I believe she is the inventrix of the Friday Climate Change Strike, which means that Woke adolescents go on 'strike' from school on Fridays and protest in city centres.
Admirable though this is, I can suggest a nuancing tweak which would make it even better.
The Government should fund a lengthening of the School Week to include Saturdays. Saturday teaching would be exclusively devoted to a detailed study of the 'Climate' problem ... I mean, issue. It would be studied in terms of weather patterns, economic structures, demographics ... you name it. The course would be subject to intensive examination. So as to avoid accusations of 'brainwashing', different teachers would take different positions on these subjects, and, in the Examinations, the willing young people would be expected to discuss with discrimination contrasting attitudes. The good old discipline of the Three Hour Essay Paper could thus be restored, to the advantage of all. Prose Composition in Latin, Greek, French .... could also enjoy a miraculous revival. "Cicero attacks Verres for polluting the beaches of Sicily". "Demosthenes excoriates the ecological policies of the Macedonian government". "Bossuet preaches to the Court about the Ozone Layer". But why only Prose Compo? The young could imitate the ferocious hexametres of Juvenal, the nasty snarling Epodes of Archilochus and Horace with all their dirty malevolence, Semonides' intemperate tirade against women. After being let out of school, they could be allowed a relaxing half hour smashing shop windows to chants of "Indignatio facit like versum".
A spin-off advantage would be that the town centres would do practically no trade on Saturdays. This would be noticed ... and, of course, one of the main purposes of 'Industrial Action' is to be noticed. In particular, the stores where little girls endlessly purchase new garments made in foreign factories with dubious conditions of work, would be brought to their knees. That in turn would etc. etc..
This sort of stuff more or less writes itself, doesn't it? I could go rabbiting on for ever.
P.S.: We don't seem to hear nearly as much about the Ozone Layer as once we did. However would Bossuet explain that to the Most Christian Monarch?
On the ozone level - we don't hear as much simply because the massive campaigns to change things actually seem to have worked.
ReplyDeleteThe release of the damaging chemicals into the atmosphere slowed drastically after the Montreal Protocol was adopted 30 years ago; depletion rates reduced significantly and by 2016 there was research showing that ozone levels were starting to recover (see https://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6296/269)). This all takes time because the chemicals concerned take a long time to break down.
It would be good to think that the world might manage to take the same sort of concerted action on the causes of the current climate issue in time to avoid some of its more extreme effects.
On the ozone level - we don't hear as much simply because the massive campaigns to change things actually seem to have worked.
ReplyDeleteThe release of the damaging chemicals into the atmosphere slowed drastically after the Montreal Protocol was adopted 30 years ago; depletion rates reduced significantly and by 2016 there was research showing that ozone levels were starting to recover (see https://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6296/269)). This all takes time because the chemicals concerned take a long time to break down.
It would be good to think that the world might manage to take the same sort of concerted action on the causes of the current climate issue in time to avoid some of its more extreme effects.
There is only good news about the ozone layer these days because it was agreed in the Montreal Protocol in 1987 that governments would ban or highly restrict use of the chemicals which were depleting it. The ozone layer is likely to return to 1980 levels within forty years. It was a great success which proves the viability of concerted action to conserve the composition of the atmosphere. Perhaps the campaigns of Dr Mario Molina would be good matter for dactylic hexametres.
ReplyDeleteNo, better yet, a comedy on the model of Plautus or Terence, something like a version of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People where Dr Stockmann is actually listened to. The old man dispatches the clever slave to the magistrates with the results of his research. While the slave is busy not attempting to explain the science to politicians but rather lobbying them with his own rhetoric about the gods being disturbed by noxious gases, warnings of divine wrath if nothing is done, and bribes, the old man frets about how they'll react, convincing himself that they won't listen to him on account of their ignorance and greed. When they arrive to discuss his findings, he attempts to begin his anti-democratic rant against the prejudice of the authorities and the populace against the new ideas of superior men, only to be told they've agreed to everything he proposed, and wish to know if there is anything else they can do to avert disaster. Well, Stockmann's son is in love with a beautiful and virtuous young maiden, but up to this point in the play they haven't been able to get married because...
Ceterum censeo carbonii dioxidum esse retinendum.
Nor acid rain.
ReplyDeleteWe don't hear so much about the ozone layer these days, because the world's leaders recognised the problem and agreed measures to tackle it. The problem was detected when Mrs Thatcher was Prime Minister. Her first degree was in industrial chemistry, she understood the problem and the solution, and persuaded other world leaders to take action. The world has also been successful in facing up to other problems caused by industrial chemicals, DDT for example.
ReplyDeleteEr, one of the *problems* of DDT was the million or so people a year it stopped being killed by malaria.
ReplyDeleteDDT has a downside, to be sure, but it can be usefully employed at much, much lower levels than it was, and in restricted areas, such as under house eaves. It's a repellent as well as a lethal agent against mosquitoes as well. And like other sorts of air defense, one doesn't need to destroy the attacking craft to win. One only needs to prevent them making a successful attack.
I have read plausible claims that subsequent research indicates that DDT was never the problem that was alleged. Those poor people in undeveloped tropical areas that have continued to suffer from the mosquito/malaria scourge might not look upon the issue with such sanguinity.
ReplyDeleteI am not as convinced as some posters here that the classification by our elites of Carbon Dioxide, as essential to plants as Oxygen is to animals, as a toxin to be depleted from our atmosphere is going to end well, most particularly when the supply of food is on a knife-edge in the face of an unprecedented world population and with suggestions from some quarters that sun-spot activity levels predict an imminent return to a colder climate period.
A combination of falling temperatures with reduced CO2 levels could very well present a future perfect recipe for the greatest famine known to mankind, bearing in mind that current CO2 levels, though marginally higher than a century or two ago, are very low in terms of geological time and not very comfortably above the level below which plant life can no longer grow. That's what quite a few scientists will tell you. Whichever side turns out to be right, the experiment cannot be run again if the results prove undesireable.
And let us hope (albeit without any expectation) that the effects on the climate and environment of the following are studied: 1) divorce, and the subsequent rise of single occupancy households, 2) the availability of abortion, 3) contraception, 4) Sunday trading, 5) "women's lib." I am aware that I personally take a slightly more liberal line (not enough to make me socially 'woke') on some of these issues than you do, but the way debate and argument are being closed down on these issues, particularly in places of learning, is very worrying.
ReplyDeleteIs it a mortal sin when I say how much I hate this brat? Forgive my language.
ReplyDeleteThank you for not calling her a "child" unlike some Swedes.
ReplyDeleteLots of ancestresses of King George III were married at her age.
"The Swedish Schoolgirl" actually has a name. And surely it behoves us, contributors to this blog, to recognise her human dignity by acknowledging that she does have a name. She is Greta Thunberg.
ReplyDeleteI quite like the following, from #357 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church: "Being in the image of God the human individual possesses the dignity of a person, who is not just someTHING but someONE" [emphasis added].
Terry Loane
I am sorry to learn, Randolph Crane, that you hate Greta Thunberg, and that the strength of your feeling is so great that you refer to her by using the (customarily uncharitable) word "brat". Do you feel able to tell us why you hate her so much?
ReplyDeleteTerry Loane