HUNTER students responded to Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg's cut-through speech to world leaders this week with a protest outside Wickham railway interchange on Thursday to show the projected impact of global warming by 2100.
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Students and their supporters held up a "bold blue line" to show where sea levels at Wickham could be by 2100 under a worst case scenario if global warming is not contained.
The protest at 8am coincided with release of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's latest report on Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate, which said sea levels will rise higher and faster than previously predicted under dramatically revised projections from a 2013 report.
Inaction will likely result in sea level rise of 1.1 metres by 2100, up from the 2013 projection of more than 90 centimetres.
The revised projections follow increasing ice loss from Greenland and Antarctic glaciers and ice sheets that is contributing to accelerating sea level rises.
The report says that even if political action can keep global warming to within the 2 degrees Celsius required under the Paris Agreement, warming oceans and melting sea ice glaciers will still raise sea levels by 30 to 60 centimetres by 2100.
Lambton High School student Alexa Stuart, who helped organise the Wickham protest with Hunter Community Environment Centre and other students, said Greta Thunberg's electrifying speech to world leaders at the United Nations this week, and US President Donald Trump's response, showed that teenagers should lead the world on climate change action.
"It's our future," Ms Stuart said about the Bold Blue Line protest, which showed commuters how high sea levels are projected to rise in Wickham and Newcastle, under a worst case scenario, without climate change action. The protest took place with the world's largest coal port in the background.
A Hunter Community Environment Centre spokesperson said the response of teenagers in the past year to Greta Thunberg's lone climate strike that led to her "How dare you" speech to world leaders this week showed teenagers brought "light and moral clarity", despite political inaction.
"I am impressed by the Hunter teenagers' grit, courage and optimism," the spokesperson said.
"We really need governments to come to grips with what is required to respond to what the science is telling us, and it's students who are showing the way."
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