Global warming, mental illness, and Greta Thunberg
After traveling across the United States and parts of Canada, Greta Thunberg, the sixteen-year-old Swedish climate activist, has set sail back to Europe.
This time, she's hitching a ride with an Australian couple sailing around the world in a 48-foot catamaran called La Vagabonde, chronicling their travels on YouTube.
La Vagabonde will take roughly three weeks to reach Spain, where Thunberg hopes to arrive in time for the next round of United Nations–sponsored climate talks.
Without a doubt, Thunberg's travels across North America, which included angrily lecturing world leaders at the United Nations, have gained her fame and notoriety. This is reminiscent of another child, anti-gun activist David Hogg, being elevated to celebrity status overnight. Both Hogg and Thunberg have been honored not because either has any insights, but because they are fresh faces useful in advancing leftist causes.
Thunberg's case is the stranger of the two. She is not only a child leading the man-made climate change parade, but a mentally ill one at that. As Thunberg herself has repeatedly stated, she suffers from Asperger's syndrome, classified as a mental disorder by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), along with several other mental conditions.
In Greta Thunberg's eyes, her mental illness is not an impediment to her analyzing the hard science behind climate. On the contrary, it's actually an asset. She cites one advantage of Asperger's syndrome is that it provides "remarkable focus and persistence." Or in Greta's case, could we perhaps say the "remarkable focus" is an obsession?
Thunberg is heralded as a visionary. Her mother, Melania Ernman, a noted opera singer in Sweden, says Greta "is one of the few people who can see carbon dioxide with the naked eye. She sees how greenhouse gases pour out of our chimneys and rise into the wind, where they turn the atmosphere into a gigantic invisible garbage dump." I would love to ask my old physics professor about that claim.
Thunberg's fierce advocacy for worldwide action to assuage her global warming panic is a chicken-and-egg situation. That is, has the propaganda on climate change driven young Greta cuckoo, or was she unbalanced to begin with, which then made her susceptible to believe an Al Gore–type global warming hysteria? E. Michael Jones puts the blame on Thunberg's mother and Sweden for so thoroughly abandoning the moral law.
In Jones's telling, while Ernman was trekking about the world to applause and acclaim on the opera stage, Greta was home without a mother in a morally bankrupt Sweden. This unbalanced Greta. In her memoir Scenes from the Heart, Ernman makes a self-serving claim that the issue of climate change made Greta mentally ill just as she was entering puberty. Ernman traces the onset of Greta's disorder back to a specific moment when "during one of her classes, Greta's class viewed a film about ocean pollution. In the South Pacific, there is a floating island made up of plastic that is larger than Mexico. Greta bursts into tears during the film. Her classmates are moved to tears, too."
Jones says climate change was an acceptable substitute for guilt on the part of the mother for not being there for Greta and hatred on Greta's part for being abandoned. Both are at peace now that they have man-made global warming into the boogeyman. She writes that "it manifests itself in our neck of the woods [Sweden] in the form of stress illnesses, segregation, and ever longer lines in child and youth psychiatric clinics."
Again, and for Ernman's edification, it is not global warming per se that is driving the kiddies mad, it's a combination of the deliberate hype about its dangers coupled with living in a secular, God-free world.
Clearly, as the West abandons God and religion as outmoded concepts, many more people will become lost and adrift in the valueless societies. Mental illness of one type or another has to follow, with current examples being gender confusion, Trump Derangement Syndrome, global warming, and the embrace of socialism.