1) In ten years time (around 2030) there will be a chain reaction of climate devastation that will end human life as we know it. If we don't act now.

Greta's actual words:

Around the year 2030, 10 years 252 days and 10 hours away from now, we will be in a position where we set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control, that will most likely lead to the end of our civilisation as we know it. That is unless in that time, permanent and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society have taken place, including a reduction of CO2 emissions by at least 50%.

Greta is presumably referring to the 2018 report of the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate, reported here.. This in turn refers to this paper. In short, business-as-usual emissions for the next 10 years will lock in an eventual rise of 2C, which in turn brings a good chance of irreversible changes to the climate and biosphere. Civilisation would indeed look very different under this scenario.

2) The emissions associated with climate change are so "a small number of people could make an unimaginable amount of money"

Greta's actual words

In the year 2030 I will be 26 years old. My little sister Beata will be 23. Just like many of your own children or grandchildren. That is a great age, we have been told. When you have all of your life ahead of you. But I am not so sure it will be that great for us. [...] Now we probably don’t even have a future any more.
Because that future was sold so that a small number of people could make unimaginable amounts of money.

2) The UK has a "historical carbon debt" thanks to our early adoption of the industrial revolution

China now has the greatest emissions, historically the USA is the single country responsible for most of the CO2 in the atmosphere, however on a per capita basis, the EU has that honour.

3) No one is doing anything, no one is acting, no one is listening to her

Not sure this is an accurate paraphrase, she is certainly critical of measures taken so far, deeming them inadequate. Many climate scientists would agree.

People always tell me and the other millions of school strikers that we should be proud of ourselves for what we have accomplished. But the only thing that we need to look at is the emission curve. And I’m sorry, but it’s still rising. That curve is the only thing we should look at.

4) Lowering emissions (e.g. switching from coal fired power to gas) is not good enough, they must be eliminated

Greta:

But perhaps the most dangerous misconception about the climate crisis is that we have to “lower” our emissions. Because that is far from enough. Our emissions have to stop if we are to stay below 1.5-2C of warming. The “lowering of emissions” is of course necessary but it is only the beginning of a fast process that must lead to a stop within a couple of decades, or less. And by “stop” I mean net zero – and then quickly on to negative figures. That rules out most of today’s politics.

This is nothing more or less than the (inconvenient) truth. IPCC

5) The steps the UK have take (lowering emissions by 37% since 1990) is creative accounting because it doesn't take account of aviation (unspecified but presumably it doesn't reflect inbound and outbound flights) and exports and imports - i.e. the UK hasn't double counted the emissions it uses to export goods and the emissions created in other countries to manufacture goods the UK imports.

6) That means the UK has "only" reduced its emissions (using her double counting method) by 10%

Again, all true. Aviation (and shipping) are not formally included in carbon budgets and targets, aviation being one of the fastest-growing sources of GHGs. Nor are so-called 'embedded' emissions, that is, the greenhouse gases emitted during the manufacture of goods that we then import. For the UK, we import more embedded GHGs than we export, as so much manufacturing has been offshored.

7) You must act now and not give a thought to the political consequences.

Greta:

You don’t listen to the science because you are only interested in solutions that will enable you to carry on like before. Like now. And those answers don’t exist any more. Because you did not act in time.
Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking. We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling.

Sometimes we just simply have to find a way. The moment we decide to fulfil something, we can do anything. And I’m sure that the moment we start behaving as if we were in an emergency, we can avoid climate and ecological catastrophe. Humans are very adaptable: we can still fix this. But the opportunity to do so will not last for long. We must start today. We have no more excuses.

We children are not sacrificing our education and our childhood for you to tell us what you consider is politically possible in the society that you have created. We have not taken to the streets for you to take selfies with us, and tell us that you really admire what we do.

Greta is in many ways just being a typical naive teenager, pointing the finger at the adults for their failures and hypocrisies, while lacking the experience and maturity to propose a politically realistic solution. She has a point, the political system is very bad at dealing with issues that have a timescale many times longer than the electoral cycle, and Lord Stern opened his report on the economics 'Climate change is a result of the greatest market failure that the world has seen. We are going to mitigate, adapt and suffer, the ratio of each depends on what we do now.

She has also made a useful contribution to the gaiety of nations, who knew so many commenters could be triggered by a 16 year old Swedish schoolgirl? ;-)

Full Speech

Mrs Thunberg

Yes. Thanks for confirming that Greta has a mother.

