John Chuckman
EXPANSION OF COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY JONATHAN COOK IN CONSORTIUM NEWS
“Greta Thunberg & the Consolation of Doubt
“Jonathan Cook catalogs the three types of criticism that a section of the progressive left is aiming at a Swedish child who is finally saying what they have been thinking”
"... a Swedish child who is finally saying what they have been thinking."
I'm not so sure about that.
The vehemence - and that's the right word, vehemence - of her words does sound more like a child heavily indoctrinated by some adults, perhaps parents. The child of some intense cult members.
While normally I would be charmed by a young person trying to explain something to adults, I confess that I find Greta downright unpleasant. Unbounded earnestness and about something she cannot possibly understand because science does not yet understand it.
I am happy to see any child take an interest in serious matters, even if they haven’t got it exactly right, but her tone and extreme choice of words makes this religious-cult speech, not just trying to explain something she believes she has come to understand.
I resent being harshly preached at that way. She’s a Jehovah’s Witness on steroids at your front door.
Her ill-chosen words and facial expressions remind me of no one so much as Donald Trump. Yes, there are lots of people, millions of Americans, who admire Donald Trump and treat his name-calling, rude speech, and threats, accompanied by contemptuous and sneering faces, reverently, but I’m not one of them.
And the fact is that she doesn't understand what she is talking about any more than Trump does, likely the most uninformed and unbalanced president in American history.
Yes, there is climate change, but we don't yet know why, and we certainly do not know whether we’d be able to alter it even if human activity proves to be driving it. We might just have to adapt, which is what the animals and people who survived the Ice Age did, adapt.
Imagine trying to have a plan to stop ice sheets advancing that were two or more kilometers thick? And interestingly, the Ice Age ended by giving us some very nice things. The Great Lakes were created by the gouging and melting of retreating ice sheets. There will be benefits, too, from global warming, or global cooling, as some now say is going to be the case, a fact which provides a pretty strong measure of our uncertainty.
I’m not a big fan of the kind of massive projects in which the good old USSR used to engage, changing the course of large river systems and the like. The Aral Sea in Russia, for example, has virtually disappeared because of Soviet tinkering with the waters feeding it from the mountains. They were diverted to cultivate vast new croplands.
Green Extremists sound very much like enthusiastic Soviet planners in, say, 1953. Quite bizarre global experiments are sometimes proposed as though they were discussing a science fiction film rather than our home.
We even have kooks suggesting we’ll all eventually have to go to Mars. Oh, yes, Mars has real potential with temperatures colder than the North Pole, no oxygen, next to no water, intense radiation, a universally bleak rocky landscape, and a surface now said perhaps to be poisonous from certain chemicals. I think that’s an excellent measure of just how extreme the talk becomes, reaching insane levels.
People often think because we live in the 21st century, we pretty much understand everything and that there’s an answer for almost any problem. But that just isn’t so. We do not understand a great many common phenomena. We certainly do not understand the human mind. And we do not understand the causes of many serious illnesses, including mental ones.
