You’ve probably heard the teenage Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, with her quite good
English, addressing the world from the Climate Action Summit 2019, as if she
were an expert with something important to say. But it’s just an emotional
screed. However, the first several sentences of her speech, surprisingly, I
totally agree with. I’ll highlight the sentences I think are spot on:
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| Greta Thunberg, screenshot from here |
This is all wrong!
I shouldn’t be up here!
I should be back in school, on the other side of the ocean!
Yet, you have come to us young people for hope! How dare you!
You have stolen my dreams, and my childhood, with your
empty words!
Yet, I’m one of the lucky ones!
People are suffering! People are dying!
Entire ecosystems are collapsing!
We are in the beginning of a mass extinction! And all you can
talk about is money! And fairy tales of eternal economic growth!
How dare you!
For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear!
How dare you continue to look away, and come here, saying
that you’re doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still
nowhere in sight?
You say that you hear us and that you understand the urgency.
But, no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that, because,
if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then
you would be evil! And that I refuse to believe!
The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in ten
years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees and the risk of
setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control. Fifty percent
may be acceptable to you, but those numbers do not include tipping points, most
feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution, or the
aspects of equity climate justice. They also rely on my generation’s sucking
hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that
barely exist. So a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us—we who have to live
with the consequences!
To have a 67% chance of staying below a 1.5 degrees of global
temperature rise, the best odds given by the IPCC, the world had 420 gigatons
left to emit, back on January 1st, 2018. Today that figure is
already down to less than 350 gigatons.
How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just
business as usual and some technical solutions!
With today’s emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will
be entirely gone within 8 ½ years. There will not be any solutions or plans
presented in line with these figures here today, because these numbers are too
uncomfortable—and you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is!
You are failing us! But the young people are starting
to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you!
And if you choose to fail us, I say, We will never forgive you!
We will not let you get away with this! Right here, right
now, is where we draw the line! The world is waking up! And change is coming,
whether you like it or not!
That’s her entire speech. I transcribed, so it was my choice
to put in the exclamation points, but I think I was fair and only did that when
she was exclaiming. It’s 477 words. The speech took just under five minutes. So
she spoke at a haltingly slow 100 words per minute. By comparison, average
speeches are probably around 135-150 wpm. Ben Shapiro approaches 200 on a daily
basis. English is not her native language, so we’ll give her some leeway for
that, and also the occasional applause time she had to wait through. But a
speech that slow has a particular purpose: drama.
This was about the optics of a girl, all emotion, drumming
up sympathy for a particular way of thinking.
Her speech was written. By her? I’ve read a lot of student
papers from people her age and up into college, and even in their native
language, they’re probably incapable of inciting this much emotion. They are
likely to contain about this many “facts,” or data points, not usually
discovered themselves, but coming from some source they ought to cite, if they’ve
produced something in writing. And one would hope for the majority of the facts
to be actually true, if the piece is to be persuasive. But if you don’t have
the facts on your side, then a poor child in pain over the existential worry is
what you’ve got. What a bonus if you can get her to cry as she delivers the
words!
In other words, I think someone wrote it for her. Which
brings me to where I agree with her: How dare you! Whoever fed her this propaganda,
and incited her to this much painful emotion, depriving her of her childhood,
as she has pointed out—you are quite possibly just evil.
There are reasons that someone my age should not take
science scolding from a teenager. Take a look at this cartoon—listing actual
pronouncements.
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| Cartoon by Rick McKee, November 11, 2014 |
I remember these. If you’re familiar with George Orwell’s 1984,
you remember how they rewrote history, replacing all past references and moving
forward with new “truth,” as if the old words had never existed. We have
watched this happen in my lifetime related to climate change.
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| image found here |
Let me add that, when we were dealing with CO (carbon
monoxide) emissions, an actual poison gas, it made sense to try to bring that
down. We did. And then, quite suddenly, mention of CO turned into CO2 (carbon
dioxide), which is not a poison. It is what we exhale and plants inhale. It’s a
natural part of our environment. From the people who suddenly told us we were
no longer worried about global cooling, but were supposed to be frantically
worried about global warming, we were told to worry about the killing power of
the air we and other living things breathe.
I’m experienced enough to be skeptical.
The cultish belief that our earth’s climate is doomed
because of human activity, and the only way to preserve the earth is to
sacrifice human lives and livelihoods—is NOT my religious belief. And, in a
country that guarantees religious freedom, I resent having this pagan religion
forced upon me—with scorn, name-calling, blame, shame, and coercion heaped upon
any non-adherents.
