Worldwide student strike over climate change

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Also known as the "awful truth" (apologies again to Michael Moore)

Just not warming at the rare predicted. No one really denies that earth is warming gradually. One argument is that we are still coming out the last ice age. The problem is with the man made theory.

This is part of a carefully orchestrated public relations campaign. It has to do with indoctrinating our children and using a young Aspie girl.

The rise to fame of Greta Thunberg, the teenage climate activist, has been nothing short of extraordinary. Less than a year ago, she was an unknown schoolgirl from Sweden, albeit an unusual one: she is the daughter of a famous opera singer and an actor. Thunberg also has Asperger’s syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder and selective mutism. The latter, she says, ‘basically means I only speak when I think it’s necessary’. ‘Now is one of those moments,’ she said in a Ted talk watched hundreds of thousands of times on the topic that first brought her into the public eye: her decision to stage a ‘school strike’ last August to draw attention to climate change. Thunberg’s profile has only grown since. Her appearance at the UN climate conference in Poland propelled her to international fame. Most recently she was in Davos. Her message to the billionaires at the World Economic Summit was stark: ‘I want you to panic’ about climate change.

Greta’s steely gaze and call to action has won her legions of fans online. She certainly makes for a good story: the sweet girl who is moved to climate action and ends up as an unlikely international celebrity.

However, her sudden appearance in the limelight has led to some pointed questions: is Greta’s celebrity status less to do with chance and more to do with a carefully orchestrated public relations campaign?

Doubts were first raised when the Swiss magazine Weltwoche published an article last month entitled ‘We’re making a climate icon’. It revealed that Thunberg’s school strike had coincided neatly with the launch of a book about climate change written by her mother, Malena Ernman. Is this a coincidence? It looks less like one when you learn from the same article that the first publicity of Thunberg’s protest came via the social media of the book’s PR man, Ingmar Rentzhog, on the day of its launch. It seems that Rentzhog took a freelance photographer along to the school strike, later posting the pictures on his Facebook and video on his company’s YouTube channel.

Meanwhile, Swedish journalist Henrik Alexandersson has claimed that Thunberg’s much-touted speech to the Katowice summit was actually delivered to an almost empty hall – perhaps unsurprising given that she was speaking near the end of the day. Yet it was hard to tell this from the film of her speech – which went viral – which only showed close-ups of her face, a shot of the stage and a brief sequence of an apparently appreciative crowd. Nevertheless, it was this apparently inauspicious event that propelled Thunberg to worldwide fame.

Further worrying details have also emerged. As well as working for Greta’s mother, Rentzhog had also recently launched a business called ‘We Don’t Have Time’, a sort of climate-focused PR agency. In October 2018, he invited Greta to join the company’s Youth Advisory Board and in the weeks that followed he used her image intensively ahead of the company’s share issue. This seems to have been very successful, bringing in something short of a million pounds. But whatever the figure, Greta has proved to be an extraordinarily lucrative asset for Mr Rentzhog, and the environmental press has been extraordinarily helpful too.

Greta and her family both deny being aware that she would be used in this way, and they have since cut ties with Rentzhog’s organisation, but all these revelations have rather tarnished her image, no matter how sincere her views on climate change. The Thunberg phenomenon began as the unlikely story of a young girl with strong views falling unsuspecting into the limelight. Her strange garb and piercing gaze added to the mystique. But now, the ‘Wizard of Oz’ outfits and the pigtails look to be less odd and more calculated: the careful packaging of a product so that it gets noticed rather than an unusual penchant for 1950s fashion. What we have seen is surely an example of marketing genius rather than a miraculous stroke of luck.

Source: What’s behind climate change activist Greta Thunberg’s remarkable rise to fame?

Propaganda and exploitation as usual. The political agenda is obvious.

The warming is going at the worst rate predicted, more so there is no know explanation for the current warming except being man made; the so called "skeptics" are welcome to find another one, but so far they have being unsuccessful.

Discrediting results of a entire domain of science, just because it don't fit your political view.

Where's the evidence that it's man made? Where's the evidence that their solutions are working?

It's the political agenda attached to the science that I'm seeing.

And science gets discredited all the time without politics being involved. The entire domain of cardiology science just got discredited so to speak. For decades cardiology experts were saying taking aspirin every day would reduce the risk of heart attack and stoke. That's now been discredited, even though it was considered sound science for decades. Science is like that. There's often a new study, new theory, new model that discredits a previously established one.

No, the domain of cardiology science did not just get "discredited." That's ridiculous - and I say that as the wife of a man with A-Fib who has an excellent, caring cardiologist with an M.D. from Harvard, who is one of the most thorough and excellent doctors I have ever known.

Medicine will from time to time have a paradigm shift, just as other scientific fields will. Something that was "accepted practice" gets challenged with a larger sample size or better research design, or with longitudinal studies that take many years to complete. Aspirin for heart health is one example. Another is hormone replacement therapy for symptoms of menopause, which turned out to cause early death from cancer. There are drugs that are considered miracle drugs up to a certain age, but then after that age you change to something else because risk of side effects changes in the aging body.

But saying the field of cardiology has been discredited is just throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Please excuse my cynicism, but how is skipping classes going to stop global warming?

It's a bit late for that...and how does striking/boycotting their educations help the climate?

Do something tangible, even something small...like compound interest, it adds up of time.

1. Creates a global show of strength, which always results in publicity. ("ten local kids cut class" = no headline; "students attend demonstrations in over 100 countries" gets on the evening news)

2. Gets youth, soon to be voters and holders of power, involved in political action.

3. Stimulates an activist mindset.

See my answer to Fnord, above.

Fair enough...

I still think that if students want to be noticed, they need to hit where it hurts - in the corporate pocketbook. In this case, the schools already have their money.

I predict that skipping classes to reverse global warming will have about as much success as camping out in front of the New York Stock Exchange during the "Occupy Wall Street" had in correcting the unequal distribution of wealth in this country.

That is to say, no success at all.

People can promote change by voting, getting laws made or changed. Voting with their wallets, and not supporting companies whose values don't align with theirs, and doing their individual parts to support causes they believe in. I just don't see what's to be gained by skipping school one day. Other than not being taken seriously, or being labeled negatively.

I see online petitions for this or against that all the time...they don't accomplish anything, in a legal sense. Learn how the system works (and were it doesn't) and use it.