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Climate Hysteria Is Harming Our Kids
Every week, the rhetoric is ramped up: “Surviving climate change means an end to burning fossil fuels. Prepare yourself for sacrifices,” the LA Times warns. The Guardian writes, “World ‘gravely’ unprepared for effects of climate crisis.” For the New Yorker, it’s already too late: “What if We Stopped Pretending the Climate Apocalypse Can Be Stopped?”
The latest round of ecological doomsaying hit the United Nations Monday in the form of Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old Swedish climate activist. The media made this child a celebrity after her speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos. “I don’t want you to be hopeful,” she scolded the jet-setting elites. “I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day.”
In Monday’s speech to the UN Climate Action Summit, she was even more apocalyptic:
“You all come to us young people for hope,” she said. “How dare you? You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words, and yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing.”
None of this is healthy, neither for Ms. Thunberg nor for anyone else. Especially other kids.
Those of us who have been around awhile are used to constant fearmongering about the environment. My first-grade teacher handed out maps showing how a pollution-caused ice age would soon cover our Chicago suburb with a glacier. Mom eased the panic with a reminder we were moving to Phoenix that summer.
After that, acid rain was going to kill us, then the ozone hole, then global warming, then “global weirding,” and now, climate change. (Granted, the climate has always changed, but progressives think it started a century ago.)
Despite the wildly different scenarios, from freezing oceans to boiling ones, the solution is always the same: curtail capitalism and let government control more of our lives.
The young, unfortunately, don’t have our luxury of perspective. And it’s destroying their emotional health.
According to the National Institutes of Health, nearly one-third of all 13- to 18-year olds will experience an anxiety disorder. The numbers continue to go up; between 2007 and 2012, anxiety in children and teens rose 20 percent.
The suicide rate for young Americans is now the highest ever recorded. Between 2000 and 2017, the number of suicides has doubled for females aged 15 to 24. Males between 15 and 19 killed themselves at a rate of 17.9 per 100,000, up from 13 per 100,000 in 2000.
Our increasingly anxious kids deserve better. Daily prophecies of global annihilation are deeply unhealthy, not to mention unsupported by the vast majority of research. Even if you accept that human activity is heating the globe, relatively few scientists are predicting the end of the world in 12 years or 17 months.
What Thunberg’s parents are doing to her borders on child abuse. Hyping increasingly apocalyptic claims is spreading that abuse to every other young person.
Published in Environment
She should be saying “How dare you?” to her parents and the other adults exploiting her.
Using kids to promote an extreme political agenda is not new.
I was on the fence about whether it was abuse a couple of months ago when this whole thing started. But as it’s progressed and facts have emerged about her, and just seeing her speak, I’m convinced she is being mentally abused. And there is no one to stop it.
The brat needs to be spanked and sent to her room.
In order to address some of these problems, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) implemented, beginning in 2005, a new surface temperature measurement system in the U.S.
So–not to keep you in suspense–what does the USCRN show so far? No warming:
No. Warming. None.
Gosh, Jon, I considered including her in my OP on Human Sacrifice. Probably better here. ;-)
I do find these manipulations of children extremely troubling. Sacrificing their mental state for political purposes is disgusting.
If Big Tobacco could be successfully sued in a massive class action, why not Big Science, centered in universities and foundations with billions of dollars in endowment money? Fund remedial education, corrective PSAs, take “climate science” out of circulation where anyone under the age of majority might encounter it.
Fund reimbursement of tuition and books from junk science college courses.
Fund lots of therapy.
We must do it for all the suffering children!
News flash for your first-grade teacher: all of the Chicago suburbs were under an ice sheet about 6000′ feet thick 10,000 years ago.
I don’t want Greta to panic. I want Greta to gut through enough math, physics and chemistry so that she’s able to recognize the difference between legitimate concerns and utter balderdash.
I’m sure if I made a 12 year old boy memorize Milton Friedman, he’d be just as respected by the media
https://youtu.be/oxNjLuifZD8
President Trump was at the UN to deal with a real crisis causing actual lives, including those of actual children. He was there to drive a religious liberty and persecution reporting session. He rolled out of the real crisis meeting to big foot the fake crisis media production.
