Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teen environmental activist, promised her fight for climate change will continue in 2020 and hopes that she’ll soon get to see Japan if the opportunity arises.

Speaking with Kyodo News, Thunberg, 17, said she remains determined that her impact on climate change will inspire others to change how the climate crisis is viewed and dealt with, with more awareness and pressure put on those in power to do something about the problem.

The comments were made while partaking in the weekly demonstration Stockholm school students held – a date that also happened to be her birthday.

She said science shows that doing nothing is only going to lead to even worse problems. Thunberg said she and others like her are doing whatever they can do to prevent these climate change disasters. 

Scientists have said a rise in global temperatures will lead to even more floods and droughts along with rising sea levels due to melting glaciers. Thus, affecting all human life. 

Thunberg is responsible for the global youth movement, which started with her school strike for the climate in 2018. She would skip schools on Friday to hold protests outside Sweden’s parliament to bring light to the global problem facing the environment. Her activism led to world recognition, allowing her to speak at huge conferences such as the U.N. climate conferences in both Madrid and New York.

For 2020, Thunberg said she would take any opportunity she could to speak with world leaders in getting them to reduce their global emissions. She said she’ll be going to the annual World Economic Forum in Switzerland with various business and political. Leaders.   She hopes her message is also spreading to areas such as Japan, China and other Asian countries. 

Thunberg’s travel often involves not traveling by air. For instance, she attended the 2019 New York climate summit, making the trek in a zero-carbon yacht. 

According to Thunberg, the young people of today feel betrayed by today’s leaders and support her ambition and drive to bring light to the problem. Thunberg said there is an environmental emergency and this is the time to come together and battle this issue.

While early spring is often a time people celebrate in the northern hemisphere, it may be bringing with it a nasty side effect – hotter, drier days during the summer.

When winter gives way to spring, it allows the leaves to bloom from the trees and branches, which needs moisture in the soil to grow. When the greening process begins early in the calendar year, the process called evapotranspiration takes moisture out of the ground sooner than needed. 

A look at the satellite data and climate simulations are showing early spring weather and greening are leaving soil drier during the summer in the Northern Hemisphere. And, this could lead to intense summer heatwaves. 

With the climate warming up, scientists believe earlier springs will happen, which will mean longer growing season. In one study, the Northern Hemisphere growing season is already 10 days more than average compared to 30 years ago.

U.K. Center for Ecology and Hydrology climate modeler Chris Huntingford said the more green on the ground, the more likely evapotranspiration will occur. 

It’s not known if a local rise in pumped water in the atmosphere through the process would be helped with rain falling back to Earth, or if some areas were more affected by this than other locations.

Huntingford, along with other researchers, looked at the satellite information of vegetation cover and soil dryness in the Northern Hemisphere from the years 1982 to 2011. In much of the top half, an earlier spring greening was tied to drier soil in the summer than when spring happened later in the year. 

The weather may also play a role in the earlier spring of certain areas. For example, Siberia experienced several early springs but never had summer dryness. It’s thought that the weather patterns are consistent enough to give them excess moisture from Europe. 

Soil dryness often leads to severe consequences such as rising local temperatures near the surface, leading to heat waves or making heatwaves even worse. According to researchers, climate simulations were soil dryness occurs because of an early spring could increase the number of hot days during the summer by one day every 10 years with an increase of 0.07 degrees Celsius of that same time. 

Scientists say it doesn’t sound like a lot now, but in 50 years, it could mean that heatwaves will become too intense for people to feasibly handle. 

Researchers are also considering plans to do an analysis of the Southern Hemisphere to determine the correlation between soil dryness and early greening, especially in areas where heat-linked disasters are probable.

Norway residents often suffer during the first several weeks of the year with short days and temperatures dropping to lows that make it unbearable with icy sidewalks that make it next to impossible to get from point A to point B. 

Although it has snowed in some parts of Norway, the same cannot be said for areas 90 miles away from the tiny town of Sunndlasora along the Tinngvollfjord.

Just recently, the temperature in the region hit 66.2F degrees, which broke a previous January record for Norway. According to the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, the temperature is equivalent to what a warm summer day would be in northern Norway. 

In the town of Andalsnes, the temperature reached 65.5F – another record for January.

According to the mayor of this community, Yvonne Wold, people are wearing t-shirts when they should be skiing. 

Sunndalsora is in a rather unique location. Although it’s been known to hit high temperatures, the valley location means it usually experiences foehn winds, which are warm gusts that happen downwind due to the mountains. Due to this phenomenon, Sunndalsora has held record highs for both December and February. 

Why is January’s record high so worthwhile? It’s occurring at a time of year where below-freezing weather is expected.

Is Norway Experiencing A Climate Change?

Experts say this isn’t the first temperature record that’s been broken and unlikely to be the last. In fact, temperature records fall last summer when some cities such as Bergen hit temperatures higher than 90F.  In Bergen, a temperature of 92F was set, a degree higher than the previous record. 

A day after this record was set, a northern Norway weather station hit 96F, which was once recorded in June 1970.

Erik Kolstad, a climate researcher, said climate change is the number one reason Norway residents have had higher temperatures, especially during the winter. Kolstad is currently putting together a seasonal forecasting model that will offer more reliable forecasts. The whole process involves getting data from seven forecasting models. Right now, it seems all seven models are predicting wet, mild weather for the first several months of 2020 – must like what was seen in 2019.