By contrast to Ms. Thunberg’s rant on subjects like ecosystem collapse and mass extinctions about which she obviously knows nothing, Ms. Seibt talks about the basics of scientific inquiry, like humility and skepticism — things that high school students can and should have studied thoroughly. Certainly, you might think, there could be nothing objectionable about a young woman making such obvious points in the context of what goes under the name of “climate science.” If you think that, then you don’t understand how this game works.
BY THE INTERNATIONAL CHRONICLES
Almost certainly, you have heard of Greta Thunberg. Indeed, you undoubtedly know a lot about her. She is the Swedish teenager who for more than a decade has suffered from various mental illnesses, including depression, Asperger’s syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and even something called “selective mutism.” Apparently, in between bouts of mental illness, at some point she became interested in the issue of climate change. In late December 2018, at the age of 15, Greta suddenly sprang on the world stage, when she got invited to speak at a UN climate conference in New York. That’s when we first got to see her trademark anger — fury, even — about what she perceived to be the crisis of the climate. In 2019 she spent the year playing hooky from school and leading climate “strikes” and demonstrations wherever she could get an audience. On September 23, 2019 she was back at the UN in New York giving a barn-burning speech letting everyone know how deeply furious she is that anyone is enjoying their life. Here is some text from that speech:
[Y]ou all come to us young people for hope. 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. 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!
Here is a picture of Greta delivering that speech:
And what exactly was it that anyone had done to her to “steal [her] dreams and [her] childhood”? I’m still trying to figure that one out. My own inclination is to feel very sorry for this young lady. As a high-school age girl who hasn’t even attended school much of the time and hasn’t yet studied these things at all, she obviously has no real idea about whether “entire ecosystems are collapsing” or whether we are “in the beginning of a mass extinction.” Clearly, before her unhinged anger takes over everything and destroys her life, she needs to get some professional help with her mental issues. But that’s just my view.
Then there’s Naomi Seibt. You may not even have heard of her. She’s a little older than Greta — 19 to Greta’s 17 — and hails from the German state of North Rhine Westphalia. Naomi graduated from high school in 2017 at the age of 16, and while there won a first prize for research in physics. After high school, Naomi started on her own to develop a presence on YouTube as a climate skeptic, and attracted the notice of the Heartland Institute. On December 4, 2019 she appeared at the behest of Heartland in Madrid, Spain, at the time of a UN climate conference in that city, and delivered what looks to me like a very reasonable and appropriate speech for an intelligent young lady to give. Excerpt:
Science is based on intellectual humility and it is important that we keep questioning the narrative that is out there instead of promoting it. And these days ‘climate change science’ really isn’t science at all. We’ve heard it today. They draw their conclusions before testing their hypothesis and base their assumptions on incoherent models. It’s an insult to science itself.
Here’s a picture of Naomi delivering that speech: