It’s not easy being Greta. Or Greta’s family. She convinced them to go vegan because eating plants is better for the environment. Then she lobbied them to stop flying, effectively ending her mother’s career as an international opera singer. A young Greta chose not to speak for years at a time until she found something she really wanted to use her voice for – changing the world.

“I don’t care about being popular,” she famously said, as a 15-year-old addressing the United Nations Climate Change Summit in Poland. “I care about climate justice and the living planet. Our civilisation is being sacrificed for the opportunity of a very small number of people to continue making a large amount of money.”

Why grown men are scared of Greta Thunberg. Post continues after podcast.

Saying things like that pisses a lot of people off. Our own Andrew Bolt is only one of the climate science-deniers who suggest that admiration for Greta is misplaced, because she is a young girl with “many mental disorders”.

“Green extremists are hiding behind these children,” Bolt said on Sky News earlier this year. “They want children to state their case so that adults will feel embarrassed or reluctant or ashamed to say they’re wrong.”

“And with Thunberg, they get double protection,” Bolt went on. “Because she… suffers from all sorts of mental problems. Depression, they say. Anxiety, they say. Selective mutism, they say. I haven’t seen much evidence of that. Autism. Aspergers. Conditions that Thunberg says she believes help her see more clearly. I believe these disabilities do not make her see better, but make her see things in a dangerously black and white view.”

Bolt was referring, in quite the grotesque way, to another reason Greta Thunberg is not ordinary. She is neuro-diverse. The teenager self-identifies as having Aspergers Syndrome, which in 2013 was folded in under the umbrella of Autism Spectrum Disorder.

And when Greta wrote about the criticism she gets for being different, she spoke for many who come to realise – often much, much later in life than she – that it can be the very things that make you different that make you anything at all.