For Greta Thunberg the climate — and weather — have become a very real issue. The 16-year-old campaigner was last night being buffeted by an Atlantic gale with gusts of 30-40mph, as the yacht carrying her to a UN climate change conference tried to outrun a potentially bigger storm racing up behind.
She also faces being becalmed, with forecasts showing that the gap between the two weather systems contains little wind.
If the weather allows, Thunberg will dock in Lisbon early this week and head for Madrid to speak at the UN’s Cop25 climate change talks, which start tomorrow.
Thunberg’s 3,000-mile winter crossing is courtesy of two Australian YouTubers, Riley Whitelum and Elayna Carausu, and their 11-month-old son, Lenny. They offered Thunberg, and her father Svante, a lift on La Vagabonde, their 48ft catamaran, when she got stuck in America.
Thunberg had sailed to the US to speak at September’s UN Climate Action Summit and planned to travel overland to Chile where the Cop25 conference was set to take place until riots forced a switch of venue to Madrid.
Advertisement
In theory, the voyage saves the roughly two or three tons of CO2 emissions that flights from Washington for her and her father would otherwise have generated.
There was, however, one hitch. Sailing the Atlantic in November requires an experienced crew — and La Vagabonde needed an extra hand. The answer was Nikki Henderson, 26, from Guildford, Surrey, who is one of Britain’s best young offshore yacht skippers. She volunteered to help — but was in Britain, and had to buy a plane ticket to join them.
The emissions from her transatlantic flight will have undermined those saved by Thunberg and her father.
The science to be revealed in Madrid this week suggests neglect is a mild description. One report, the World Meteorological Organisation’s Statement on the State of the Global Climate in 2018, will warn that 2019 could be the second or third warmest year on record with global temperatures up by 1.1C on the pre-industrial baseline of 1850-1900 and on track to rise by 4-5C by 2100.
It is the UK’s Met Office which predicts the scariest future. Its projections suggest that the greenhouse gases already released will make sea levels rise for hundreds of years. By 2300 coastal cities such as London, Cardiff, Belfast and Edinburgh face rises of as much as 12-14ft, it said in a new report.