Sixteen-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg was recently named Time Magazine's 2019 Person of the Year.

The tradition of Person of the Year started almost accidently in 1927. The editors of the magazine realized they had made it through the year without putting the 25-year-old aviator Charles Lindbergh on the cover to commemorate his historic solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean.

“They decided to make him ‘Man of the Year,' launching what has become one of the most enduring franchises in journalism. Lindbergh was not only the first but until now also the youngest individual to be named TIME Person of the Year,” said Edward Felsenthal, Editor-in-Chief at Time Magazine.

While Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic Ocean in an airplane, Thunberg sailed across the Atlantic from Plymouth, England, to New York in a 60-ft racing yacht equipped with solar panels and underwater turbines.

Thunberg is not alone in arguing that climate change poses an existential theat to humanity. Scientists argue that the affects of climate change are already being felt and they'll only become more apparent in the coming decades.

Recent results from the annual Arctic report card, a peer-reviewed assessment produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that takes a broad look at the effects of climate change in the region, found some of the highest temperatures in the arctic on record.

Climate change will have a disproportionate effect on young people as it's not the current generation of politicians in Washington that will feel the impact of their decisions.

Despite the gravity of the situation, the Time Magazine Person of the Year selection does carry some optimism with it. It's encouraging to see a younger generation, one often derided for being lazy, technology-dependent slackers, taking an active role in world affairs.

Boyan Slat was just 19 when he founded The Ocean Cleanup in 2013, a nonprofit organization trying to decrease the amount of plastic in our oceans with an invention that utilises the natural oceanic forces to passively catch and concentrate ocean plastic.

After four years of reconnaissance expeditions, testing and many design iterations, on September 8, 2018 the world's first ocean cleanup system was launched from San Francisco, soon after followed by deployment inside the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

While we congratulate Thunberg on being Time Magazine's 2019 Person of the Year, the issue of the year isclearly climate change.

It seems the generation that has the most to lose is also the most willing to address the crisis.