Any doubts about Climate Change?

**AntRobertson** · 26-09-2019, 07:13 AM

Originally Posted by Pragmatic

You get all your info from the IntraGoogles and Youtube vids don't you.

I suppose it would be quicker to ask what you don't believe...

**docmartin** · 26-09-2019, 08:05 AM

Obviously a communist Red Shirt

**AntRobertson** · 26-09-2019, 08:20 AM

Why old men are triggered by Greta Thunberg

25 Sep, 2019 6:28pm

By: Liam Dann

Environmental activist Greta Thunberg, of Sweden, addresses the Climate Action Summit in the United Nations General Assembly, at UN headquarters on September 23. Photo / AP

When I saw the clip of 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg speaking at the UN I bristled.

A critical voice in my head spoke up.

"Why is she so overly dramatic?" the voice said.

"I bet it's not going to be as bad as she said. I bet it takes longer for things to get really bad, things always do."

The voice in my head got louder.

"Why is she so dismissive of everything that works well in society?"

"She says we should stop thinking about money - doesn't she know that we're going to need money and capitalism to fix this crisis."

"Doesn't she see that technology is the only way through this?"

Now the voice was shouting.

"I don't see Venezuela doing much to solve climate change," the voice said.

"Young people are annoying," it said.

It was the voice of an angry old white man.

The angry old man lives inside me. He's reactionary and defensive.

He doesn't like change and I hear him getting louder as the years roll by.

He's technically right about a lot of things, but he's almost always on the wrong side of history.

I don't like him much.

Critical thinking is crucial to human success. We need to apply it rigorously.

But if we keep our focus narrow enough it can become a useful tool to avoid seeing a much bigger picture.

Keeping our focus narrow makes conservatism easier. It allows us to push back against change.

For some reason we get better and better at that as we age.

You'd think with so much less time left on the planet we'd be getting more care free.

We've done the hard yards, we're financially secure. The stakes should be getting lower.

Instead we focus on all we have invested in the world. We want to hold on to it.

Conservatism can be synonymous with wisdom. It can stop us making mistakes and sometimes it is good to share.

But it should be shared without anger.

And when the evidence is clearly in favour of the need for change - as it is with climate change - it can become a problem.

Thunberg's passion for change seems deeply triggering for many older men.

It has prompted an aggressive backlash on social media and from some conservative commentators.

That depth of feeling about Thunberg isn't surprising to me - but it is a little embarrassing.

I recognise the appeal of conservatism. It is like a warm blanket. It provides an almost religious comfort for those who enjoy the status quo.

Its arguments encourage us to relax, stop worrying, shed any burden of guilt.

I am middle-aged and privileged enough to be lazy about social change.

But on balance I'm glad that young people are getting politically fired up.

So if you are a male of certain age, if you feel angry and antagonised by what young people are doing and saying, maybe it's time to stop and take a moment to think about what it is that specifically upsets you.

Are you giving in to the old man inside your head?

When previous generations marched for civil rights or against apartheid, which side were you on?

It doesn't matter if you are 45, 65 or 85 - you have the power to remember what it meant to be young and see only the big picture. Doing that might help keep you young.

Thunberg's speech reminded me of the profound words of a 78-year-old man.

He wrote them when he was 22.

After all these years they are as relevant now as they ever were.
Admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth saving
And you better start swimming'
Or you'll sink like a stone,
For the times they are a changing

- Bob Dylan

**bsnub** · 26-09-2019, 09:01 AM

^

Spot on

Originally Posted by AntRobertson

I suppose it would be quicker to ask what you don't believe...

Exactly

**harrybarracuda** · 26-09-2019, 12:00 PM

**Luigi** · 26-09-2019, 01:02 PM

So an emotionally unstable 16 year old girl, that suffers from mental disorders has her emotional instability put on show in front of the world.

Great!