The climate(s) around the world change. To slip in that
term, instead of warming or cooling, which unreliably failed to happen as
modeled, is a clever ploy—to anyone not paying attention.
Since I care about my environment, and the beauties of this
earth that is my home, of course I want to take care of it. Not so that all
creatures except humans can enjoy it; that is antithetical to the way
any species should instinctively behave. But so that we humans can enjoy
it.
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| image found here |
So, cleaning up air pollution is worth doing. But when we do
that and it’s never enough, and the only way to get even a tiny incremental
improvement is to return to pre-industrial times—that doesn’t seem right.
Especially since the evidence shows, the more industrialized a country becomes,
the more capable it becomes of eradicating pollution and disease.
The cleanest, safest energy source we have is nuclear. Most
of Europe knows this. But climate activists here have fought the building new
nuclear plants for decades. (There are, however, two under construction since
2017.) Instead they want more solar and wind—which, at this point both are more
costly to the environment than coal and natural gas energy and remain
unreliably dependent on wind and sunlight.
I used to live where we had both nuclear and hydroelectric power.
We never had a power outage, in the nine years we lived there. Other than the
occasional tree falling on a power line, no one else in the vicinity had
outages either. But hydroelectric was fought against for the sake of the fish.
And nuclear was fought against—because it scares people who don’t understand it.
(See this expression of reasoning by presidential candidate Marianne Williamson.)
Young Miss Greta Thunberg, you have been deceived. Someone
told you that the science is settled and has been crystal clear for 30 years; it
is not, and you do not even have the life experience to know better. Someone
told you that humans producing CO2 is an existential threat; it is not. Someone
told you all the things you’re upset about, and convinced you that you’re now
some kind of expert. You’re not. I could join you, but for this opposite
reason, and say to them, “How dare you!”
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| Found this in my representative's Facebook |
But, for the sake of your education, and the many others who
have been likewise duped into traumatic existential misery, I suggest you educate
yourself on what you’ve missed.
A good starting point is Prager University. These
five-minute videos, presented by actual scientists, who don’t all agree even
with each other, is worthwhile. Take the quiz and look up the study guide
attached to each one. There’s even a transcript, if you need it in writing:
PragerU Videos
There’s more. Just this month, probably because of the
Climate Action Summit 2019, my newsfeed filled up with pieces by others, like
me, with a little more perspective to safeguard us from yet another wolf cry of
existential threat within a decade unless we turn over all power to the
government—which, you might suppose is the purpose of those cries. Here are a
few pieces worth reading:
·
“Canada’s global warming models threw out actual historical data and substituted models of what the temperature should have been,”
Thomas Lifson, for American Thinker, September 22, 2019. He asks, “If
global warming is not a fraud, why do the promoters of it so often do the sorts
of things that fraudsters do?”
·
“Doomsdays that didn’t happen: Think tank
compiles decades’ worth of dire climate predictions,” Sam Dorman, for Fox
News, September 18, 2019.
·
“Wrong Again: 50 Years of Failed Eco-pocalyptic Predictions,” Myron Ebell and Steven J. Milloy, for Competitive Enterprise
Institute blog, September 18, 2019
·
“NASA Study: Mass Gains of Antarctic Ice SheetGreater than Losses," last updated August 6, 2017, by NASA Official Brian
Dunbar, edited by Rob Garner. The report is a few years old, but updates continue.
·
“Socialism, Not Climate Change, Is the Real Threat,” Emma Roberts, for RealClear Politics, September 24, 2019.
That last one is by a 17-year-old homeschooler from Liberty,
Texas. A lot less emotion, a lot more data. Good to see in someone so young.
While I don’t, as Thunberg accuses, “go to young people for hope,” not even
sure what she means. But this Texas teen inspires hope.
There’s a book a came upon a year or two ago, when the
author spoke at a local gathering. It makes no attempt to be politically
correct, but it contains a wealth of data—all from known sources. The list of
further reading in the back, plus the notes documenting every chapter, could
keep you reading on up through college. It’s The Mad, Mad, Mad World of
Climatism, by Steve Goreham, © 2012, New Lenox Books, available at www.climatism.net.
I could probably dig up a few more very good pieces I’ve
accumulated over the years. But I think this is enough to get a person started
on the path to freedom from the cultish indoctrination.
I don’t really know what the climate will do. No one else
does either. But being in abject fear over people driving cars or using plastic
straws—that’s not a good way to live a life. No young person should be deprived
of their childhood just because they’re an easy emotional target due to their
lack of knowledge and perspective. Education—and time—are a cure for that condition.
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