Around the world, thousands of children have skipped school for the day on the feeble pretext that they are somehow doing something to help save the planet.

This is, of course, nonsense.

At best they’re just regurgitating the lies, fake news and junk science which have been brainwashed into their pretty little heads by their teachers.

At worst they’re just being exploited as useful idiots by the hard left.

A good example of the latter was the chanting, at the London demonstration, captured on video here:

One Two Three Four, Theresa May’s a fucking whore.

According to Guido, “people who appeared to be teachers were egging on the chanting.”

This speaks volumes about the degree to which hard-left politics has been allowed to penetrate school classrooms. Extreme ignorance, too. There are many, many criticisms that could be made of Britain’s worst ever Prime Minister Theresa May. But being a “fucking whore” is most definitely not one of them. If she were, it would at least add an element of interest to her dreary personality and apparently hinterland-free existence.

Also, why pick on Theresa May?

Again, there are many, many criticisms one could make of Theresa May’s Conservative government. But being dilatory on the issue of “climate change” is not one of them. On the contrary, the policy of May and her government in response to the man-made global warming scare has been at least as credulous, intrusive, economically damaging, and scientifically illiterate as any left-wing administration’s would have been.

These global protests, let us remind ourselves, were instigated by a 16-year old schoolgirl called Greta Thunberg, whose earnest intensity and wholesome appearance (apparently modelled on Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz) have made her something of an internet star among the left-liberal chattering classes.

Indeed, she has become such an icon of the left that she has been nominated – ludicrously – for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Thunberg’s contention – and the excuse of the marchers for bunking off school – is that nothing is being done to fight climate change.

According to the #FridaysForFuture website which is promoting the strikes:

#FridaysForFuture is a movement that began in August 2018, after 15 years old Greta Thunberg sat in front of the Swedish parliament every schoolday for three weeks, to protest against the lack of action on the climate crisis. She posted what she was doing on Instagram and Twitter and it soon went viral.

Lack of action? Really?? We’ll come back to that one in a moment.

Oh, and here’s another high-profile protestor – 16-year-old Isra Hirsa, daughter of Rep. Ilhan Omar – interviewed in the Guardian about her motivation for leading one of the strike actions in the U.S.

“I’m hoping a lot of things. I just want that awareness and education — I want people to understand the intense emergency of climate change, and that young people aren’t really going to be backing down. And also I want folks to feel…threatened enough to take climate action.”

All this might seem perfectly admirable if these children’s claims were true: that there really is such a thing as the “climate crisis” and that “nothing” is being done to avert it.

But it’s simply not true, is it?

The annual cost of the global industry to ‘combat climate change’ has been estimated at $1.5 trillion. (That was four years ago, since when the cost has no doubt skyrocketed).

By whatever definition you care to use $1.5 trillion is not “nothing.” In numerals it looks like this: $1,500,000,000,000. Even kids who have a problem with arithmetic – hardly surprising when their teachers are encouraging them to waste schooltime on climate marches – ought to be able to see that that is not “nothing” but “an awful lot”.

Those kids are protesting on the basis of one massive lie.

But it gets worse. Not only is that $1.5 trillion – all of which comes from taxpayers – an awful lot of money. It’s also an awful lot of money which is being spent to no useful purpose whatsoever.

In 2015, using the United Nations’ own calculations, Bjørn “Skeptical Environmentalist” Lomborg found that if every country in the world sticks to the “decarbonisation” promises it made at the Paris Climate Summit – unlikely by the way because the agreements are non-binding – then the resultant reduction, by the end of the century, in global warming may be 0.048°C (0.086°F).

For kids who can understand fractions – again, unlikely these days – that’s less than one twentieth of one degree centigrade.

The kids’ climate strike is stupid, dishonest and pointless. If only their teachers were clever enough to help them understand this.