LESS MARCHING, MORE LEARNING
IADMIRE the children who showed such guts and brains during last week’s students’ strike for “action” on global warming. No, mean the tens of thousands — the vast majority — who stayed at school.
I mean the ones who resisted mob pressure, the cheap flattery of the media and the lies of teachers and green politicians.
As for the students who marched in this new children’s crusade through our cities, their chants — “ScoMo sucks” — and abusive and poorly spelled signs said it all.
“Scott Morrison you’re so full of sh.t the toilet is jelous [sic]..” read one. “Princess MoFo,” (Google it) read another, with a picture of the Prime Minister with rouge and lipstick. “We’ll be less activist if you’ll be less s..t,” said one (expletive not deleted). “F… ScoMo.” “FU @ ScoMo.” “F… Adani.” And with a picture of a melting polar bear: “Act now before they dissappear (sic).”
Yes, many other signs were witty, but at the heart of this protest was a deep ignorance, shielded by an impenetrable and arrogant selfrighteousness. What did these students actually know about global warming, as they demanded we end the coal-fired electricity that powers their schools, and scrap the $60 billion-a-year coal exports that help pay for their teachers?
The Junkee website interviewed a key speaker at the Sydney rally, a girl just 11 years old.
“I feel lots of fear,” she said. “Soon, there could be no such thing as Antarctica … There could be no such thing as polar bears. There are islands disappearing.”
Every one of those claims is inarguably false.
Antarctica is a rocky continent that will never disappear and the British Antarctic Survey says its snow is growing, not melting.
Polar bears are not vanishing, either. Adjunct professor Susan Crockford, a leading expert on this mascot of the warmists, estimates numbers jumped from 22,500 to 28,500 over a decade.
And Professor Paul Kench’s landmark study of 27 atoll islands in the central Pacific found 43 per cent actually grew and just 14 per cent shrank.
All these facts are easy to find, as is the science that shows Australia has had fewer cyclones, record grain crops and more rain, with the planet recording virtually no more warming this century.
So who filled the head of that 11year-old and all the other protesters with such fearful lies?
And here is the most shameful part of that student strike. It is less an indictment of the students than of the teachers, parents, journalists and activists who coached them and pushed them to fight their climate jihad.
Which idiot educators, for instance, put Al Gore’s error-ridden propaganda film, An Inconvenient Truth, on the national curriculum?
Gore, too, falsely claimed that Pacific islands were drowning, even causing evacuations — a deceit nailed by a British High Court judge in 2007.
Gore, too, falsely claimed global warming was wiping out polar bears, another deceit nailed by the judge.
And Gore, too, falsely claimed the seas would rise 20 feet “in the near future”, a preposterous scare that the judge branded “distinctly alarmist”.
Yet now we have mobs of schoolchildren believing fervently in these falsehoods and swearing at politicians who refuse to wreck our economy to “stop” what’s not happening.
“Australian politicians and policymakers aren’t doing enough,” tweeted the Climatestrike organisers, when our politicians have actually wasted billions on renewable energy schemes and made our electricity prices among the world’s highest.
And for what? Chief Scientist Alan Finkel admits we could stop all Australia’s emissions — junk every car, shut every power station, put a cork in every cow — and the effect on the climate would still be “virtually nothing”. We’re too small.
Do the striking students even know that?
Hey, do they even care? What counts is not being right but seeming good. And if the facts don’t fit, they must be ignored or howled down.
That’s what scares me most about this children’s crusade. Students who show no real interest in the truth, have trouble even spelling and are intoxicated with their moral superiority cannot be reasoned with.
Argument is their enemy, which is why so many resort instead to abuse and even bullying.
At the Sydney rally, Jean Hinchcliffe, just 14, read out the Prime Minister’s phone number to the nearly 2000 students and asked them to call it for at least the next week.
That’s is not reasoning but harassing. But what do you expect when an army of children is on the march, drunk on their power and righteousness?