This TED Talk features climate activist Louisa Neubauer, recorded live at TEDx Youth at Munich 2019.

I never planned to become a climate activist. But 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.

10 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, like many of you, I thought that the planet wasn't really in a good state.

I had no idea that we were 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. And this is just one aspect of that crisis we're seeing. I'm not going to

get into details here, but let me tell you so much.

We are in a point of history

that the most destructive force on the planet

is humanity itself.

We are in a point of history

that no scientist could guarantee you

...