On Monday, Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old climate activist, delivered a speech at the United Nations on the threat of climate change. Video clips of her speech went viral on social media and they drew rather polarizing reactions, to put it mildly.
‘How dare you – you have stolen my dreams and my childhood’
Watch Greta Thunberg’s powerful speech to world leaders at the UN pic.twitter.com/cMzPNKHpMN
— The Guardian (@guardian) September 23, 2019
The speech she made is, quite frankly, unwatchable. It’s not so much the content of her speech that makes it unbearable but the manner in which she says it, although the content did play a significant part. While people of a leftwing political orientation would froth in their mouth and demonize us if we said the obvious but the obvious does need to be said. It was awful and cringe-worthy and very difficult to watch. I could not listen to the entirety of it without closing my eyes. My face twisted into a grimace almost involuntarily.
US President Donald Trump, who trolled his way into the White House, spoke for a lot of people when he made a sarcastic comment on it. And if you were looking for a reason as to why Trump got elected, this is it. He has the guts to say the obvious when there’s immense backlash for daring to speak the truth.
She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see! https://t.co/1tQG6QcVKO
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 24, 2019
There’s a reason why Greta Thunberg, who suffers from Aspergers, is the new face of Climate Change activism. She is a 16-year-old with an obvious health issue. Therefore, she can get away with a lot of things that people older than she can’t. And if anyone dares to criticize her, they could then demonize them for ‘attacking’ a little girl. It’s quite malicious if you ask me.
Using children for propaganda is one of the vilest things anyone could do. It’s done with the full knowledge that no adult feels good about being rude to a child or saying harsh things about them. It’s done to shut down debate and silence the opposition into submission. There’s literally no way you could be a grown-up and be rude to an unhealthy child without looking like a complete and utter moron. The Left understands that and takes advantage of it. Their moral depravity knows no bounds.
However, the truth does need to be said. Thus, at the risk of coming across as a heartless moron, I would say that Greta Thunberg came across as an entitled spoilt brat who has absolutely no clue about anything, like most 16-year-olds. She began her speech with the words, “My message is that we’ll be watching you. 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 all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!”
She should have stopped right when she finished that third sentence. She was right, she shouldn’t have been up there and she should have been back at school. She is perhaps the only person in the history of human civilization who has made a career out of skipping classes. I am not too sure about the Nobel Peace Prize but she does deserve to go into the Guinness Book of World Records for that.
“How dare you?” The manner in which she said is just bad. That’s just no way to talk to elders. Sure, they are world leaders and some of them do deserve some spite and much worse, however, there are norms of civility that need to be observed. Being rude to people you know can’t be rude to you without suffering significant damage to their reputation is just deplorable. It’s just not fair.
I do not believe world leaders need to be exposed to such insults, they sure could take, they have thick skins, but it’s not fair. Okay, maybe Imran Khan deserves it and Angela Merkel, maybe Xi Jinping and a few others but certainly not all of them. It just doesn’t seem right. All of us know that we can’t talk that way to world leaders without major consequences, therefore, some people are enjoying it immensely merely because the leaders are being tortured by someone they can’t be rude to. It’s quite sadistic.
Greta Thunberg then accused them of stealing her dreams and childhood. She said, “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones.” The truth is, no world leader stole her dreams and childhood. Her parents did. In a sane world, her parents would be tried for child abuse. She is being treated as a commodity to make some money and earn some fame.
She has obvious health issues. And I do feel sorry for her. It’s not something that I would want my little cousin sisters and brothers to be put through. She suffers from Asperger’s syndrome, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and selective mutism. The least her parents and everyone around her could do is make her life easier, not more difficult. Sure, the world may need heroes, a lot of them, we have not reached a point where we need to make children with health issues suffer even more than they already are in order to save the world.
Her dreams and childhood were stolen but they weren’t stolen by world leaders. They were stolen by her own parents and guardians. They were stolen by every single individual who cheered for her and encourages her to carry on when she was obviously suffering. Greta Thunberg had her chance at having a better life destroyed by the very people whose duty it was to protect her and raise her.
The Greta phenomenon is little more than a manifestation of the Christian world’s desire to have another Messiah. They desperately need another person they can nail to the cross, they want another person willing to die for their sins, they want another human sacrifice so that the world could be saved from its sins. The Left may believe they have nothing to do with Christianity but every act of theirs reveals their Christian roots.