Phil

In your 6.36pm post, you seem to be arguing exactly the opposite of what you argued on the thread I opened about the Climate Change Act last year. Then you said (I paraphrase, of course) that it (the Act) had been successful, the UK had significantly reduced its GHG emissions without damaging the economy or pushing poor people into fuel poverty, and that it was helping to lead the rest of the world in the right direction. You were then particularly hostile to my argument that we were simply off-shoring jobs and CO2 emissions. Now you say:

"5) The steps the UK have take (lowering emissions by 37% since 1990) is creative accounting because it doesn't take account of aviation (unspecified but presumably it doesn't reflect inbound and outbound flights) and exports and imports - i.e. the UK hasn't double counted the emissions it uses to export goods and the emissions created in other countries to manufacture goods the UK imports.

6) That means the UK has "only" reduced its emissions (using her double counting method) by 10%

Again, all true. Aviation (and shipping) are not formally included in carbon budgets and targets, aviation being one of the fastest-growing sources of GHGs. Nor are so-called 'embedded' emissions, that is, the greenhouse gases emitted during the manufacture of goods that we then import. For the UK, we import more embedded GHGs than we export, as so much manufacturing has been offshored."

Not terribly consistent, then? I suppose it's a bit difficult not allowing criticism of the CCA whilst not allowing criticism of green zealots like Greta and XR, who either explicitly or implicitly criticise the UK Government for "not doing enough" and thus drawing attention to the failures of, inter alia, the CCA.

Hi Mark,

Memory can play tricks, but I am not sure that I agree with your synopsis. I praised the CCA, while noting that it was successful as judged on it's own terms, but I thought I was clear that I regarded those targets as woefully inadequate

I've read the science, which is quite ingenious and wonderful. I accept it, and thus the need to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The political response has been nothing less than a betrayal of humanity. Ranging from the moronic denial of Trump ('it's all a hoax') to lukewarm, timid responses elsewhere.

I also explicitly mentioned the 'imported' emissions issue and how it reduced our headline reduction in emissions

I think the territorial measure is indeed flawed, if you want to measure progress, as it enables countries to evade strict accounting for all their emissions, but it is what we have. Even on this more challenging measure, the trend in emissions is a 19% decline since 2007.

You suggested a 19% decline since 2007 ("even on this more challenging measure", i.e. taking into account imported emissions etc), as you have just quoted, now you say it's only 10% (since date unspecified).

Other quotes from you, Phil, on the CCA thread:

"Germany has reduced emissions by 27.3% (1990-2016) compared to an EU average of 22% . They are unlikely to meet their target of a 40% drop by 2020, but … good effort!"

"Another key claim of Darwall is that reducing emissions in one member country of the ETS just leads to more being emitted elsewhere, so-called 'carbon leakage'. He claims this amounts to 100%, that is , for every tonne of carbon dioxide not emitted in Britain, an extra tonne can be emitted elsewhere in the EU. In terms of cutting global emissions, the CCA doesn’t do anything. Yet the economic case for the CCA rests on the fiction that it does

Well no, once again, Darwell omits the measures built into the ETS to mitigate leakage and is silent on the real world evidence, which tells a different story, carbon leakage does occur, but at a maximum rate of 15-16%.

Leakage is limited to 15% of the emission reductions in the pioneering regions, and depends on the size and composition of the pioneering coalition and the decarbonization strategy in the energy sector. There is an incentive to delay action to avoid near-term costs, but the immediate GDP losses after acceding to a global climate regime can be higher in the case of delayed action compared to early action. We conclude that carbon leakage is not a strong counter-argument against early action by pioneers to induce other regions to adopt more stringent mitigation."

"Ooops, I put the wrong URL in the link to Fankhauser et al. It is here

And it informs us that

The first two carbon budgets, for the period 2008 to 2017, have been met with relative ease. The UK has been successful in decoupling greenhouse gas emissions from gross domestic product. Since 1990, UK GDP has grown by more than 65 per cent while total annual greenhouse gas emissions fell by 41 per cent to the end of 2016, the latest year for which official figures are available.
Which seems incompatible with the idea that the CCA has inflicted massive damage to the economy, putting it mildly."

"The CO2 reduction targets in the CCA were baselined in 1990 and included a 25% fall by 2012 and a 31% decrease by 2017. The actual figure for 2017 was -38%. This puts CO2 emissions at a rate not seen since 1890. See the graphic halfway down this piece. The rate of change increased markedly around 2008, when the figure was 527 MtCO2, to 366.9 in 2017, I make that around 30%."

"2017 CCA target - CO2 down 31% on 1990. Actual reduction -38%."

"In 2014 – the most recent year for which there are comprehensive figures across the G7 – British
per-capita greenhouse gas emissions were 33% down on figures for 1992. "

"Another aspect of the UK story is that it has “imported” emissions more than other G7 nations – in
other words, a greater proportion of emissions produced from goods and services consumed in
the UK are incurred abroad. However, this trend appears to have stopped with the financial crisis,
with research indicating the proportion of emissions associated with UK consumption “outsourced”
has not grown since 2010. In this period, per-capita UK emissions continued to fall faster
than in any G7 nation except Italy (which enjoyed far lower per-capita growth). Now, Britain’s
per-capita “imported” emissions are at almost exactly the same level as in the mid-1990s, despite
per-capita GDP having more than doubled in this period."

