If you haven’t heard of Sweden’s Greta Thunberg by now, you surely haven’t been paying attention. The 16-year-old “climate activist” has received an enormous flood of media attention over the past year.
Already a phenomenon in her home country and other parts of Europe, Ms. Thunberg arrived in New York after a publicity-seeking two-week journey across the Atlantic on a solar-powered yacht. She refuses to travel by air because, she is convinced, planes spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The yacht did carry fuel in case a need arose to get away from dangerous weather.
Unlike other teens selected as spokespersons for some cause, Ms. Thunberg has occasionally seemed unenamored with microphones and podia. She has, in the past, summed up her message with a terse, “I don’t want you to listen to me. I want you to listen to the scientists.” That’s a piece of sound advice but it appears that the young Swede doesn’t know who are competent scientists and who are spreading unreliable claims of impending catastrophe.
After debarking from the yacht that brought her to America, she made a number of public appearances in the city and in Washington. Stops included an Amnesty International Awards ceremony, the United Nations, “The Daily Show” with host Trevor Noah, and CBS’s Good Morning America. Off to Washington, she met with House members, visited with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and told a Senate task force that she and her youthful collaborators didn’t want any praise while adding, “Don’t invite us here to tell us how inspiring we are without doing anything about it.”
While with members of Congress, Ms. Thunberg submitted the report issued last year by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). She obviously doesn’t know that this report, claiming that human-produced carbon dioxide is warming the planet, has been shown to be based on unreliable computer models. IPCC’s report is the work of a grand total of 53 IPCC writers, not all of them scientists. On the other hand, there are 31,000 American scientists — 9,000 of whom have earned PhDs — who do not agree with the Anthropogenic Global Warming (humans are to blame) theory. Ms. Thunberg should follow her own advice and “listen to the scientists.”
At the recent annual opening session of the UN General Assembly, Ms. Thunberg once again showed herself to be a determined advocate of the unproven claims of climate doomsayers. Speaking for the world’s youngsters, she chastised the planet’s leaders for having “stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.” Nevertheless she boasted that millions of the world’s young people “have done our homework” about the climate crisis. Aiming an angry summation at current world leaders, she told the UN gathering, “How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood.”
Here’s what the young Swede needs to know. “Climate change” is happening all the time. But, as many scientists are saying, it isn’t caused by human activity. Fluctuations in temperature and other weather events regularly come and go, rise and fall, and produce both benefits and harm. Ms. Thunberg needs to factor this bit of information into her presentations.
The sad truth here in America is that we now have several members of Congress and some leading candidates for president swallowing the claim that “humans are the cause of climate change.” The “Green New Deal” advocates have gone so far as to call for terminating all air travel because airplanes put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But carbon dioxide amounts to only 400 parts per million — .04 percent — of our atmosphere.
Ms. Thunberg and millions of others captivated by unreliable environmental claims need a wake-up call. On July 25th at the 13th International Conference on Climate Change held in our nation’s capital, Dr. Roy Spencer, a highly credentialed University of Alabama (Huntsville) meteorologist, delivered one:
There is no climate crisis. Even if all the warming we’ve seen in any observational dataset is due to increasing carbon dioxide, which I don’t believe it is, it’s probably too small for any person to feel in their lifetime.
And Dr. Hal Lewis, a 57-year member of the American Physical Society (APS), has offered an explanation of what is happening. He stated:
I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer my resignation from the American Physical Society. It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried the APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen I my long life as a physicist.
Greta Thunberg should be told to book an airplane flight to get back to Sweden. Skip another two-week trip on that yacht. And be assured that the plane ride won’t be worsening the non-problem that has captured her attention.
John F. McManus is president emeritus of The John Birch Society.
