*What happens when the world’s leaders fail to act as empathetic reasonable adults? The children of the Earth are rising to the occasion as sentinels for Nature and their future.

In August, a 15-year-old Swede named Greta Thunberg began a solo climate protest by striking from school. That strike, Strike 4 Climate, has gone global. More than 20,000 students from 272 towns and cities in Australia, Belgium, Japan, the U.K. and the U.S. have walked out of class. They are protesting their respective governments for not taking the science behind the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report and the 4th U.S. Climate Assessment seriously and quickly implementing change to protect Earth’s life support systems and their future.

The children are terrified and so they should be. Fossil fuel heat is irrefutably cooking the planet. This week, the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released its 2018 Arctic Report Card. It’s a dire account of a runaway climate stoked by subsidized fossil fuels.

There’s only 1 percent of old ice, ice older than four years, remaining. Older ice is crucial because it’s usually thicker, therefore more resilient to changes in temperature. Young ice breaks up in the summer and exposes the darker colored Arctic Ocean to solar radiation, which it absorbs. Lighter colored ice, on the other hand, reflects incoming radiation back to space.

The Arctic is warming two times that of all other landmasses.

The five warmest recorded Arctic years have all occurred since 2014.

The Arctic Ocean is suffocating from lack of oxygen due to missing sea ice from fossil fuel heat.

The warmer ocean temperatures are incubating repeated ghastly algal blooms causing mass die-offs in marine mammals and fish.

Thunberg appeared at the United Nations (UN) Climate Change Conference (COP24) in Katowice, Poland. She told the delegates that, “For 25 years countless people have come to the UN climate conferences begging our world leaders to stop emissions and that has not worked as emissions are continuing to rise. So I will not beg the world leaders to care for our future.”

Thunberg warned, “I will instead let them know change is coming whether they like it or not.”

A couple billion children are exposed daily to toxic levels of putrid fossil fuel air pollution, which stunts their lungs. For the rest of their lives, they will suffer respiratory ailments.

Aussie children #Strike4Climate Down Under.”

The children claim, and rightfully so, that it’s their birthright to breathe clean air and drink fresh water. They are demanding the protection of all the remaining ancient forests, coral reefs and all land and sea wildlife because adults are driving the accelerated Sixth Mass Extinction, as much as 10,000 times faster than the previous five others.

Last weekend at the climate summit, the top fossil fuel producing countries, the U.S., Russia, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait derailed a unanimous front of nations and the plan to combat the Man-made climate crisis. The IPCC plan requires the world, right now, to initiate the necessary steps in order to achieve a zero-combustion economy. That first step entails an immediate global reduction of fossil fuel emissions whilst concurrently ending the annual $5.3 trillion fossil fuel subsidies.

The newly appointed Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison continues to greenlight new coalmines. He recently took time in the Australian parliament to chide Aussie children for daring to speak out against his ruthless fossil fuel promoting Liberal government.

Morrison bemoaned, “What we want is more learning in schools and less activism in schools.”

Climate activist and student Jean Hinchcliffe responded: “Activism is learning, and yes it should be dealt with outside of school, but it’s not being dealt with outside of school and that’s why we are here and that’s why we are striking.”

Over the previous two decades, Australia has been lambasted by long gripping droughts and relentless longer-lasting and hotter heatwaves. Consequently, there are massive forest and coral reef graveyards strewn around the land Down Under. Hideous Man-made biological annihilation.

Sir David Attenborough told the Katowice summit that without action “the collapse of our civilization and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.”

The children of the Earth are very aware of this global catastrophe. Their spokesperson Greta Thunberg stated:

“Since our leaders are being like children, we will have to take the responsibility they should have taken long ago. We have to understand what the older generations dealt us, what mess they have created that we have to clean up and live with.”

She added, “We have to make our voice heard!”

Ladies and gentlemen, there is hope because the children are now beginning to drive it home: Change is opportunity in disguise.

Failing to plan is planning to fail and that according to two billion children under the age of 15 is unacceptable!