The ‘anti-greta’ who will confront climate change activists in US

AMERICA is about to be introduced to a climate change sceptic dubbed the “anti-greta”.

Naomi Seibt, 19, will appear at the Conservative Political Action Conference this week where Donald Trump is the main speaker. It is the biggest annual jamboree for grassroots Republicanism in the United States.

Miss Seibt, who is from Germany, has been dubbed the “anti-greta” because of her views on climate change, which are in stark contrast to those of Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenage environmental campaigner.

She features in a video produced by the Heartland Institute, a US think tank which rejects the scientific consensus on climate change.

The video, titled “Naomi Seibt vs. Greta Thunberg: whom should we trust?” splices footage of the two European teenagers making opposing cases.

In a speech at the United Nations last year, Miss Thunberg excoriated world leaders and demanded quick and decisive action.

She said: “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money, and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”

Ms Seibt says she used to be like Miss Thunberg but is now sceptical of what she calls “climate alarmism”.

In a video posted on Youtube, which has 24,000 views, she said: “As a young girl, I grew up around the climate change hysteria in the media, in my schoolbooks. I thought by hugging the trees I could save the planet, which quite frankly turned out not to be true.”

She called the consensus on climate change an “insult to science, and the complexity of nature, and freedom of speech” and said “it is important we keep questioning the narrative that is out there”. She added that it was a “despicably anti-human ideology”.

Ms Seibt said: “Look around. We are living in such an amazing era of fast progress and innovation. We are not allowed to be proud of that at all? Instead debates are being shut down and real scientists lose their jobs.”

The Heartland Institute’s senior fellows include Dr William Happer, a professor emeritus at Princeton, who told The Daily Telegraph in 2017: “I don’t see a whole lot of difference between the consensus on climate change and the consensus on witches.”

Namaste Trump Donald Trump and his wife Melania at the Taj Mahal in Agra which was closed to tourists for his visit. The US president earlier spoke at a “Namaste Trump” (Welcome Trump) rally in front of more than 100,000 people in the Sardar Patel Stadium in Ahmedabad, the home of Narandra Modi, India’s prime minister. It was the largest rally crowd of Mr Trump’s political career.

Naomi Seibt, 19, a German climate change sceptic, will speak this week at a Republican convention in the US