HOW TO SAVE THE WORLD: listen to someone smarter than you... if that person exists.

This is Greta Thunberg. She is just 17 and her mission is to save the world... and she will, if we listen.

She makes it sound easy. ""We just can't continue living like there is no tomorrow, because there is a tomorrow. That's all we are saying."

As Time Magazine said when naming her one of the "100 most influential people in the world" and its current "Person of the Year," "For decades, researchers and activists have struggled to get world leaders to take the climate threat seriously. But this year (2019) an unlikely teenager somehow got the world's attention."

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To better understand who this young person with Asperger's Syndrome--a developmental disorder related to autism and characterized by higher than average intellectual ability coupled with impaired social skills and restrictive, repetitive  patterns of interest and activities--is, and her total focus on perhaps the most important problem of our lifetime, you must watch the just released documentary, "I am Greta," on Hulu. (Here's a 2 minute trailer) It will show, better than words can tell, who Greta is and how she has captivated the world and led the charge to seriously focus on what we must do to preserve tomorrow. It is most compelling and shows what a voice with passion to match can indeed change the world.

There are those who disbelieve climate change but that is no more credible than those disbelieving the coronavirus... it doesn't matter. Nature will do what it will do, no matter what you believe or not wearing a mask because it violates your rights. It's not like Santa Claus you know. It just is. Period. And it will have its way.

You think she is not direct and can't make herself heard? Here she is at the United Nations Conference on Global Warming in New York last September.

My message is that we'll be watching you.

This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet, you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!

You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words and yet I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!

For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you're doing enough when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.

You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency, but no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act then you would be evil and that I refuse to believe.

The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50 percent chance of staying below 1.5 degrees and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control.

Fifty percent may be acceptable to you, but those numbers do not include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of equity and climate justice.

They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist.

So a 50 percent risk is simply not acceptable to us, we who have to live with the consequences.

How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just business as usual and some technical solutions? With today's emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than eight and a half years.

There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today, because these numbers are too uncomfortable and you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.

You are failing us, but the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you and if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you.

We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up and change is coming, whether you like it or not.

Thank you.