“How many narwhals do you think have died of climate change?” I asked a nice lady who had come dressed as a narwhal for the Greta Thunberg rally in Britain’s greenest city, Bristol.

The narwhal lady said she wasn’t sure but she thought that at least several must have died because of “Arctic ice melt.”

But I wasn’t convinced. “If I had to guess how many narwhals had died of climate change, do you know how many I’d say? I’d say: ‘Zero narwhals have died of climate change.'”

And there, in a nutshell, you have the problem with the Greta Thunberg rally in particular and the global warming scaremonger movement in general: it is fuelled by a dangerous combination of well-meaning passion and the most abject scientific ignorance.

Delingpole: Climategate 10 Years On – The Bastards Have Got Away With It! https://t.co/3hbdvMrVBe — Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) November 17, 2019

Lots and lots of people I spoke to in the 30,000 strong crowd, adults and children alike, believed very intensely that climate change is a major, major problem which must be urgently addressed if we’re not all to be wiped out in a few years.

But when pressed for detail on what evidence there actually was for this imminent apocalypse none of them had a clue.

Most of the attendees at the rally were children who — usually with the encouragement of their parents and teachers — had skipped school for the day for a glimpse of their idol, Greta, whom they view like a rock star.

This depressed me greatly. When I was a lad, boys idolised people like Debbie Harry, the sexy singer from Blondie; girls idolised people like John Taylor out of Duran Duran. It would have been considered very weird back in those more innocent times if any of us had gone to stand in a muddy square in the middle of a city to be harangued by a 17-year old school dropout in a yellow oilskin about how little was being done to save the planet.

Save the planet? Kids had much better, more useful things to do back in the good old days. And rightly so. Back then it was recognised that the proper place for kids was either in the schoolroom learning stuff — or outdoors playing games.

Delingpole: Greta Thunberg’s Dad Writes Her Facebook Posts https://t.co/6D9tTROq1g — Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) January 14, 2020

Adults did not treat children like visionary seers or look to them for advice on how to run the economy or arrange the nation’s transport infrastructure or decide the level of taxation. To do so would have been considered quite bonkers.

Conventional groupthink wisdom on Greta Thunberg and the children’s climate movement would have us believe that they are both admirable things: how wonderful to see kids really trying to make a difference!

But kids really trying to make a difference is surely only a good and desirable thing of the cause they are fighting for is a worthwhile one.

And in the case of Greta Thunberg and the climate rally, I’m not at all sure that it is.

On the basis of the junk science factoids they’ve been fed by their left-leaning teachers, the rubbish they’ve seen on the Internet from eco-propagandists like Bill Nye, and the drivel they’ve been fed on TV by neo-Malthusian doom-monger David Attenborough, these nice, well-meaning children have been brainwashed into such a state of fright that they think the only solution is to end Western Industrial Civilisation.

They’re marching for higher taxes, less prosperity, fewer real jobs, more expensive energy, more restrictions on travel by car and by air, more government regulation, more misery and less fun.

Delingpole: Greta the Teenage Climate Puppet Goes Full Marxist https://t.co/Iu6sK6d8qZ — Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) November 30, 2019

I don’t see why the angry demagogue Greta Thunberg should be applauded for stirring up this dangerous lunacy. Nor do I think we should be encouraging kids when they fall for it.

“Politicians are acting like children, it falls to us to be the adults in the room,” Greta intoned in her short, characteristically indignant speech from the stage.

She’s almost right.

When it comes to climate change, the adults have indeed left the room. A pseudo-scientific hoax which should have been nixed ages ago by a combination of journalists doing their job, teachers teaching actual knowledge, politicians being sensible, and scientists behaving like scientists rather than activists, has instead been allowed to fester and ferment and transform itself into a large and terrifying beast which threatens to devour the whole civilised world.

Climate change is not a problem. Climate change hysteria is a major problem. But try telling that to the 30,000 kids who’d bunked off school to attend that Greta Thunberg rally – they just didn’t want to know.

After all, the end of the world — and a day off school — is SO much more exciting than boring old business as usual.