Thread by @kristiinakorpi

Yesterday we went to court for having blocked oil infrastructure and glued onto the painting Scream. We did these to demand an end to oil exploration in Norway. Why? Because we believe that humanity can do better than to give in to extinction. 🧵

Systemic changes do not happen easily. They require shifts in the public debate and values. By blocking oil infrastructure, we aimed to start this debate by targeting the problem. No one noticed. So we decided to try something that would definitely be noticed.

Scream is one of the most famous paintings in the world. Munch himself described the work to be an “infinite scream passing through nature”. We glued a banner onto the safety glass saying “Fossil fuels are choking humanity" to make it clear what is causing the scream of nature.

We were told that the court already knows about the climate crisis, and thus evidence for it can't be used as a defense. This is strange, because if the drivers and consequences of the climate crisis were truly understood, we would be seeing trials against fossil fuel companies.

So, I talked about what makes me, as a natural scientist, terrified when I read papers about climate change. I talked about “hothouse Earth”, the cascading tipping points that can lead us to a world unsuitable to human civilization as we know it. pnas.org/doi/abs/10.107…

I talked about the early warning signs of some of these tipping points: the accelerated melting of the Greenlandic ice sheet and the loss of resilience of the Amazon rainforest.
pnas.org/doi/abs/10.107…
nature.com/articles/s4155…

And I talked about the human cost: about the 3 billion people that might have to adapt to conditions like those currently in the Sahara, and of the possible multiple breadbasket failures.
pnas.org/doi/abs/10.107…
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

And I talked about George Orwell and 1984. About double-thinking, how we at the same time believe our governments are meant to take care of us, know that fossil fuels lead to collapse of our societies, and see that our governments are extracting more fossil fuels.

Because, to know all this and do nothing, is double-thinking. It's sleepwalking into a climate hell. We are in an emergency, and civil resistance is the emergency alarm.
#StoppOljeletinga #A22Network #JustStopOil #ScientistRebellion