Greta then said, “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.” Well, the only thing we can be sure of at the moment is that climate alarmists have been spectacularly wrong about their predictions regularly.
One ‘Arctic Expert’ in 2012 predicted that sea ice in the Arctic region would collapse within four years. Nothing remotely close to that has happened. In 2009, the then Prime Minister of Britain predicted that we had only 50 days to save the planet. A decade has passed since then. In 2007, UN scientists predicted that “we only had as little as eight years left to avoid a dangerous global average temperature rise of 2°C or more.” Needless to say, it was another failed prediction. Such predictions did not start in the 2000s, it started as far back as 1989.
The San Jose Mercury News reported on June 30, 1989, that a senior environmental officer at the UN says that “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000.” 19 years have passed since then and yet, there haven’t been consequences to that end. The alarmist predictions have been wrong consistently for 30 years and yet, activists like Greta use that to further their narrative.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the new Leftist Queen in America, argued passionately that the world will end in 12 years if climate change is not addressed. We can be pretty sure that her prediction will be proven false as well but that won’t prevent her or Greta from making such predictions in the future. Because such alarmist predictions are not based on reason, the basis for them is faith. And faith, as is obvious from religiosity, is remarkably persistent. As I have said before, Climate Change is the Leftist version of the core Christian Apocalypse meme.
Moreover, the frequently made Leftist claim that 97% of scientists agree that humans are the driving force behind Climate Change is demonstrably false and particularly misleading. Most importantly, Science is not driven by consensus. It’s settled by observations and facts. It only takes one Einstein or Newton to fundamentally alter our knowledge of the Universe. Despite what Greta might argue, the Science on Climate Change is by no means settled.
Throughout the decades, scientists have come up with doomsday theories. In the 1970s, it was Global Cooling, then there was the Ozone Layer Depletion which hardly anyone talks about now, then there was Global Warming and suddenly now it is Climate Change. It is indeed intriguing how the term Global Warming suddenly went out of fashion and was replaced with Climate Change, a term that is much vaguer.
Now, Climate Change may well be real. But when I see people who have been constantly wrong for the past three decades issue more dire sermons, it just makes me feel very suspicious. Especially when they are using a 16-year-old girl with health issues to make their point. They may be right but I find them increasingly difficult to take them seriously. Moreover, ‘experts’ who issue such sermons more often than not believe gender is a social construct and all the garbage that comes along with it, I just don’t know if I can trust them anymore on anything at all. On top of it, when they use a 16-year old girl with health issues to further their agenda, it makes me even more suspicious of the claims.
Having said that, I do believe there’s an urgent need to address pollution and environmental concerns. Pollution is destroying the beauty of our world. There are many things that we could do to make our cities more livable, oceans cleaner, and our way of life, less polluting. I do believe we need to address that. However, in the midst of all this cacophony of an impending apocalypse, urgent concerns are lost in the noise.
Moreover, the people who are most concerned about Climate Change are the ones who most often get in the way of actually making our cities less polluting. The protests over Aarey are evidence of it. The metro project will no doubt make Mumbai safer, less polluting and more livable. And yet, it is these environmentalists who are getting in the way. Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis deserves much credit for refusing to bow down to this mob.
Greta ended her speech with more threats. She said, “You are failing us. But 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.”
The threats are quite amusing since Greta Thunberg was able to make that speech at the UN only because the world leaders were kind enough to accommodate her. We can safely say that she won’t be able to offer such sermons from Beijing. The Chinese are not fond of being lectured by anyone, much less 16-year olds. The least she could have done is be a little bit more courteous. She was not looking to have a discussion, she merely wanted to beat someone with the stick in her hand. And the elders in the room were kind enough to allow her to amuse herself.
The theatrics that we saw at the UN summit from Greta Thunberg only does a great disservice to those who believe in Climate Change. It was all an act, everyone knows it was all an act. She was reading every single word from a piece of paper and trying very hard to put some emotions into it. By such repulsive acts, these activists are putting people off who otherwise might have been sympathetic to their interests. It wouldn’t even surprise me if hers was an elaborate act to discredit the entire idea of Climate Change activism itself by the billionaires who fund her.
The Left has truly lost its moral compass. Greta Thunberg is further evidence of the fact that they don’t honest discussion or debate. They want to shame and humiliate people and force them into submission. She needs help, not more misery. The burden to ‘Save the World’ should not be forced upon the shoulders of a 16-year-old with health issues who don’t know any better.
