The Emperor’s New Clothes: Greta Thunberg Versus The Climate Contrarians

Pearls and Irritations - Andrew Glikson

It is not an accident that fascist philosophies and movements willfully ignore human-induced global warming leading to the Sixth mass extinction of species, the largest since 56 million years ago. The nature of denialists is manifest in their venting of hate on the 16 years-old Gerta Thunberg, the voice of a generation destined to face the global warming calamity perpetrated by sections of humanity.

Kena Betancur/AFP/Getty Images

Andrew Glikson Dr Andrew Glikson is an Earth and Paleo-climate Scientist, Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University, Research School of Earth Science, the School of Archaeology and Anthropology, and the Planetary Science Institute, and a member of the ANU Climate Change Institute.

There is nothing moral about the fundamentalists telling children they may be burning in hell if they sin on Earth, while ignoring the evidence of the inferno facing future generations as the atmosphere is heated by greenhouse gas emissions, plunging the planet into a hothouse Earth.
In their panic the denialists attribute the girl’s views, which are consistent with climate science, to her asperger syndrome or smear her as mentally ill, ignoring many with this syndrome are highly intelligent people. By extension they dismiss the basic laws of physics, climate science and the consensus on global warming, which the 16 years-old reiterates.
While the destruction of the habitability of Earth is in progress, rather than comprehend the extreme consequences of global warming the contrarians appear to be alarmed by the voice of a teenage girl, just in case this may deprive the industry of death from their enormous profits. Further, these people instinctively correlate attempts at defending life on Earth with “left” socialist ideas.
The history of H. sapiens is dominated by a conflict between life-enhancing forces and the life-destroying conduct, carnage and wars, the cycle symbolized in the Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva cycle in Hindu mythology. Climate change has not been invented by “conservatives” but once its fatal consequences have become manifest it fits well with the “survival of the fittest” ideology, denying science, nature and life.
Such conflicts originate in the natural world, however once a species has acquired a range of lethal techniques—chemical detonation, atom splitting, radiation, biological warfare—the survival of the fittest paradigm becomes a recipe for global suicide, compounded by the lunacy of seeking shelter on other planets.
Global governance and legal systems are not designed to cope with this ultimate danger. Elaborate legal systems exist to collect taxes or enforce traffic rules, but no courts exist to prevent the powers that be from changing the composition for the atmosphere, thereby leading to one of the greatest mass extinction of species the Earth has suffered.

Links

• Why the right’s usual smears don’t work on Greta Thunberg
• Scientific Consensus: Earth's Climate is Warming
• The climate and the extinction rebellion
  
• Greta Thunberg . 'You lied to us'
• Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum
• Hothouse Earth: here’s what the science actually does – and doesn’t – say
• Scientific Consensus: Earth's Climate is Warming
• Climate Impacts: The consequences of climate change are already here.
• Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva:The Hindu Trinity