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Greta Thunberg - brave campaigner or deeply disturbed?

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The denier freakout over Greta is so funny! :D

The lowest way to attempt to discredit someone is to claim she's being "controlled" (GASP) :eek:, like she doesn't have aspirations of her own. Again the babyfaced appearance might have a lot to do with it but it's just amusing as hell. Or it would be if the issue wasn't so serious.
 
Approximately 25 years condensed into a few sentences...

This very site is responsible to some extent for my not being a denier any more. Give yourself a big pat on the back.

Al Gore's and others' "the science is settled"-style statements all those years ago led me to shout "Eh? Science is never settled." As I have no disbelief in evolution, the Big Bang theory of cosmological 'evolution', relativity, quantum stuff etc, I was unable to explain to myself why i had this problem with global warming. I'd read a few anti-AGW books by authors who i now realise are thought to be, at best, controversialists: Christophers Booker and Plimer for example. I'd also read Bjørn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist. Edit: I did think some of the reactions to those who did doubt were somewhat extreme. Eg, the reactions to Lomborg's book.

I rationalised all this to myself by accepting any science on, say, sea level changes in Bognor Regis, temperature changes in local areas, etc. At the same time, the IPCC were, in their assessment reports for policymakers not 'doing science' but being political.

I came across International Skeptics about four or five years ago, when The One With the Whales was the current JFK thread. (Someone on https://www.apollohoax.net/ had referenced his site.) Having read a lot - far too many - of the threads in the conspiracy section, I realised that I was doing the very same thing with climate change as woo-followers do with their particular alternative histories. I was taking heed of any anomaly and ignoring the vast bulk of evidence.

Sacrilegious, but Richard Feynman is a smidgeon to blame. His quote: "It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong." can easily be misunderstood to mean if anyone finds any error, chuck it all out.

I would say that off-hand dismissal doesn't work when trying to persuade. It's ineffective with Truthers and the like and probably will fail with non-mainstream people of all sorts.

I appreciate that there's a stand-alone thread for this sort of stuff, but I hope the mods will leave this post here.

Edit: The amusing final straw was the meme that climate change was invented so that 'they'- yup, them again - could tax us. In my limited experience, governments of all hues don't need much of an excuse to raise taxes. A massive CT seems unnecessary.
 
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I seen the writing on the wall with mandatory recycling in most of the US. Impractical at many levels and it showed the short sighted solutions many embraced.

Saving the resources, reusing them required a plan and a consumer for the products. Thirty years later it has happened in Mexico at least, plastics are in high demand here.


The flap about in 2030 some major cities worldwide will be all electric cars is ambitious, but in 2019 I cannot see any plans kicking in to get those vehicles on the roads. It wouldn't be hard to retrofit current models.

So much we could do but we aren't. It would break the routine of life.
 
Checkmite said:
Greta Thunberg has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Although to be fair this doesn't mean too much; while not just anybody can nominate a candidate, the class of qualified nominators isn't so exclusive that a nomination in and of itself is necessarily some kind of accolade.
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The Peace Prize is a joke. Kissinger was awarded a peace prize and he ought to have been jailed as a war criminal for his actions during the Vietnam War. There are other examples, but that one alone seems enough to discredit the whole venture.

I mean no smear against Thunberg mentioning such things in regards to her nomination.
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
The Peace Prize is a joke. Kissinger was awarded a peace prize and he ought to have been jailed as a war criminal for his actions during the Vietnam War. There are other examples, but that one alone seems enough to discredit the whole venture.
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Between Kissenger and terrorist leader Yasser Arafat, yeah the Nobel Peace Prize has pretty much become a joke.
 
A fine speech but the UN is probably not the right target.

If I were the UN, here would be my reply.

"We exist as a body because the 30 years leading up to our formation we just straight murdered 10s of millions. like five percent of the people were killed. Global warming is a problem because we succeed in solving the first problem. You're welcome."


Not endorsing that the UN fixed anything, but they probably think they did.
 
There should be a major public prize specifically for achievement in environmental politics, economics, engineering, or science.

It doesn't matter whether or not Thunberg ever wins one. It would just be nice to see candidates recognized and considered.
 
Myriad said:
There should be a major public prize specifically for achievement in environmental politics,
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Specifically for environmental politics? We already have one for political achievement in general - the Nobel Peace Prize. As you'd expect of a prestigious award for political achievement, it's a clown car of virtue signaling and naive aspiration.

economics, engineering, or science.
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We already have major public prizes for these. They're even still pretty reputable.

It doesn't matter whether or not Thunberg ever wins one. It would just be nice to see candidates recognized and considered.
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I don't think it does Thunberg any favors to try to associate her with the NPP. I doubt it would do serious climate change activists any favors to be associated with a similar environment-specific prize. Except as a merit badge in the eyes of people who are already on board with their message and convinced of their virtue. Like Obama's Peace Prize. Some people who already thought Obama was the bee's knees though the NPP was a nice bit of recognition for his "achievements". But for a lot of people, including a lot of Obama supporters, it just diminished the prestige of the NPP itself, to be awarded so frivolously.
 
theprestige said:
I doubt it would do serious climate change activists any favors to be associated with a similar environment-specific prize. Except as a merit badge in the eyes of people who are already on board with their message and convinced of their virtue.
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I'm having some trouble sorting through your meaning here. Are you suggesting that there cannot possibly be any actual virtue in environmental activism?

I mean, if you substitute a different field of endeavor...

"I doubt it would do serious particle physicists any favors to be associated with a similar physics-specific prize. Except as a merit badge in the eyes of people who are already on board with particle physics and convinced of its value."
 
 
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