengupta

Articles written by the author

Greta Thunberg to Sail Again After Climate Talks Relocate

Greta Thunberg on America: Too Much Air Conditioning, Not Enough Science

U.S. Midwest Freezes, Australia Burns: This Is the Age of Weather Extremes

New diet guidelines to benefit people and the planet: More greens for all, less meat for some