I&I Editorial

Following the Greta Thunberg path to fame is an Australian boy who gained notoriety for fuming about “narrow-minded” politicians. While the pair’s excesses can be attributed to their youth, the behavior of the shallow adults insisting the two are prophets who must be listened to cannot be excused. The proper response to these “grownups” behaving as high schoolers is harsh ridicule.

The world can’t help but know about Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish scold who seems to have dropped out of school to travel the world and impudently lecture her elders about how they have let her down. Though this girl knows nothing about climate other than it exists around her, and less about the world, adults nod in agreement as she rants, hand her multiple honors and awards, and have sworn they have been inspired as well as properly chastised by her. She was even considered last month as “the one to beat” for the Nobel Peace Prize, which was eventually given to Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed for putting an end to his country’s decades-long conflict with Eritrea.

Now comes Australia’s “Outback schoolboy” Dylan Storer, not as famous as Thunberg, but just as green, and we don’t mean that in an environmental sense. Storer, also 16, “has been praised on social media after slamming ‘narrow-minded’ politicians while weighing in on Australia’s bushfire crisis,” the Daily Mail reports.

“It’s not political opinion to say climate change hasn’t contributed to these horrific bushfires,” he said earlier this week on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Q&A” broadcast.

Of course Storer’s words were “met with huge applause from the audience,” because who can’t resist showing just how hip they are by airing their enthusiastic support of a raving child?

The kid’s performance, the Daily Mail tells us, had him “trending on Twitter, with many calling for him to be the next prime minister and even comparing him to the late Bob Hawke,” the country’s longest-serving Labor Party prime minister, in office from 1983 to 1991.

The Nobel Prize. Australian prime minister. The rapt attention of the United Nations. What has happened to Western civilization? How have we reached a place in which children, so clearly unlearned, are hailed as oracles who must be heeded? Like high-school kids desperately trying to be a part of the cool crowd, the flatterers, in cringeworthy fashion, fawn over Thunberg and Storer, all the while saying “look at me, look at me.”

Their virtue signaling gets us nowhere. Neither do the claims, advanced by these children, that global warming is all about science, not politics. The science simply is not settled. Science doesn’t work that way. Science continues to ask questions and challenge theories. The alarmists won’t admit it, but brilliant scholars with doctorate degrees in science are still debating the impacts of human carbon dioxide emissions.

Names? Richard Lindzen, Harvard atmospheric physicist. Roy Spencer, University of Alabama-Huntsville meteorologist. John Christy, University of Alabama-Huntsville professor of atmospheric science. Judith Curry, Georgia Institute of Technology earth and atmospheric sciences professor. Willie Soon, astrophysicist and geoscientist. Freeman Dyson, physicist and mathematician. William Happer, Princeton physicist.

There are more, just as there are many researchers who believe man’s CO2 emissions are an existential threat. Thunberg and Storer, however, are school kids. Yet they are treated as if they are rock stars by adults who should know that the science is uncertain. Apparently they’re unaware that serious people find their behavior puerile, even laughable. They need to be told — over and over again, until their embarrassment makes them stop.

— Written by J. Frank Bullitt

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