Fanning children’s climate fears is a villainous act
The 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg may be an extremely impressive young woman but the adults in her life should be absolutely ashamed, writes Miranda Devine. They’ve allowed her fear to perpetuate.
Famous teenage eco-evangelist Greta Thunberg is an admirable young woman.
It takes real courage and integrity to devote yourself to saving the planet, especially when you have mental health issues that make public speaking difficult.
The 16-year-old Swedish climate activist has been ridiculed for her doomsday pronouncements, which are received rapturously by climate zealots as if she were the Oracle of Delphi. But it is not this small brave girl who deserves our scorn.
The villains are her parents and the climate industry cynically exploiting her youthful idealism.
Since mounting a one-girl “climate school strike” in Stockholm last August, Greta has addressed the UK parliament, the UN climate change summit in Poland and the Davos economic forum. She has been ushered like a sage into private meetings with the UN secretary-general, the French president and even the Pope.
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She has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She is eulogised as the spokeswoman for a generation who must rise up and save the future. Turning scared kids into unguided missiles is the last desperate roll of the dice for a failing climate alarm industry, who have cried wolf too often for credibility.
But instead of being taught the moral of Aesop’s most famous fable, Greta is simply following her flawed education to its logical conclusion.
All her life she has been fed a diet of terrifying climate propaganda.
If the “experts” of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — a political body posing as a scientific repository — tell us the end is nigh, then what is a child to believe?
By the age of 11 the fear had done its work.
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In her TED talk in Stockholm last year, watched by 1.2 million people on YouTube, Greta, then barely 15, spoke of discovering climate change for the first time at age eight.
She remembers thinking: “If burning fossil fuels was so bad that it threatened our very existence… why were there no restrictions? Why wasn’t it made illegal? To me that did not add up.”
By age 11: “I became ill. I fell into depression. I stopped talking and I stopped eating. In two months, I lost about 10kg of weight. Later on, I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, OCD and selective mutism.”
While she recovered physically, she had become obsessed about a climate apocalypse.
For someone who believes what she is told, she took the only noble course of action, warning the world about a catastrophe she believes she, alone, sees with true clarity.
Greta views Asperger’s as a gift.
“It makes me different, and being different is a gift,” she told the BBC.
“I don’t easily fall for lies. I can see through things.”
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Asperger’s is a developmental disorder, classified as a mild form of autism, and characterised by a “lack of social reciprocity and empathy”, severe difficulties in social integration and nonverbal communication, and intensely focused interests in certain topics, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
But in many ways it has its consolations, and Greta has become an inspiration for fellow Aspies, whose difficulty understanding social cues often makes school intolerable, but who often have above-average intelligence and concentration skills, which explains their disproportionate presence in academia.
Greta impressively can recite facts and figures of climate science and has synthesised her fears into a compellingly familiar message to the world: repent or ye shall die.
If she weren’t a small girl with pigtails, her uncompromising rhetoric would be frightening.
Imagine these words from a tyrant: “Around the year 2030… we will be in a position where we set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control, that will most likely lead to the end of our civilisation as we know it. That is unless in that time, permanent and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society have taken place.”
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Greta is passionate about climate justice, “the circular economy and rewilding nature”, without understanding the implicit Marxist ideology or its proven deadly consequences.
For her, everything is black or white. “I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day… Our time is running out. We have started to clean up your mess and we will not stop until we’re done.”
She means what she says, but history shows that youthful idealism, when misdirected, ends in tragedy.
It is reckless for her parents, an actor and opera singer turned climate zealot author, to expose their daughter to such fame and stress.
How will she cope when her warning is ignored? How will she hold herself together as the countdown continues to 2030? What will be her reaction when the world doesn’t end on that appointed date?
They must know she will take it badly.
Her parents are bad enough, but world leaders should know better than to reinforce her delusions.
Worst of all was Pope Francis, who met her last week and encouraged her activism, instead of telling her to get back to school.
“Continue, continue,” he told her.
The Pope should have re-directed her admirable youthful idealism to a real problem that is addressed by Catholic teaching — the millions of unborn babies killed each year.
Abortion is real, unlike the mythical destructive properties of carbon dioxide, a plant food.
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