This is the entire 5:19 minute emotionally overwrought
and deeply flawed head bashing Greta hands out to a
bunch of grown men who have high school diplomas:
This is my responses, retorts, and assorted snarky remarks
to this child with more dollars than sense.
Greta:
"This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you 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!"
Me:
She has a point. She probably should be charged with truancy, but for some reason this 16 year old and her Climate Change Cult know everything already. They have oftentimes declared the science finished, which only exposes how ignorant of the nature, scope, and limitations of science they truly are. No one came to Greta for hope. She came before the UN to preach the Faith of Her Cult. What Greta doesn’t seem to grasp is that “Science is the pursuit of truth.” So long as you are rigorously and systematically pursuing truth with intellectual integrity you are doing science. The moment you believe that you have discovered the truth you sought, science ends and in that moment your belief in that truth becomes your Faith. So, when Greta claims the science is done, she is correct. She is a fanatic of Faith in the Climate Change Cult, nothing more.
When it comes to economic growth, Greta, the human race has a history of economic growth which stretches back millennia. A few setbacks here and there, but the long term trend has always been growth. The only fairy tale here is that you know what you're talking about. Your tempestuous behavior lends nothing to your cause. You appear as you are, an emotionally overwrought teenage girl who is a bit too passionate about several topics which she does not understand. Fully invested in your misplaced Faith, you substitute raw emotional outrage for comprehension.
Greta again:
"For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you're doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight. "You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And that I refuse to believe.
Me back at her:
The data goes back millions of years. Greta. Thirty years is a statistically insignificant sample to judge anything here on planet earth. You are basing your Faith on 0.000000006% of Earth’s life so far. That is like us judging what you will be doing 30 years from now based on the last 3 seconds of your life. Does that sound reasonable, Greta? Does that sound like solid scientific grounds to dump hundreds of trillions of dollars and countless lives of those yet to be born, Greta? If it does, then you are the reckless child that you appear to be. Yes, we hear you because you have a global venue, but your climate change cult has no lack of publicity while your cult is well financed by the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. Where its lacking isn't big political and Wall Street clout, it is in demonstrable science. Give us a call at the bar when the first city is submerged.
Greta never shuts up:
"The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees [Celsius], and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control. "Fifty percent may be acceptable to you. But those numbers do not include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of equity and climate justice. They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist."
Neither do I:
The “popular idea” you speak of is one of those well advertised and constantly repeated mantras of your cult which has no basis in fact. During the Carboniferous Period atmospheric CO2 was 12 times higher than it is today coming in at around 3%. The only chains here are the ones imprisoning you in your ignorance and the ones of those you lure into your dungeon of blind Faith. What hidden warming? What tipping points? What feedback loops? These are bogey men we've heard from your cult for fifty years, Greta. None of them have proven true. Two decades before you were born, Greta, we were told we had 15 years to save the planet. Coastal cities would be submerged beneath oceans rising 15 to 30 meters as the ice caps melted unless we cut CO2 by 50% by the year 2000. Well, my dear Greta, CO2 output has nearly doubled since then and an actual increase in sea level 0.6 cm, and even that is debatable. So, these climate scientists send you an emotional little girl because their science is worthy of ridicule and scorn. If she's not old enough to drink she lacks the perspective to be taken seriously on a many times discredited and financially corrupted science.
I’m gonna’ head over to the World Bar and try to inebriate this petulant child out of my mind. Anyone care to join me? Make sure you bring your snorkel, Greta. You can swim on over. Oh, that's right you aren't allowed in the bars yet.
