UPDATE May 7, 2019
– Climate change makes teens fear for the future (CBC Info AM Podcast)
UPDATE May 3, 2019
– Students across Maritimes march to join Youth Strike 4 Climate CTV News May 3, 2019
– Youth march on at climate protest despite warnings from Halifax school administrators Francis Campbell in Chronicle Herald May 3, 2019 (item available without subscription) – but at least one school encouraged participation.
– Halifax students lead climate march through downtown Global News, May 3, 2019
– Shelburne Students March To Protest Clearcutting
Ed Halverson for www.ckbw.ca/, May 3, 2019. Their Logo: “Stop the Chop”
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What it’s about:
In August 2018, Greta Thunberg began striking for the climate. Canada’s first climate strike in solidarity with Greta was Friday, November 2, 2018. By Friday, December 7, 2018, there were nine youth groups in Canada striking with Greta. Many youths in Canada are now striking regularly. Canada’s national climate strike is Friday, May 3, 2019. Canadian youth will next prepare for the global strike anticipated on September 27,2019. – Fridays for Future Canada
Events are cited currently for Halifax, Truro, Antiginish, Bridgewater and Shelburne. (View this link for details).
Students at Shelburne are using the event to highlight local concerns about clearcutting
“We were brainstorming ideas and the topic of the clear cuts that are going on around us came up and we talked about it and we figured it was a good cause and we wanted to help contribute to stopping it,” said student Sadie Oikle in an interview.
Oikle said a lot of students in other grades are signing up to take part in the walk.
“We went around to all the classes, did a presentation and almost everyone signed up,” she said. – From Shelburne students planning walkout to raise awareness of clearcutting, climate change issues by Kathy Johnson in the Shelburne County Coast Guard Apr 30, 2019.
The article cites concerns raised by Shelburne Co. residents about “their opposition to approved clear-cut harvest plans on Crown land in Allendale and the Upper Clyde/Ohio area” and the “letter from the group Community Forests Shelburne County dated March 1 to Lands and Forestry Minister Iain Rankin [which] calls on the minister to “immediately declare a moratorium on clear cutting on Crown Lands in Shelburne County pending a thorough and proper review and consultation with our community.
On March 15, 2019, around 300 students turned out for the first such event in Halifax.
On April 15, 2019, Extinction Rebellion Nova Scotia organized protests to demand a stop to burning of coal and forests for electricity.
Could the Times be a ‘Changin?
I think so.
Greta Thunberg: We have started to clean up your mess and we will not stop until we are done
Links
– Climate Strike Canada
Posted on GoodWork.ca
Climate Strike Canada is entirely youth-led and organized and is part of the global youth-led climate school strike movement. Our mission is to steer Canada off our current path of social and ecological catastrophe; creating a better world by cultivating a culture of compassion and respect.
Inspired by the Fridays for Future movement, students and supporters across Canada will be striking en masse on May 3rd, 2019.
Climate justice is about more than greenhouse gas emissions. It’s about workers’ rights. Indigenous rights. Migrant justice. Anti-racism. Affordable housing. Each battle is entangled within another, and we can’t win any if we don’t unite to fight them all.
… sign our Open Letter: If you’re eligible to vote in Canada, sign on to our open letter demanding that all political parties have a comprehensive and bold plan for climate justice. The future of youth is in peril, but the power is disproportionately in the hands of adults. But youth can be the moral compass. Talk to the adults in your life and convince them to vote with climate as their priority.
– www.schoolstrike4climate.com/
Australian website
#FridaysForFuture is a movement that began in August 2018, after 15 years old Greta Thunberg sat in front of the Swedish parliament every schoolday for three weeks, to protest against the lack of action on the climate crisis. She posted what she was doing on Instagram and Twitter and it soon went viral.
On the 8th of September, Greta decided to continue striking every Friday until the Swedish policies provided a safe pathway well under 2-degree C, i.e. in line with the Paris agreement.
The hashtags #FridaysForFuture and #Climatestrike spread and many students and adults began to protest outside of their parliaments and local city halls all over the world. This has also inspired the Belgium Thursday school strikes.
– #FridaysForFuture Local Groups (Interactive Map)
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Just in
More evidence that the model predictions of climate change are sound:
Tree rings show human effect on climate goes back more than a century
IVAN SEMENIUK SCIENCE REPORTER Globe and Mail, May 1, 2019. Some extracts:
In 1896, Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius made a prescient calculation that showed the vast quantities of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by burning coal and other fossil fuels would eventually cause the planet to get warmer.
Little did he realize that the effect he described was already under way and being dutifully recorded by a ready-made monitoring system distributed around the globe in the form of trees.
Now, scientists have tapped into that record and demonstrated that the human effect on Earth’s climate can be traced back to the turn of the last century, when it began leaving its indelible mark on the growth patterns of tree rings. What the tree rings reveal matches what climate models predict should have happened given the basic properties of greenhouse gases and the amount of energy the sun supplies to the atmosphere.
“The models are saying that we should see the fingerprint of human-forced climate change in the early 20th century, and the tree rings confirm that,” said Kate Marvel, a climate scientist with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, and lead author on the analysis, published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
The result is significant for two reasons, Dr. Marvel and her colleagues say. First, because it provides an alternative way to gauge how greenhouse gases and other industrial pollutants have influenced drought patterns over time. And second, because it raises confidence levels in what models are projecting for the future as climate change becomes more pronounced, including extremes of temperature and precipitation that translate into more severe droughts and floods than would otherwise have occurred.
And while the basic fact of climate change is not in doubt among experts, the study offers additional evidence that these effects are primarily the result of human activity.