What Listening to Children Begets

I am still astonished that so many can be taken in by a 16 year old of no special accomplishment who is apparently and unfortunately in fear of her life because of the constant drum beat of climate alarmists.  She also apparently has not read of (does know of?) countervailing evidence that in fact the climate is controlled not by the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but by the sun.  And so she is angry.  That much is clear.

Deana Chadwell has an article today at the  American Thinker entitled Greta The Angry in which she compares and contrast Greta Thunberg and Joan of Arc. But the comparison is anything but flattering. We may wonder that a teenager was called by God to lead French forces against England  during the Hundred Years War. But it is also clear from history that she did not behave as Greta the Angry has behaved.

Chadwell:

Those who are befuddled and beleaguered by climate nonsense look to Greta Thunberg as if she were another Joan of Arc. Those of us who live in reality see her as being hopelessly mired in the arrogance of untruth. Yes, Greta’s childhood has been stolen from her, but it isn’t America that’s done that – it’s her parents who have allowed her to be prostituted in this manner. It is the leftist politicians and their ilk who are milking her youth and gullibility and her hunger for acceptance who have stuck her up on a tilting pedestal. I’m as uncomfortable watching her as I am seeing a parent mistreat a child in public. Humiliation is coming at her like a locomotive and no one is yanking her off the tracks.

Let’s explore this comparison with the French teenager who was martyred in her attempt to free France from English control. She was a devout, if untutored and illiterate, Christian. She was, from the age of 13 until her death at 19, sure she saw visions of saints who told her what she must do. She was amazingly successful. Her followers, who included King Charles VII, believed in her -– a young girl in the 15th century! –- and allowed her to command their troops in battle.

One of the first non-fiction books I read as a child was entitled Candle in the Sky and was a biography of Joan of Arc. I read it over and over, completely astounded. Something very unusual was going on with her, and after 50 years of intense Bible study and further reading about the Maid of Orleans, I am still mystified. She believed so strongly in the divinity of her mission that she let them burn her at the stake and yet, I am unsure what concern God had in France maintaining its sovereignty, but God is the only way to even begin to grasp what happened there. He does, after all, control history.

Now look at Greta. If God had anything to do with what she’s up to, she’d understand that He has everything planned and that, in spite of human free will, the world will continue as long as He wants it to. She would know that saving the world is not a job for mere humans and that we can’t possibly be important or powerful enough to alter the carefully tuned workings of this astounding machine we call Earth.

An old English proverb states that "Children should be seen and not heard."  That is because a child, with so little experience of life under his or her belt, does not know as much as an older person.  Such is to be expected, and it is not to put youth down, but rather to keep them from embarrassing themselves later.  Those who repeat it to their children are doing so out of love.

Greta The Angry is angry that we have not taken action, that we have not "done something."  Like gun control, where the solutions always seem to be the same, so too with climate issues, where whether the Earth is getting warmer and will burn up, or whether the Earth is getting cooler and we will all freeze to death, the answer seems to be the same.  Give up living comfortably and get back to back breaking striving for a small morsel to keep body and soul together, while those scolding us to do so live like kings. But if she had just a little more of life under her belt, she would realize that the Left is constantly trying to stampede us into jumping off the cliff.  So many of their alarms have been proven untrue, but we are supposed to believe them now.

Chadwell again:

But, alas, she knows very little and what she thinks she knows makes her very angry. She shouts, “How dare you!” at her audience as if merely staying alive in this world is something we’ve all done to offend her. She shouts about “mass extinction” as if a half a degree warming over a century will have us all choking to death in the streets. She moans about losing her childhood and missing school. Joan once said that she would rather be “spinning wool at her mother’s side” than commanding armies, but she screamed no accusations at the French people. She merely cited her divine mission and went off to war. Even when she was burning to death she said only two words, “Blessed Jesus.”

Note, the emphasis is mine.

Here, then is the arrogance of which Ms. Chadwell speaks in her opening paragraph.  The arrogance of untruth.  Nobody has done anything to Greta the Angry.  But she believes, unlike the manufactured outrage we so often see, she really believes that she will be dead in 12 years, and that by not doing something, whatever that something is supposed to be, we are killing her.  As has been noted by a number of writers, this sort of thing is gross child abuse.  No such thing is going to happen.  Will Greta the Angry be embarrassed?

Greta will not meet such a fate, but one that is perhaps worse. She will either live long enough to find out what a fool she was and how people used and abused her, or she will never connect with reality and will live out her days as frightened as she is now. There’s no happy place on her horizon.

Incidentally, for more on another Leftist alarm, this time raising Malthus from the dead again, please see Laura Hollis at Townhall.com in an article entitled Scaremongering Isn't Science. There you will find this little tidbit:

A little more than two years ago, I wrote a column titled "What Margarine Can Teach Us About Climate Change." Inspired by a book excerpt in National Geographic, that column summarized just one example (the U.S. government's promotion of margarine and synthetic oils over actual dairy products to reduce heart disease) of how politicizing science can have devastating results.

As the "climate crisis" wunderkind have been "striking" all over the world, led by grumpy guru Greta Thunberg, I couldn't help but think of that column and the many other "crises" we've been warned about over the years that never panned out.

Take Paul Ehrlich, for example. Ehrlich wrote "The Population Bomb." Published in 1969, it made shocking and foreboding pronouncements like, "The battle to feed all of humanity is over," and "(H)undreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." While researching Ehrlich, I came across a 2018 article in Smithsonian Magazine that was sharply critical of Ehrlich and his book, which Smithsonian describes as having "fueled an anti-population-growth crusade that led to human rights abuses around the world."

And while your at it, look up Hollis's article What Margarine Can Teach Us About Climate Change. There, I've done if for you.

As it turned out, not enough was known about different kinds of fats and cholesterol. That didn't stop the USDA, FDA, National Institutes of Health and WHO from promoting diets low in saturated fats — which turned out to play little to no role in heart disease.

Consumer advocacy groups like the Center for Science in the Public Interest and the National Heart Savers Association went even further, accusing American companies that used saturated fats in their products of "poisoning America," and warning Americans to avoid all saturated fats.

Later research showed that trans fats — like those used in margarine — were actually much more damaging to health than butter and other animal fats, or tropical oils like coconut oil and palm oil. But it took decades for public policy to change. In the meantime, how many heart attacks — and related deaths — could be traced to trans fats?

Oops.

The point of this whole post then is that when certain ill behaved children speak out, even at the U. N., adults should not pay attention: and rhat we adults should be a little more humble and circumspect about making policy decisions that may cause more harm than good, and will surely cost us all dearly. The Left (read children in adult bodies) has been wrong all along, and there is no reason to believe they are finally right this time. This is what listening to children begets.