Kids caught in a climate of panic

Doom-mongers should stop and think about what they are doing to vulnerable young people.

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg speaks to Australian businessman Andrew Forrest in New York. Picture: AP

Last week the great climate change strike by schoolchildren was on, and one intelligent young lady I know decided to go to the demonstration. She had permission, some of her other friends were going, they were only missing PE, and it might be fun to be at a demonstration — and there was the school dance that night.

But to her disappointment the demonstration was full of clueless primary school kids and their excited mothers. It was, in her words, pretty lame so she and the other girls went off to have their hair done for the dance.

That is definitely a normal, healthy teenager’s thought processes. But then there is Greta Thunberg. What good is the school dance, of fun, of youthful ephemera, if you are on the edge of extinction? “You should panic. Yes, it should be your constant state,” Greta cries, her young face straining to spit out imprecations of doom, a picture of sheer stress. Poor Greta appears far from being a normal teenager.

The adult pundits commenting on Greta’s riveting performance at the UN — and she was riveting — appeal to our rational sense of proportion about climate change because climate change should be a topic of rational discussion, informed by science and, dare I say it, history, and of course a child can’t know all about that.

But the Great Greta phenomenon is not about climate change, let alone the rational arguments about it. It is really about Greta and the girls who follow her. Oh yes, we should indeed be worried, even panic, not because of climate change but because of Greta. Greta is a sign of the times and Greta has a vast following among teenage girls.

This girl is the embodiment of all that is wrong with modern teenagers, especially girls. She is the embodiment of adolescent anxiety, a phenomenon that propels pathologies from drug taking to transgenderism and suicide, yet parents and teachers are holding up this child as a role model to young people and especially to girls. Adults who are complicit in this should be ashamed and, yes, afraid of the consequences.

Anxiety is a diagnosed illness affecting a huge number of young people. It can lead to suicide. The constant refrain among parents is: why does this happen in the richest, the most secure and the most privileged society that has existed? The really poor and the miserable in other places do not seem to suffer in this way. Perhaps it is because among the truly poor, adults and children alike are too busy trying to keep body and soul together. The children of the poor are too intent on bettering themselves. So, when we wonder why this happens, perhaps we need to look beyond ourselves.

We live in a materialistic spiritual wasteland, so the Greta phenomenon gives affirmation to people who have a sense that they are missing something. There is indeed something greater than themselves, an almost spiritual cause to hang on to, something that changes the way we live, think and behave.

However, the climate change cult, although often compared to a religious movement, is itself essen­tially a product of neo-Marxist materialism. So, unlike religion, which promises at least grace in the struggle leading to the salvation of the individual soul, the extreme cult of climate change looks only to the historical necessity of their triumph, saving the planet. It has much in common with the failed ideals of communism. The climate warriors constantly invoke science, but they are really ideologues.

Climate extremism is also essen­tially negative because it is a product of extreme fear and anxiety. The message is: we have only one chance or else it is doom, Gotterdammerung awaits. Negative messages are not good for kids.

This week in New York, Scott Morrison decried the anxiety imposed on children by climate change extremists. He also reminded people that there have been great existential disasters in the past and children have survived, although children are told that climate change is like no other great man-made disaster. Really?

World War II seems to have disappeared from the consciousness of most parents and teachers. Who remembers the great anxiety around the possibility of another world war, the imminent possibility of nuclear war? “Ban the bomb” was the slogan du jour of the generation who had come to maturity during World War II and had seen the newsreels of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They were afraid.

Consequently, the threat of nuclear war hovered in the infant consciousness of the postwar generation. Then, as teenagers, all but a few became less preoccupied about it and, much like the girls who didn’t last at the school student strike, were too busy with exams and, naturally, having a good time to worry about possible nuclear annihilation.

The Prime Minister was right to criticise the anxiety-producing mass hysteria of the Greta phenomenon. Many children today are peculiarly vulnerable to that hysteria. Nor do I think most people realise how anxiety is naturally heightened in children. A small thing can turn into a big thing in a child’s mind, and a big thing can become enormous, almost beyond childish fearful comprehension.

There are grave conse­quences of imposing on impressionable children the burden of a threat to their existence, and climate change warriors, especially the adults who are complicit in this panic, should stop and think about what they are doing. By compounding the anxiety and fears of some young people, embodied in the image of a young girl called Greta Thunberg, they could be propelling the girl herself and many of her young followers to a dangerously unstable future.