All I can think of in these times of “follow the children” is how much I love the film WILD IN THE STREETS. I can totally see Greta demanding that older Americans be committed to prison camps where the water is laced with LSD.
That is inconvenient……
I remember reading verbatim (I’ve said this before) on a global site around the late 1990’s the following words” We NEED to create a “crisis” that the world can rally around like global warming……. I can’t find it now, but if you dig around in that time period, you’ll find things like this:
“The World Bank itself fears its move may carry the “political risk of seeming to get ahead of the convention on emissions trading”, but sees rich rewards from controlling a system by which Third World countries can sell their pollution allowance to developed countries in return for cleaner combustion technology.
The bank plans to charge 5 per cent commission on all deals. It estimates that the market will be worth £90 billion by 2020, giving a total commission income of £4.5 billion, of which 60 per cent will be “profit above administration costs”. Nov. 13, 1998
https://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/209/43527.html
I remember wondering why the powers-that-be needed to create a crisis and that line stuck with me. If global warming has been an issue for 50 years and countries have been holding meetings and appropriating funds, and redirecting wealth and changing business practices and on and on, why are we still in crisis mode??? Has nothing prior to 2019 worked?? Maybe its good to clean up the environment because its the right thing to do, although major polluting countries probably have not complied. We have and have the documentation to prove it. That being said, could 75% be natural, as the sun is heating things up, a warming and cooling trend of the earth is natural? We will soon be accepting climate refugees – Countries that are most affected like China and India and sub-Sahara Africa seem to be doing the least.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Framework_Convention_on_Climate_Change
Panicking people and indoctrination of this hysteria tells me there is another agenda behind it.
By the way, I heard on the news that Greta Thunberg met with Obama prior to her appearing in front of Congress – no surprise there. I understand he is doing some sort of youth training – what happened to his library and the sustainable rooftop gardens? Why isn’t he cleaning up the inner cities that he promised with hope and change mantra? Why are we still in a crisis mode with filthy drug riddled cities, rampant homelessness, and now the world will end because we didn’t clean things up yet? So multi-gender bathrooms wasn’t enough? Get a grip !
The Lab Coat Left.
Soros’ shadow
Looking at the photo again, she needs a bandanna around her neck, or at least a red armband.
When it’s a real problem, you don’t send children to argue for it. This is creepy, abusive psychodrama.
Poor little squirt. What is she supposed to do with this experience once she finds out, in ten years or so, that it was much ado about nothing?
My dad used to say we were a country run by 3-year olds because of his observation of parents giving in to the tantrums of their kids and wanting to avoid a scene. He was mostly joking. But now it appears we are letting ourselves be swayed by teens. The notion of adults applauding and woo-hoo-ing this girl is sad, indeed.
We’re going to see a replay of the saga of the Millerites.
Karl Marx got one thing right: “History repeats itself, the first as tragedy, then as farce.”
Why did he blow $15,000,000 on a beachfront mansion on Martha’s Vineyard? The seas are gonna rise!
Do you know why he did, Greta? Because he knows that the whole thing is a grift.
It crossed that border, set up camp, and settled in for a long stay.
What a rage-filled little girl. It’s like watching a very young Elizabeth Warren.
When I first read this line in the OP:
“In Monday’s speech to the UN Climate Action Summit, she was even more apocalyptic,” my eyes did that little trick that made me see “apoplectic.”
Here’s another mentally unstable youth.
Can only disagree with “borders on.” This is flat out child abuse.
Honestly fear for what she will do to herself when all the sycophants leave, after they have no further use for her.
She says she should be back in school, but something tells me she’d rather be an international celebrity. I think this is the miscalculation being made here – by, of course, the adults who should probably be insisting that this child does go to school, instead of putting their fears and insecurities on her, and other children. There will be a tiny coterie of kids, vastly ambitious and privileged, who will see this and believe that they can have big careers doing very little actual work. But most won’t be phased in the least. I remember those kids in high school (which wasn’t very long ago for me). They we’re just plain obnoxious and unpleasant.
Your eyes are smart. They cut right to the chase!