Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
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
He was probably just inviting her to spend the summer at his new beach house mansion.
I’ve seen a real decline in the mental health of young people in the last 15-20 years in the ER. The number of teens and young adults with anxiety, or depression, on heavy psychotropic meds is amazing. I see less and less ability to cope with even minor stress or even being uncomfortable for a period of time.
I love it.
Now plot it as absolute temperature and see what it looks like.
Someone ought to introduce her to David Hogg. They’d make a great couple.
Kinda like this:
____________________________________
Your point?
The scale used to display such data is deceiving to the human eye and can frequently mislead people who aren’t savvy to what data look like in the wild. People can read far too much into such how these things look without realizing that things that look like trends… aren’t.
You know what will close down St. Greta’s “the earth is dying” hysterical climate change psychodrama?
The Big One, striking either California or the Pacific Northwest. When the earth yet again demonstrates that it can wipe away what has taken human beings hundreds (if not thousands) of years to create, and quite casually, as if scratching a mild itch.
This explains a lot.
Mom, Pop and spawn…
This one looks less menacing than this Comrade
\\
\
Modern-day quislings, those parents.
Funny, I discovered this four year old video just yesterday….
Kozak: I’ve seen a real decline in the mental health of young people in the last 15-20 years in the ER. The number of teens and young adults with anxiety, or depression, on heavy psychotropic meds is amazing. I see less and less ability to cope with even minor stress or even being uncomfortable for a period of time.
I really don’t see how anyone should be surprised by either the deranged behavior of this little girl or by Kozak’s comment which I believe to be true.
Our schools around the western world have become dangerous indoctrination centers that not only refuse to teach about the real world to these children and whose primarily good is to indoctrinate our children to believe the deranged unsubstantiated destructive rants of the Far Left, but also insidiously undermine the effects of good parenting and purposely lead our children down the paths to destructive social and psychological disorders.
I didn’t know about the Martha’s Vineyard palatial playground – Interesting – at least the Kennedys were from Ma. I guess they got tired of Hawaii. Between that and the “walled” compound near DC, they are dropping some big bucks. You can make that much – multi-millions – writing a couple books and making some speeches? I don’t think the presidential salary is that much……Most ex-presidents go back to their home states and work with charities….
Is this for real??
“The Grump” a new movie by Adam Sandler
Basically a horizontal line.