Wow.

I'm incredibly proud and honored to be here in Iowa City and in beautiful Iowa with all of you — and it's just so many people. I don't think any one of us expected this many people.

Special thank you to the organizers and the strikers who have been striking Friday after Friday not giving up: Shoshie (Hemley), Esti (Brady), Yardley (Whaylen), Diego (Biggers), Alex (Howe), Massimo (Biggers) and everyone else. Thank you. I think every one of us owe you a great--we owe you so much. You have really done so much for everyone of us. And we realize we are on indigenous Ioway land, the land Sioux and Meskwaki. We thank Dawson Davenport and all the Meskwaki people here with us today.

This is the real hope. So many people gathering here on a weekday with such a short notice.

This is real hope to me. Last week and the week before that well over 7 million people joined the climate strikes. Over 7 million people in more than 180 countries. That is not something you can continue to ignore. We told world leaders to act on the science and we demanded a safe future for us and for everyone. But they didn't listen. As we all know the human climate action summit was a faliure. That was unfortunately what we had expected. To stand behind and speak the science is still too uncomfortable for them. That needs to change.

No matter what, we need to continue. No matter how hopeless this situation may seem like, we must always carry on. We must never allow ourselves to give up. That is simply not an option.

We teenagers and children shouldn't have to take the responsibility, but right now the world leaders keep acting like children and somebody needs to be the adult in the room.

We promise we will go on every Friday for as long as it takes and the next Global Climate Strike is on November 29. But of course, we strike every week. And we have to prepare ourselves to go on for a very long time. For years. But that will not stop us. We have reached a tipping point where enough people have had enough. Together we are unstoppable.

And we will not beg world leaders to care and to act. They have ignored us in the past and they will ignore us again. We will instead tell them that if they won't do it, then we will.

Because the world is waking up and we are the change and change is coming whether they like it or not.