Brazil’s Bolsonaro Calls Greta Thunberg a 'Brat' for Speaking up for Indigenous Rights

Right-wing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is angry that 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg is speaking out for indigenous rights.
On Sunday, Thunberg tweeted a response to the killing of two indigenous leaders in Northeast Brazil Saturday.
"Indigenous people are literally being murdered for trying to protect the forest from illegal deforestation," she wrote. "Over and over again. It is shameful that the world remains silent about this."
Bolsonaro, whose pro-development policies and rhetoric have been blamed for the uptick in violence against indigenous people in the Brazilian Amazon, lashed out against Thunberg Tuesday.
"Greta said the Indians died because they were defending the Amazon (forest). How can the media give space to a brat like that," Bolsonaro told reporters, as Reuters reported.
Bolsonaro used the Portuguese word "pirralha," which means roughly "little brat" or "pest," according to The Guardian.
Thunberg then responded by temporarily changing her Twitter biography to "pirralha."
This isn't the first time Thunberg has used her Twitter biography to shame world leaders who dismiss her activism, Business Insider pointed out.
After Thunberg gave an emotional speech at the UN Climate Action Summit in September denouncing world leaders for failing to act on the climate crisis, U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted mockingly that "she seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!"
Thunberg then temporarily changed her Twitter bio to read "a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future."
Greta Thunberg speaking at the Climate March on Sept. 27, 2019 in Montreal, Canada. Lëa-Kim Châteauneuf / CC BY-SA 4.0
Sunday's tweet isn't the only way that Thunberg stood up for indigenous activists this week. At the COP25 UN Climate Change Conference Monday, Thunberg said she and other European climate activists had been given disproportionate attention from the media, The Associated Press reported.
"It is people especially from the global south, especially from indigenous communities, who need to tell their stories," she told reporters, before handing the microphone to other young climate activists from frontline communities.
One of the young activists who spoke was 18-year-old Rose Whipple from Minnesota, who had participated in the protests against the Dakota Access pipeline.
"We deserve to be listened to and we also deserve to have our lands back," Whipple said.
Thunberg also isn't the only one to speak out for indigenous rights in Brazil specifically, The Guardian pointed out. Since Bolsonaro took office, 153 indigenous territories have been invaded, more than double last year's number of 76, Brazil's Indigenous Missionary Council found. The group said Bolsonaro's anti-environmental rhetoric was partly responsible.
"This Amazon bloodbath demands a strong and swift response from Brazilian authorities," Brazil's former environment minister Marina Silva tweeted after Saturday's murders.
Bolsonaro responded to questions about the murders by saying "any death is worrying" and promising to enforce laws against illegal forest clearing, Reuters reported.
Indigenous communities in the Amazon are often threatened by illegal miners or loggers, and Bolsonaro has promised to open more indigenous territories to the extractive industries.
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The speed and scale of the response to COVID-19 by governments, businesses and individuals seems to provide hope that we can react to the climate change crisis in a similarly decisive manner - but history tells us that humans do not react to slow-moving and distant threats.
A Game of Jenga
<p>Think of it as a game of Jenga and the planet's climate system as the tower. For generations, we have been slowly removing blocks. But at some point, we will remove a pivotal block, such as the collapse of one of the major global ocean circulation systems, for example the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that will cause all or part of the global climate system to fall into a planetary emergency.</p><p>But worse still, it could cause runaway damage: Where the tipping points form a domino-like cascade, where breaching one triggers breaches of others, creating an unstoppable shift to a radically and swiftly changing climate.</p><p>One of the most concerning tipping points is mass methane release. Methane can be found in deep freeze storage within permafrost and at the bottom of the deepest oceans in the form of methane hydrates. But rising sea and air temperatures are beginning to thaw these stores of methane.</p><p>This would release a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, 30-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming agent. This would drastically increase temperatures and rush us towards the breach of other tipping points.</p><p>This could include the acceleration of ice thaw on all three of the globe's large, land-based ice sheets – Greenland, West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica. The potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is seen as a key tipping point, as its loss could eventually <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5929/901" target="_blank">raise global sea levels by 3.3 meters</a> with important regional variations.</p><p>More than that, we would be on the irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters, roughly at the rate of two meters per century, or maybe faster. Just look at the raised beaches around the world, at the last high stand of global sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene period around 120,0000 years ago, to see the evidence of such a warm world, which was just 2°C warmer than the present day.</p>Cutting Off Circulation
<p>As well as devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world, melting polar ice could set off another tipping point: a disablement to the AMOC.</p><p>This circulation system drives a northward flow of warm, salty water on the upper layers of the ocean from the tropics to the northeast Atlantic region, and a southward flow of cold water deep in the ocean.</p><p>The ocean conveyor belt has a major effect on the climate, seasonal cycles and temperature in western and northern Europe. It means the region is warmer than other areas of similar latitude.</p><p>But melting ice from the Greenland ice sheet could threaten the AMOC system. It would dilute the salty sea water in the north Atlantic, making the water lighter and less able or unable to sink. This would slow the engine that drives this ocean circulation.</p><p><a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/atlantic-conveyor-belt-has-slowed-15-per-cent-since-mid-twentieth-century" target="_blank">Recent research</a> suggests the AMOC has already weakened by around 15% since the middle of the 20th century. If this continues, it could have a major impact on the climate of the northern hemisphere, but particularly Europe. It may even lead to the <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/39731?show=full" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cessation of arable farming</a> in the UK, for instance.</p><p>It may also reduce rainfall over the Amazon basin, impact the monsoon systems in Asia and, by bringing warm waters into the Southern Ocean, further destabilize ice in Antarctica and accelerate global sea level rise.</p>The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation has a major effect on the climate. Praetorius (2018)
Is it Time to Declare a Climate Emergency?
<p>At what stage, and at what rise in global temperatures, will these tipping points be reached? No one is entirely sure. It may take centuries, millennia or it could be imminent.</p><p>But as COVID-19 taught us, we need to prepare for the expected. We were aware of the risk of a pandemic. We also knew that we were not sufficiently prepared. But we didn't act in a meaningful manner. Thankfully, we have been able to fast-track the production of vaccines to combat COVID-19. But there is no vaccine for climate change once we have passed these tipping points.</p><p><a href="https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2021" target="_blank">We need to act now on our climate</a>. Act like these tipping points are imminent. And stop thinking of climate change as a slow-moving, long-term threat that enables us to kick the problem down the road and let future generations deal with it. We must take immediate action to reduce global warming and fulfill our commitments to the <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Paris Agreement</a>, and build resilience with these tipping points in mind.</p><p>We need to plan now to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but we also need to plan for the impacts, such as the ability to feed everyone on the planet, develop plans to manage flood risk, as well as manage the social and geopolitical impacts of human migrations that will be a consequence of fight or flight decisions.</p><p>Breaching these tipping points would be cataclysmic and potentially far more devastating than COVID-19. Some may not enjoy hearing these messages, or consider them to be in the realm of science fiction. But if it injects a sense of urgency to make us respond to climate change like we have done to the pandemic, then we must talk more about what has happened before and will happen again.</p><p>Otherwise we will continue playing Jenga with our planet. And ultimately, there will only be one loser – us.</p>By John R. Platt
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