**kmart** · 26-09-2019, 01:11 PM

^Agreed. Has put her under a massive amount of political pressure and spotlight. Not fair on a 16 yo, imo.

**AntRobertson** · 26-09-2019, 01:11 PM

Originally Posted by Luigi

So an emotionally unstable 16 year old girl, that suffers from mental disorders has her emotional instability put on show in front of the world.

That's a triumph of propaganda and a concerted smear campaign.

Since when has it been a crime to be emotional about something she's very clearly passionate about. Distinct whiff of double-standards also.

**Luigi** · 26-09-2019, 01:21 PM

Originally Posted by Luigi

So an emotionally unstable 16 year old girl, that suffers from mental disorders has her emotional instability put on show in front of the world.

Great!

Originally Posted by AntRobertson

That's a triumph of propaganda and a concerted smear campaign.

**AntRobertson** · 26-09-2019, 01:22 PM

**Luigi** · 26-09-2019, 01:52 PM

I'll have to come into Speaker's Corner more often, this place is funny.

**bsnub** · 26-09-2019, 01:56 PM

Originally Posted by AntRobertson

That's a triumph of propaganda and a concerted smear campaign.

It is and there are no credible sources reporting that it is all from shit sources like infowars that these muppets have latched onto. The fact is that when I watched the video I saw a very grounded passionate young women who very clearly and concisely laid out fact after fact about climate change.

Then a bunch of idiotic right wing science denying nutjobs start spreading this utter bullshit and the lemming tinfoilers latch onto it. Pathetic.

**taxexile** · 26-09-2019, 02:27 PM

bsnub

I saw a very grounded passionate young women who very clearly and concisely laid out fact after fact about climate change.

are you permanently drunk?

you and robertson, its pinky and perky. donald and daffy. ant and dec. the loser and the boozer.

The disturbing spectacle of Greta the Great

david aaronovitch

september 25 2019, 5:00pm, the times

Despite my admiration for the teenage climate change campaigner, her message is unrealistically bleak and hopeless

Everybody who is anybody was in New York this week. Except Plácido Domingo. But the one whose speech got the most global airtime was a 16-year-old Swede who had arrived on a zero-carbon yacht.

Greta Thunberg is a phenomenon. In some ways she fulfils everything that adults say adolescents should be: serious, hard-working and honest. Horribly, horribly honest. The epitome of the unselfie generation. Which is not the same thing as being right. She is also not a hypocrite: the convenient category awaiting almost anyone who tells us we should all behave better. The arguments of hypocrites are easy to knock down but when somebody is inconsiderate enough to practise exactly what they preach, they’re almost impossible.

Thunberg was the teenager who encouraged pupils around the world to take the occasional day off school to protest about global warming. This tactic has attracted admiration and, from some on the right, an admonitory pomposity amounting to “never mind about the planet, what about Mr Jones’s RE class?”

Of course adolescents in full earnest mode can be funny. Long before Greta sailed into view the poet Wendy Cope wrote The Concerned Adolescent, a musing on climate disaster which includes this stanza:

“They pollute the world, they kill and eat the animals.
Everywhere there is blood and the stench of death.
Human beings make war and hate one another.
They do not understand their young, they reject their ideals,
They make them come home early from the disco.
They are doomed.”

But Greta Thunberg has attracted far more obloquy than a little bit of affectionate satire. The treatment that several commentators and politicians have been inclined to mete out is reminiscent of the way some Pakistani nationalist greybeards denounced Malala Yousafzai after she started her campaign for girls’ education.

This week, for example, Dinesh D’Souza, an American conservative commentator, tweeted a picture of Thunberg and a picture of a League of German Girls member with the commentary “Children — notably Nordic white girls with braids and red cheeks — were often used in Nazi propaganda.” It will come as news to fans of Little House on the Prairie that, by the same logic, the long-running series was actually a fascist classic.

