Gretta, your first climate strike

was a lonely event a little over a year ago.

And in the intervening time, you have sparked the interest

of millions literally of children around the globe

demanding action for climate change.

What's your message to world leaders today?

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 the money

in fairy tales 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 sights.

You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency.

But no matter how sad and angryI 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 it.

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.

50 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.

To have a 67 percent chance

of saying below a 1.5

degrees global temperature rise, the best

odds given by the IPCC, the world

had 420 gigatons

of CO2 left to emit back on January

1st, 2018.

Today, that figure is already down to less than

350 gigatons.

How dare you pretend that this can be sold

with just business as usual and some technical

solutions? With today's

emissions levels, that remaining

CO2 budgets 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.

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.