20 | New Scientist | 21/28 December 2019

R

EPORTING on the doomsday beat,

which is how I often think about

climate change, is fascinating, but can also

be deeply depressing. This year, scientists

predicted even higher future sea level rises,

carbon emissions marched upwards and

the Amazon was on fire. Donald Trump

recently started the formal process of

taking the US out of the Paris climate deal.

Despite this backdrop, there are signs

2019 may have been the year the world

woke up to the need for fast and serious

action on climate change. A year ago,

the names of Greta Thunberg, the protest

group Extinction Rebellion and Alexandria

Ocasio-Cortez were unfamiliar to many.

The impact of Thunberg, and the Fridays

for the Future movement she kick-started

with her school climate strike, has been

extraordinary. She was nominated for the

Nobel peace prize, dominated a UN climate

summit in September and was the catalyst

for a global climate protest that month,

which appears to have been the biggest yet.

Many schoolchildren who took part told

me she inspired them to take to the streets.

Nick Nuttall at the Earth Day 2020

environmental campaign, who was a

spokesperson at the UN at the time of

the 2015 Paris climate summit, says:

“The strikers have certainly changed the

debate and fired up the level of conversation

among citizens and governments.”

Elsewhere on the streets, whether you

love or hate it, there is no denying that

Extinction Rebellion (XR) has moved the

dial. Adam Corner at communications

group Climate Outreach says XR deserves

credit for changing how the debate is

framed. When the UK government was

passing its law for net-zero emissions by

2050, many questioned if that was fast

enough, something XR had pushed hard on.

Shortly after the group’s Easter protests,

polling showed public concern in the UK on

the environment spiking to levels not seen

in the past decade. Although it is hard to pin

this on a single factor, says Chris Curtis at

polling organisation YouGov, the timing

was closely aligned to XR activity and the

sustained rise in concern is significant. “It is

pretty incredible the way the environment

has risen up our issues tracker,” he says.

Science has played a role. Reports on land

and oceans by the UN climate science panel

this year may not have made the same

splash as last year’s on holding temperature

rises to 1.5°C. But I have been repeatedly

struck by how many protesters this year

have cited the “carbon budget” in that 1.5°C

Review of the year

Trends of 2019

The year the world woke

up to climate change

At last, the public is calling for urgent action, and politicians are

falling over themselves to get on board, says Adam Vaughan

The 2010s saw huge leaps in physics,

genetics, archaeology and technology.

Here is our pick of the best

The electric eel

(Electrophorus

voltai)

generates

860 volts with

its electrical

discharge,

making it the

strongest living

bioelectricity

generator

we know

Amazing

things we

learned

in 2019

The 10 biggest

discoveries of

the decade

Higgs boson

It took four years, thousands of people

and the world’s biggest machine, but,

in 2012, particle physicists at CERN

announced the discovery of the Higgs

boson. The particle helps explain why

all other particles in the universe have

mass, and its discovery completed the

standard model of particle physics.

0001

The universe

is 2.5 billion

times less

magnetic than

a fridge magnet

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