You suggested a 19% decline since 2007 ("even on this more challenging measure", i.e. taking into account imported emissions etc), as you have just quoted, now you say it's only 10% (since date unspecified).

Apples and Oranges. 19% including embedded emissions, but excluding aviation and shipping, Greta's number includes these, and appears to be correct.

Please be more accurate Phil, what you refer to as "Greta's number" (with the possessive apostrophe) isn't. Any number she uses has probably been fed to her by others. Whereas, I acknowledge she is a smart cookie, I very much doubt if she wastes her valuable time compiling data.

Phil

From that article (on the BBC website) you linked to, and which I'd already referred to on Unthreaded, we find this quote:

"The UK also has further to go than many countries: because it was early to industrialise, it has cumulatively contributed more carbon dioxide emissions than any other country, according to Prof Myles Allen, at the University of Oxford."

Given that 13 days' emissions from China are the equivalent of one year's emissions from the UK, even allowing for the fact that we have been emitting at high levels for a lot longer than China, can that statement (that the UK "has cumulatively contributed more carbon dioxide emissions than any other country") really be true? I genuinely don't know and would like to know, as it it doesn't seem to pass the "sniff" test - it just plain smells dubious.

https://timeforchange.org/cumulative-co2-emissions-by-country

This website has a graph by country. Admittedly it's from 1900, rather than than since the start of the industrial revolution, but the figures are so stark that I'd still be very surprised if the claim that the UK has the world's largest cumulative emissions stands up. Figures since 1900 are (in millions of tonnes of CO2):

USA - 303,034

Russian Federation - 86,821

China - 80,804

Germany - 71,792

UK - 54,141

The emissions by country are for the year 2002, so the chart is out of date, but given emissions rises in developing countries and falls in developed countries since then, the UK on an ongoing basis is probably moving down from 5th place. For 2002 emissions -

USA - 5,773

China - 3,783

Russian Federation - 1,534

Japan - 1,213

India - 1,106

Germany - 863

UK - 541.

Does anyone have any better source/statistics?

Seemed implausible to me, too. My understanding was that, historically, the US was responsible for most of the anthro GHGs currently resident in the atmosphere. I'll do some Googling.

...Later ....

One of the principles underlying global climate policy is that each country should constrain its future emissions budget based on its historical emissions, so high historical emitters (say USA) should have proportionally smaller future budgets than developing countries. And so these have been historical cumulative emitters have been estimated. There are a few issues, identified in this press release ...

China surpassed the United States as the top annual emitter of carbon dioxide in around 2006 and now emits more each year than the United States and the European Union combined. Per capita emissions by its 1.3 billion people are around EU levels.

Beijing says the best yardstick for historical responsibility is per capita emissions since the 18th century, by which measure its emissions are less than a tenth those of the United States.

But stretching liability so far back is complicated.

Should heat-trapping methane gas emitted by rice paddies in Asia in the 19th century, now omitted, count alongside industrial carbon emissions by Europe? Should Britain be responsible for India’s emissions before independence in 1947?
Lawyers say it is difficult to blame people living today for emissions by ancestors who had no inkling that greenhouse gases might damage the climate. [...]

The U.N. panel of climate scientists estimated last year that humankind had emitted 1.9 trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide since the late 19th century and can only emit a trillion more before rising temperatures breach a U.N. ceiling of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times.

Any fair formula for sharing out that trillion tonnes, or roughly 30 years of emissions at current rates, inevitably has to consider what each country has done in the past, said Myles Allen, a scientist at Oxford University.

“Until people start thinking about blame and responsibility they are not taking the problem seriously,” he said. 

Another problem is that the EU bloc is generally treated as a single country; I've been unable to locate historical cumulative CO2 emissions for just the UK.
This paper estimated historical emissions for the major players and found that from 1900-2008 the proportions were: 48% for the USA, 24% for Western Europe, 16% for China, 7% for Japan, and 5% for India, which is in line with my understanding.

I seriously doubt that UK emissions prior to 1900 were enough to put us ahead of the US, once you consider the 20th century. Figure 1 is illuminating.

Pretty sure the BBC has got it wrong this time.

Phil

Thanks for the info. It's nice to agree for a change. :-)

One other thought - the BBC does seem to have it wrong, but it was apparently quoting Myles Allen of Oxford University. So, unless the BBC has mis-quoted him or mis-attributed the quote, then it's Myles Allen that's wrong, but the BBC reporter should have done some fact-checking (ironic, given that the story is from the fact-checking team - why you can trust the BBC?) before reporting it as such.