Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old girl selected by the media to be the poster child of climate alarmism, gave another hysterical speech on Monday. This time, at the U.N., she declared that the Earth is undergoing a “mass extinction” which, she warns, probably cannot be averted.
“How dare you,” the distraught teen cried. “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood.” On one level, I can relate to this sentiment because it’s exactly what I said after watching the “Lion King” remake. On another level, as a parent, I find this girl very hard to watch. It is obvious that she really believes her delusional doomsday fantasies. That is because they are not her fantasies — she is merely repeating what she has been told by adults who know better.
Thunberg, as the media likes to remind us, is autistic and OCD. This section of a Daily Beast profile gives us a brief outline of her psychological issues:
But thanks to the formal diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome coupled with high-functioning autism and obsessive compulsive disorder, the now-16-year-old Swede has become quite literally the poster child for the generation that will have to deal with the destruction of our planet. Once she started receiving multifaceted treatment, Thunberg was able to channel her anxiety into something we should all be concerned about: The health of the planet and the science behind apocalyptic warnings of its demise.
In October 2018, Thunberg started having anxiety-ridden 3 a.m. nightmares, but unlike before, they were not about her. The recurring nightmares were about the impact of global warming on the planet, according to the book, Scenes From the Heart, she wrote with her parents and sister Beata, who also suffers from many of the same emotional conditions.
This time, instead of holing up in her bedroom as she did before treatment, she decided that her anxiety about the climate needed to become everyone else’s, too. One of the aspects of her complicated diagnosis is obsession. Her family says she just wouldn’t let the idea go that the planet was burning up and there was ample science to prove it.
The Daily Beast recounts all of this like we shouldn’t be concerned. But what we’re being told is that an obsessive, mentally troubled young girl came to believe — mistakenly — that the apocalypse is upon us. Rather than calm these terrible fears, and redirect her in a healthier direction, the adults in her life have only encouraged her paranoia. And now the media is only too happy to exploit her fear in order to stoke even more fear. Creating fear with fear. That is the media’s specialty.
This is child abuse. If any grown up in Thunberg’s life really cared about her psychological and emotional well-being, they would sit her down and explain that climate change is not going to destroy human civilization. Yes, the climate is changing. Climates tend to do that. But whatever role humans play in that process, and to whatever degree, it is not going to result in the end of all life as we know it. Talk of a 10-year, or 12-year, or 20-year, timeline before planetary catastrophe is all an invention of politicians and media personalities. Scientists don’t speak this way.
When I was a child, they told us of an imminent future without rainforests. Well, I am now living in that imminent future and the rainforests are doing okay. Sure, there was a problem with deforestation. We were cutting down more trees than we should have. But the dystopian vision of a world without trees was — and I couldn’t have known this at the time, because I was just a kid — completely insane. It is possible to say “trees are good and we shouldn’t wantonly destroy them” without adding “and soon all the trees will be gone and you will suffocate.” But the environmental alarmists always choose to tack on the apocalyptic bit at the end, undermining the validity of their message and creating unnecessary panic.
Once again, we must call this what it is: Child abuse. It may be a smart political move to traumatize children with these End Times prophecies, but it is morally abominable. Yes, tell kids to recycle, pick up trash, plant trees — all fine and worthwhile pursuits. But the hysteria is entirely unjustified. Let kids be kids. They shouldn’t have to wake up every morning with hallucinatory fears about the planet’s demise.