How dare you mock and attack 16 year old climate change activist Greta Thunberg?
How dare you make light of her excoriation of world leaders when one day our children, or children’s children, could turn victim?
How dare you force upon her words she hasn’t spoken? She never spoke a word against science or research; only against our collective inability to act on scientific evidence and advice.
How dare you speak without understanding her personal example and the baby steps she walked at home? Take a look at this teenager’s short journey here and ponder about what each one of us has done in the same timeframe.
How dare you insinuate that she’s in this for a Nobel Prize? Could your evil mind think up such tricks when you were 16? She is a teenage climate soldier. Do soldiers fight because there are gallantry awards up for grabs?
How dare you rail against others of her ilk who fought evil & violence with nothing but a small voice that echoed around the world?
How dare you feed off the global movement she sparked and get your 15 minutes of fame by trolling her like this?
The moment when a petulant child was put in her place by a real Leader. Her doomsday cult should be dismissed instead of indulged and the cretins that follow her should grow up. https://t.co/iHoWWLKN4C
— David Vance (@DVATW) September 24, 2019
How dare you compare her with centenarian Indian environmentalist Padma Shri Saalumarada Thimmakka and make her out to be some kind of juvenile delinquent? Has Greta ever spoken a word against Thimmakka or other activists following their own noble path to bring change? Does Thimmakka’s greatness make Greta a lesser force? Is this a zero sum game?
How dare you turn her efforts into an ‘us versus them’ debate? If some countries are more damaging for climate change, does that make the others any less responsible for the future of this planet?
How dare you drag-in a video of her message to Prime Minister Modi and attack her with subsidized LPG cylinders, biogas and single-use plastics? Has she done anything to actively oppose his policies? Why can’t we see this as collaboration instead of competition? Can a nuanced subject like climate change be reduced to such binaries?
https://twitter.com/seriousfunnyguy/status/1176776959906308097
How dare you tell her to listen to her parents, tie her ponytail and go to school like other kids her age? Is condescension your answer for the future of this planet?
How dare you call her ‘another Malala’ without having sat outside your country’s parliament in silent protest or taken bullets in your head? What makes you so callous and insensitive?
How dare you compare her with scientists who have given their entire life to climate change when all she ever said was listen to them and ACT? Is your mind so filled with mistrust that you see everything as a conspiracy? Do all of us have to be scientists to fight climate change?
Greta Thunberg’s life stands changed forever. For better or worse only time will tell. Just because she took a resolute stand while all you did was stare at a screen, type out hate and feed the roaches in your bathroom.
How dare you make jokes about her Asperger’s syndrome without knowing what that even means? Even with Asperger’s, she is still a force to reckon with while you are just another troll. With all faculties intact, all you could do was bring hate and hubris into the discourse while she spoke the truth to power?
Shame on you, haters.
Go get a life. Think how foolish & naive you were at 16. Maybe you still are; because even after all the years, there’s still no light upstairs. With all that experience, what did your disgusting whataboutery achieve other than discouraging potential Gretas in your homes from taking up the good fight?
If she makes you cringe, it’s probably because you have no real answers to her challenge. The forces of evil don’t care for the flood waters; they are safely ensconced in ivory and Trump towers. The real victims are either too young or too disenfranchised to ever be given a fair hearing. It is that community her voice speaks for.
Encourage her. Protect her. Nurture her. If every house had one Greta, planet Earth won’t drown in its own waste few decades from now. If nothing else, she has galvanized the attention of policy makers and common citizens (including nitwits like Justin Murphy above) to the grave peril we face. All this in under 16 years. What have you done that qualifies you to be her critic? Want to discuss that?
How dare you attack her?
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©KP Sanjeev Kumar, 2019. All rights reserved. I can be reached at kaypius@kaypius.com or on my Twitter handle @realkaypius. Views are personal. Cover photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA).
Is climate change a scientific fact? Do scientific observations and data support global warming and rising sea levels?
Pertinent questions with no readily available answers.
Are we just getting engulfed in an ocean tide of misinformation?
Brilliantly written KP.
Please don’t get me wrong. I donot endorse any of the haters and trolls. It is downright abominable what these a….holes do. Saw her video and must admit was impressed with her conviction and sense of purpose. Respect.
Do read State of Fear, a book by Michael Crichton, especially the scientific references at the end. Might give us all a new perspective.
Rock on Bhai
Climate change is real. It’s a scientific fact. It’s not some new-age narrative or conspiratorial conjecture. You can find it everywhere from high school textbooks to NASA’s official website. What you believe is up to you, but keep in mind that people’s beliefs on climate change can have powerful effects on the world, so you have epistemic responsibility to believe only that for which you have good evidence for, and dismiss those who would sooner drive us all extinct than take action.
Again, Anthropogenic climate change is really far beyond the point where one can reasonably deny it. Average surface temperature has risen by about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit and average ocean temperature has risen by 0.4 degrees in the last century alone. While this might not seem like much, keep in mind that when you have a fever, even a one degree rise in temperature can make you very uncomfortable. A fever of 105 is relatively harmless. A fever of 108 will kill you.
Glaciers and sea ice, have lost approximately 286 billion tons of mass, causing a global sea level rise of 8 inches, in turn causing small oceanic islands like Tuvalu to come close to being swallowed by the sea, never to be seen again.
If you doubt all this, please search the internet or take a look at my sources below. Taking a neutral position on climate change is almost as harmful to the world at large as denying it altogether. We are far too late to stop climate change, so let’s just try to make sure we don’t exacerbate an already massive threat to humanity, shall we?
Sources
-https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/
https://www.edf.org/climate/how-climate-change-plunders-planet/climate-facts-
-https://www.ucsusa.org/our-work/global-warming/science-and-impacts/global-warming-science-
-https://uk.reuters.com/article/environment-tuvalu-dc/tuvalu-about-to-disappear-into-the-ocean-idUKSEO11194920070913-
-https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/sotc/glacier_balance.html-
-https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming-
If you’re following any of those links, do remove the dashes first. This site thought the post was spam(I guess even the website denies climate change) so J had to edit the links a bit.
Hi Sir, i am actually surprised that of all the people, you (being an ex armed forces man) have been found so naive to fall for this melodramatic smokescreen/propaganda. For your persusal, i am forwarding you an article written by another young girl, who is also in her teens but speaks & writes way past her age. She is on twitter as well. Read this alternative piece for the sake of not getting carried away by the noise of Malala 2.0
https://medium.com/@ojasvy.tikoo/why-children-should-not-be-turned-into-activists-an-open-letter-from-one-teenager-to-another-9c8528c50d3b
It’s rather evident that you haven’t understood the essence of my article. The story you sent me is an alternative and there is room for more than one type of activism. But by trolling and calling her Malala 2.0 what contribution have me made to the cause of climate change?
Please read my story again with an open mind. Be more accommodative of teenagers, many of whom, like you pointed out may think and write far above their age. Also read up about Asperger’s.
Thanks for sharing your views. I welcome all critique as long they are not abusive or below the belt.