Here in Britain, one journalist began his profile of Thunberg by referring to her “cold, hard eyes” and jabbing finger. Then he asked: “Is Greta a green prophet or a schoolgirl puppet controlled by more sinister forces behind her?”

This is what you call an each-way bet.

Whether Thunberg is a scary zealot or the witless patsy of dark actors, the punter still gets his money.

Some have settled for casting her parents as the bad guys. Especially “a fame-hungry mum who once appeared on Eurovision” and for whom Greta is presumably another daughter to be psychologically abused like JonBenét Ramsey. One US commentator wrote last month that her mother was equivalent to a parent “pimping her kid out, not to Penthouse, but to the cause of climate apocalypse . . . the whole thing smacks of child abuse”.

Almost in the same breath it is recounted how, in fact, it is Greta who pulls her parents’ strings. She “persuaded” them both to turn vegan, both to stop flying and both to only wear clothes made from nettles. Actually I made the nettles bit up but you get the point. In fact Greta has said that “I kept telling them that they were stealing our future and they cannot stand up for human rights while living that lifestyle, so then they decided to make those changes. My dad is vegan, my mum, she tries — she’s 90 per cent vegan. I made them feel so guilty.” I have helped to bring up three daughters and the word that resonates most here is “kept”.

Which presumably is why The Washington Times headlined a piece “Greta Thunberg, a parents’ nightmare.” Something else I learnt over those parenting years, from other mums and dads, is that having a suicidal child or a drug addict, or one with anorexia, is rather worse than one who makes you eat vegan food and then addresses the United Nations.

These attempts to dispose of Thunberg’s uncomfortable message by disposing of her are transparent. But there is another side to this. It’s one I felt when watching her speech on Monday or when an artist unveiled a 15-metre high mural of Greta in Bristol in the spring. Thunberg keeps calling herself a child when she’s not. She looks younger than her 16 years. And out of the non-child’s mouth comes not hope and happiness but hellfire and damnation. As the American writer Franklin Foer said this week, her speeches are like Obama’s speeches turned inside out: they contain no lyrical passages and they are couched in accusatory language. There’s no “yes we can!”, it’s all “just look what you did!” As a psychoanalyst friend said to me, it’s exactly how therapists are taught not to speak.

Some people, of course, get off on hellfire. But it can frighten or alienate more than it energises. So when we look at what Thunberg claims and compare it with what we know of the science of climate change, we have to conclude that she exaggerates. Even the latest bleak report from Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change about the impact of climate change on sea levels does not suggest anything like obliteration.

In a nutshell, the science says we are not heading for extinction but for nasty times with millions of avoidable deaths. As we may well be, incidentally, from the loss of effectiveness of our antibiotics.

We should do all we can to avoid this situation. But there is a price and people are often unwilling to pay it, and that unwillingness can influence what they believe about the future. Action like that taken by Thunberg can and does help to change attitudes but to lump all governments and politicians together as being useless and uncaring is wrong. You can see why President Macron of France, who got it in the neck from the gilets jaunes partly because of his plan to increase fuel duties, is beginning to feel a little sore about being told “how dare you!”

And yes, I worry about her too. Greta, who has Asperger’s syndrome, looks as though she is emotionally raw now. Yet species extinction aside, she has a bright future if she can pace herself properly.

Is she dangerous? Too powerful? A figurehead for a cult? In New York at one point this week she was photographed looking on as Donald Trump walked past. I know who scares me most.

@DAaronovitch

**taxexile** · 26-09-2019, 03:06 PM

well, it looks like we may have at last have reached peak greta.
her teenage tantrums, self obsessed rantings and anger fuelled death stare can be seen for what they are........nothing more than the delusions of the unbalanced.

World’s leaders turn on Greta Thunberg after legal move over carbon emissions

Oliver Moody, Berlin
September 26 2019, 12:01am,
The Times

Greta Thunberg spoke angrily at the United Nations. She said older generations had stolen her childhood
CARLO ALLEGRI/REUTERS

National leaders have rebuked Greta Thunberg after the climate campaigner criticised their inaction and started a legal challenge against France and Germany’s environmental policies.

