I & I Editorial BoardI&I Editorial
Following the Greta Thunberg path to fame is an Australian boy who gained notoriety for fuming about “narrow-minded” politicians. While the pair’s excesses can be attributed to their youth, the behavior of the shallow adults insisting the two are prophets who must be listened to cannot be excused. The proper response to these “grownups” behaving as high schoolers is harsh ridicule.
The world can’t help but know about Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish scold who seems to have dropped out of school to travel the world and impudently lecture her elders about how they have let her down. Though this girl knows nothing about climate other than it exists around her, and less about the world, adults nod in agreement as she rants, hand her multiple honors and awards, and have sworn they have been inspired as well as properly chastised by her. She was even considered last month as “the one to beat” for the Nobel Peace Prize, which was eventually given to Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed for putting an end to his country’s decades-long conflict with Eritrea.
Now comes Australia’s “Outback schoolboy” Dylan Storer, not as famous as Thunberg, but just as green, and we don’t mean that in an environmental sense. Storer, also 16, “has been praised on social media after slamming ‘narrow-minded’ politicians while weighing in on Australia’s bushfire crisis,” the Daily Mail reports.
“It’s not political opinion to say climate change hasn’t contributed to these horrific bushfires,” he said earlier this week on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Q&A” broadcast.
Of course Storer’s words were “met with huge applause from the audience,” because who can’t resist showing just how hip they are by airing their enthusiastic support of a raving child?
The kid’s performance, the Daily Mail tells us, had him “trending on Twitter, with many calling for him to be the next prime minister and even comparing him to the late Bob Hawke,” the country’s longest-serving Labor Party prime minister, in office from 1983 to 1991.
The Nobel Prize. Australian prime minister. The rapt attention of the United Nations. What has happened to Western civilization? How have we reached a place in which children, so clearly unlearned, are hailed as oracles who must be heeded? Like high-school kids desperately trying to be a part of the cool crowd, the flatterers, in cringeworthy fashion, fawn over Thunberg and Storer, all the while saying “look at me, look at me.”
Their virtue signaling gets us nowhere. Neither do the claims, advanced by these children, that global warming is all about science, not politics. The science simply is not settled. Science doesn’t work that way. Science continues to ask questions and challenge theories. The alarmists won’t admit it, but brilliant scholars with doctorate degrees in science are still debating the impacts of human carbon dioxide emissions.
Names? Richard Lindzen, Harvard atmospheric physicist. Roy Spencer, University of Alabama-Huntsville meteorologist. John Christy, University of Alabama-Huntsville professor of atmospheric science. Judith Curry, Georgia Institute of Technology earth and atmospheric sciences professor. Willie Soon, astrophysicist and geoscientist. Freeman Dyson, physicist and mathematician. William Happer, Princeton physicist.
There are more, just as there are many researchers who believe man’s CO2 emissions are an existential threat. Thunberg and Storer, however, are school kids. Yet they are treated as if they are rock stars by adults who should know that the science is uncertain. Apparently they’re unaware that serious people find their behavior puerile, even laughable. They need to be told — over and over again, until their embarrassment makes them stop.
— Written by J. Frank Bullitt
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Using these vague “policy violations,” Google is now threatening to demonetize us. It’s part of Big Tech’s effort to silence conservative voices.
My gosh, I can’t believe you are scared of kids!
Actually, you are scared of the truth of what we have done to the Earth in our greed.
Want to debate the science? Let’s do it!
Skeptics have wanted to debate the science from day 1. It was the alarmists who have said the debate was over before the debate even began. Because in early debates the audiences always sided with the skeptics when the debate was done. Which is why they moved to shut down all dissent to their best ability.
Well gosh, Mimi, let’s do it now.
Ocean Acidification has been shown to be the factor after the Chixulub incident which wiped out most species in the oceans, and now it is happening again from the concentrations of carbon dioxide in the seas.
Are you concerned?
Shows just how stupid these climate crisis idiots are. Willing to be led by the nose by child actors regurgitating the talking points taught to them by the globalists using the fake climate hysteria as a means to power.
Want to discuss the science? Please do. I have been asking and asking, but no Deniers want to debate it.
You know the world’s gone crazy when presumably sane, educated adults worship at the feet of a mentally ill, unquestionably brainwashed, angry child.
I suggest you actually read what they are saying. I think political prejudice has infected rational thinking.
I earned an advanced degree in this topic and want to discuss it with you Deniers.
Maybe you should read the actual article you are commenting on – it mentions several prominent scientists who challenge the “consensus” but for the most part can’t find an alarmist to debate with. Not to mention that the main point of the article is not about the science, it’s about the stupidity of listening to children who know nothing but are yelling at the adults to “panic”, which is usually not a good starting point. Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, on the Thunberg phenomenon: “As a friend says on Facebook, when an emotionally disturbed sixteen-year-old is the spokesperson for your movement, maybe it’s not really about science. Poor kid — she’s just a younger, more vulnerable Cindy Sheehan, and like Sheehan will be discarded as soon as she’s no longer of use. In the meantime, her moral theatrics have grown tedious.”
I will bet you that she knows more of the science and our present condition than you.
You have an advanced degree in this topic and your chosen activity is to take on internet commenters? How about you go and debate those named in the article who are credentialed and are so-called “Deniers” (in your eyes at least)?
I do go after them if I see their phony posts or writings.
I ask questions if I am present.
In my 76th year, and with familial responsibilities, I do not go out a lot.
Still waiting for the pint-sized pigtailed pugnacious prophet of doom to take her children’s crusade to Beijing and New Delhi.
What do you have against saving both money and the Earth?
We are killing the Earth, and renewables are cleaner and cheaper than polluting fuels now.
• Greta Thunberg nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.
• Caitlyn Jenner wins ESPN’s Courage Award.
• Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” wins a Grammy and an Oscar, even though all of its predictions are wrong.
• Parkland student David Hogg (daddy CIA) leads the anti-gun movement.
• Obama wins the Peace Prize as he barely enters office.
In our era of Peak Ju, propaganda value trumps legitimacy.
A sensible response to this issue is on Scott Adams blog, easily found by searching “A Message for Children about Climate Change” I’m very suspicious of any “crisis” when the solution involves government taking over vast swaths of the economy and socialism–the Green New Deal (for some odd reason) includes things like providing everyone a government job and massive spending on social programs. When the proposed solution to a problem involves the transfer of power and control to the ones crying “Fire” you do wonder if their motives might not be pure. One can also google “Forbes: Denying the Catastrophe, the Science of Climate Skeptics” to find a thoughtful response to the “man-made CO2 emissions will heat the planet and cause global catastrophe” narrative. Telling children that untold millions, including maybe them, are going to die because of climate change is child abuse.
Indeed. The whole GND was nothing more than a front for a complete take over of the economy by further expanding the Federal government. The idea was hatched by AOC’s (former, now disgraced) chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti. He even bragged about it:
https://news.yahoo.com/aoc-chief-staff-admits-green-124408358.html
Wrapping the scheme in green virtue helps to sell it to low information, easily triggered masses.
Thanks for playing, friends, but I really must go. Reading that pitiful screed about Soros told me I am in a conservative bubble, where the words you invent and tell others come back confirmed.
Good luck to you folk, I know you mean well, even though you may dream of hurting liberals one way or another. Smearing a little girl for speaking out should have sealed it for me but I hung on, hoping even one of you would go to the references I gave, or look up the science instead of reading political pundits. You abrogated your duty to yourself by giving the job of actually thinking to others, . . others with their axes on the grindstone.
Thanks for all the replies.