I never planned to become a climate activist,
but now things have changed,
and now, standing here as a climate activist,
I ask you all to become one too.
Here's why,
and most importantly, how.
Ten years ago, when I was 13 years old,
I first learned about the greenhouse effect.
Back then, we spent 90 minutes on this issue,
and I remember finding it quite irritating
that something so fundamental
would be squeezed into a single geography lesson.
Some of this irritation remained, so when I graduated from high school,
I decided to study geography
just to make sure I was on the right track with this whole climate change thing.
And this is when everything changed.
This was the first time I looked at the data,
at the science behind the climate crisis,
and I couldn't believe what I was reading.
Like many of you,
I thought that the planet wasn't really in a good state.
I had no idea that we are rushing into this self-made disaster
in such rapid pace.
There was also the first time I understood what difference it makes
when you consider the bigger picture.
Take the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, for instance,
the number one driver for global warming.
Yes, this looks bad.
This looks like we are on a pretty bad track,
but it's only once you don't just consider the last 60 years,
but the last 10,000 years,
that you understand how terrifying this really is.