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”.

Mrs Merkel, 65, whose government set out its own climate plans last week and who met Ms Thunberg on Monday, distanced herself more subtly from the teenager’s “bracing” speech.

“I would like to take the opportunity to strongly contradict her in one matter,” the German chancellor said. “She did not adequately address the way technology and innovation, especially in the energy sector but also in energy conservation, raise possibilities for reaching our goals.”

It is not the first time that Ms Thunberg has chastised politicians who share some of her objectives. In the summer she upbraided Europe’s green parties for insufficient zeal.

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 thound therefore you don’t achieve your goals,” he told Die Welt.

**AntRobertson** · 26-09-2019, 03:08 PM

Originally Posted by taxexile

her teenage tantrums, self obsessed rantings and anger fuelled death stare can be seen for what they are........nothing more than the delusions of the unbalanced.

Triggered old men...

Move along dinosaurs, your time is up!

**AntRobertson** · 26-09-2019, 03:47 PM

Just how emasculated and insecure do grown men need to be in order to feel compelled to anonymously slander, abuse, and post lies and vitriol about a child on a forum anyways.

...taxi??

**taxexile** · 26-09-2019, 03:55 PM

how can you support gretas crusade and disparage those who disagree with her whilst at the same time owning, restoring and gleefully using gas guzzling poison belching muscle cars and 30 year old diesel pick trucks and use air con for most if not all of the day. you constantly consume energy, you constantly purchase and consume factory produced goods and throwaway tech crap, you are a shit spewing polluter in every sense of the word.

why are you even on this thread if not to provoke and start pointless arguments. you should be relegated to the doghouse.
you are madder than mad greta madberg.

cue yet another deflection, irrelevant cut and paste, lazy smiley and the usual old man meme.

**AntRobertson** · 26-09-2019, 04:03 PM

Originally Posted by taxexile

how can you support gretas crusade and disparage those who disagree with her whilst at the same time owning, restoring and gleefully using gas guzzling poison belching muscle cars and 30 year old diesel pick trucks and use air con for most if not all of the day. you constantly consume energy, you constantly purchase and consume factory produced goods and throwaway tech crap, you are a shit spewing polluter in every sense of the word.

Ad hominen and lies are one of your default settings aren't they...

Originally Posted by taxexile

why are you even on this thread if not to provoke and start pointless arguments

...hypocrisy being another.

**baldrick** · 26-09-2019, 05:25 PM

the simpsons predicts the future ..... again

**bsnub** · 26-09-2019, 05:47 PM

Originally Posted by baldrick

the simpsons predicts the future ..... again

WOW! That is pretty cool.

**bsnub** · 26-09-2019, 06:19 PM

Now we have another science denier lurking in here. Hello Koman we can see you.

**docmartin** · 26-09-2019, 06:32 PM

Originally Posted by Dragonfly

..... nobody but her cares seriously .....

Yeah right .....

If she's just a silly girl then why do grown men get so wound up ?

Maybe she frightens them.

For some reason.

**Dragonfly** · 26-09-2019, 07:47 PM

nobody denies we should try to respect the environment, but the fooking loons doing the promotion of this are just fooking annoying and have no fooking solution whatsoever, so just fook them

**docmartin** · 26-09-2019, 07:54 PM

It’s not rocket science.

Get rid of the thieving scum at the top and the bludging scum at the bottom.
Everybody contributing to society.
Fewer people using less energy.
Manage the environment properly, including the rogue feral species that’s causing all the mischief now.

**harrybarracuda** · 26-09-2019, 09:03 PM

Originally Posted by taxexile

Dinesh D’Souza

You really show what a fucking tit you are when you're quoting that knobhead.

Thread: Any doubts about Climate Change?

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