About 140 million years ago, a continent the size of Greenland broke off from North Africa, plunged into the Earth’s mantle and was buried under Southern Europe.

The hidden continent that researchers have named Greater Adria was revealed in a study just published in the journal Gondwana Research by Douwe van Hinsbergen, a professor of global tectonics and paleogeography at Utrecht University.

It’s fortunate that Greta Thunberg wasn’t alive 140 million years ago, because the stress might have killed her.

Thunberg is the Swedish teenager who helped to kick off climate week at the U.N. with a scorching speech to world leaders. “How dare you,” she seethed, accusing the government officials of stealing her dreams and ignoring “the beginning of a mass extinction.”

There has been a mass extinction of common sense.

The young activist told the world body that “the popular idea of cutting emissions by 50 percent” is utterly inadequate to head off “irreversible chain reactions beyond human control.”

She’s right about one thing: the proposed “solutions” to global warming are not going to make one bit of difference.

In California, for example, where the entire state accounts for 1 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, we are paying higher energy prices, higher transportation costs and higher housing costs because of policies designed to cut the state’s greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels. That was the mandate in Assembly Bill 32, the 2006 “Global Warming Solutions Act.”

But you will not find even one scientist who says the climate will be affected by California’s achievement of its target. In fact, we could shut down the entire state — close every electricity-generating facility, turn off every engine, park every car, shoot every cow — and it would make no difference at all to the global climate.

Think about that the next time you pay your electricity bill. Residential electricity rates in California are more than 50 percent higher than the national average. Think about it at the gas station, where the price per gallon of gasoline is about $1 per gallon higher than the average in the rest of the country. Think about it at the grocery store, where the price of food reflects the higher cost of operating the diesel trucks that deliver it.

No matter how many kids courageously skip school on Fridays to save the Earth, the solutions offered to prevent climate change don’t have any effect on the climate.

Even if you grant, if only for the sake of argument, that everything the climate activists say is absolutely true – global warming is happening, it’s catastrophic and it’s all our fault – we’re paying a lot of money for nothing.

And if you’re older than 16, you probably remember that not everything the climate activists have said has been absolutely true.

Related Articles The Roberts Court is more complicated than it seems: Tom Campbell

Who is left out of the new American mainstream?

California is indeed a cautionary tale for the nation

Governor Newsom should deliver theme park guidelines ASAP

UBI grows in popularity among local governments The Competitive Enterprise Institute just published a list of climate-apocalypse predictions that missed the mark. For example, Time magazine warned that signs of “another ice age” were “everywhere.” That was 1974.

The Associated Press quoted U.N. officials who said the world had only eleven years to reverse global warming or rising seas would “obliterate nations.” That was 1989.

Biologist and author Paul Ehrlich warned that if something wasn’t done to halt human impact on the environment, “everybody” would “disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years.” That was 1969.

Dire warnings of doom are very useful for politicians. Government officials become more powerful by scaring people into believing that they cannot think for themselves and have no alternative except to follow the orders of the government.

But it is an indisputable fact that it’s easier to manipulate public opinion than to affect the physical processes of the planet, as the residents of Greater Adria, had there been any residents of Greater Adria, could have told us 140 million years ago.

The best thing we can do for the next generation is to stop spending their money on climate boondoggles and put it back into their college funds.

Susan Shelley is an editorial writer and columnist for the Southern California News Group. Susan@SusanShelley.com. Twitter: @Susan_Shelley.