The Greta Thunberg Debate

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Yep. Focus on the idea, not the person.

I think she is being exploited.

I think years from now she is going to come out and reveal things similar to former child stars and or adult children of celebrities often do.

She’s like many young people who are scared about the repercussions not doing anything about climate change COULD have upon the state of this Earth.

I don’t hold to those views...and I’m not stopping plane travel, nor am I becoming a Vegan....but I believe there is some basis for her views, yet perhaps more basis for a more moderate view than those of the extremists.

It’s possible she is being exploited...but I don’t sense so much of that...except maybe by the extremist climate-change lobbyists.

Her mother’s opera career is on hold because her daughter is scared about plane travel is doing to the environment, so the mother doesn’t travel on planes.

Just shows that they haven't got a clue at all about aspies.
The one thing I've stood up for since childhood was the environment and endangered species.



The latter part must me them projecting. They were ignorant and detached teens so everyone else must be too. What would it say about them if (heaven forbid) someone like us out does them Pathetic doesn't even cover it.



I've heard her on the news and was agreeing with her every word. Only this week did I learn that she's aspie, which made me proud. I've said it before here and I'll say it again: She is awesome!

The amount of commitment she shows and seems to feel, mirrors my own entirely. I've always had that too, since I was around 9 or something.


She is like a personification of the end words of The Lorax (good movie, great message):
Unless someone like you care a whole awful lot
it's not gonna get any better.
It's not

Continue the good fight, Greta Thunberg. The world needs you.

Exactly. This should be more common: the common sense to do what is important.

She spoke the truth. How dare the condemn all life as we know it? The sixth mass extinction isn't a joke, however much conservatives would like it to be. (now, there's a joke)

In my view, there’s very few facets of objective knowledge which are “irrelevant.” It’s irritating when one says that fields of knowledge which are not in one’s narrow field of interest is “irrelevant.”

I wish Greta could sit whatever exam one takes in Sweden for the culmination of her secondary school studies, and entry into university.

She should, very soon, attend to her education. One can’t be a climate scientist without at least a university degree.

Given she dropped out in second grade, she's got some catching up to do before starting actual secondary education. Additionally, I dont Think she and her activist friends would take kindly to science that contradicts their already established view. One criticism I've read about the studies she cites is that none of them take into account the fluctuating radiation output of the sun but instead treat it as a constant. That alone will skew the end result massively, and make it basically useless.

I don’t feel blind adherence to anything is good.

I do understand what is meant by a “cult mentality.”

I do believe more of an objective dialogue about “climate science” would be useful, and better for Greta in the long run. We should take into account all objective obtained parameters...like variations in the Sun’s overall output, for example. And how much of this “climate change” is caused by natural geological forces, rather than being man-made.

This “now or never” approach, to me, is similar to the approach used by survivalists to stockpile years of canned goods within an underground bunker.

The issue is certainly "intellectual Marmite "

I'm just not going to blindly drop everything---not take planes, become a Vegan, live the "green" life totally---because of some doomsday prognostications.

Just "dropping everything" reminds me of what cultists like the Moonies used to do. They used to give the cult leader all their worldly possessions, just out of faith that the cult leader was "God," or the "Second Coming of Jesus," or some such Supreme Being.

I do feel we should look strongly into "climate change," and its effect on the environment of the Earth in general. And seek solutions. And not to deny the possibility of "man made" or geologically-naturally-inspired climate change.

It's wrong to use "climate change" for political ends.

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?

World’s Leaders Turn On Greta Thunberg After She Sues France And Germany

President Macron and Angela Merkel, who had both previously endorsed Ms Thunberg’s Fridays for Future school strike movement, were stung into reacting to what one French minister termed her “despair . . . verging on hatred”.

Scott Morrison, 51, the prime minister of Australia and a fossil fuels enthusiast, also accused her of stirring up “needless anxiety” among his country’s children.

Ms Thunberg, 16, rose to global celebrity in the space of 12 months after a solitary protest outside parliament before last year’s general election in Sweden.

Last Friday she mobilised an estimated four million demonstrators in more than 100 countries to join protests after sailing across the Atlantic to address a UN climate summit in New York.

In an uncompromising speech she told the world’s politicians that they had “stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words”. She accused governments of betraying young people. “You are not mature enough to tell it like it is,” she said. “You are failing us.”

She joined 15 other child protesters in filing a formal complaint to the UN that nations including Brazil, Germany, Turkey and France had violated international children’s rights by failing to take sufficiently bold measures to reduce carbon emissions. This step appears to have provoked some governments that might otherwise have counted themselves among her allies.

Mr Macron, 41, who adopted Fridays for Future as the motto for the G7 summit he hosted in Biarritz last month and said that the movement had “fundamentally changed” him, abruptly turned on Ms Thunberg.

“All the movements among our youth, or the less young, are useful,” he told Europe 1, a French broadcaster. “But now they must concentrate on the people who are further away [from their position], those who are trying to block them. These radical positions will naturally antagonise our societies.”

Brune Poirson, the French ecology minister, questioned whether Ms Thunberg could succeed in “mobilising people with despair, with what is verging on hatred, setting people against one another”. […]

Yesterday Boris Palmer, 47, a prominent figure in the German Green party and the mayor of the university city of Tübingen, said he was worried that her movement was becoming “radicalised” and urged her followers to ignore her call to “panic” about the climate.

“If you’re panicking, you’re no longer in a position to deal with things thoughtfully, and therefore you don’t achieve your goals,” he told Die Welt.

Source: World’s Leaders Turn On Greta Thunberg After She Sues France And Germany

There seems like there is an old saying that seems to fit this situation. It is "Never Bit the Hand that Feeds You."

^ I notice that's from a right wing source that's always been very anti climate change advocates.

Not mentioned: the specialist crew that was flown over here in order to man the boat she insisted on taking because of her objection to flying. Principled stand or crass publicity stunt? You tell me.

I don't think anyone is forcing her. I think this is her interest, her passion and since her parents are actors, she might have learned to craft her speech and add emotion to it. I thought it was a monologue she was doing but no, it was her speech and when I looked her up, it explained her emotions in her speech.

I think she should move to Oregon, we are green here, she would love it here.