Mid-week Musings || Teen warriors in wrong place at wrong time

Time gave this award in 1939 and 1942 to communist warlord, Joseph Stalin. Another notable recipient was Adolf Hitler in 1938.

Greta Thunberg has my respect, but not the hidden people behind her crusade.

There are many things in life where adolescents reign supreme - idealism and video game prowess come immediately to mind - but lived history and experience, are not among them - important traits in dealing with the climate change debate. Why?

A well-intentioned Greta Thunberg was openly permitted - and thus encouraged - to state "I want you to panic".

If you remember the 1980s you would remember the constant fear mongering about a hole in the ozone layer over the south pole that was rapidly getting bigger. It was "Chicken Little" for real.

Perhaps this is the genesis of Adelaide becoming our greenest city.

Only last week an Adelaide woman told me, as a girl, she had nightmares about the hole in the ozone layer.

NASA revealed in October the ozone layer hole over the south pole is now the smallest it has ever been since NASA started studying it in 1982. Strange, given CFC refrigerants are still being produced in Asia.

In her UN speech, Greta was permitted - and thus encouraged - to state: "Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction... cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees, and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control."

What's frightening is that a similar speech was given 50 years ago, and with gruesome results.

In February 1970, American biologist Paul Ehrlich was interviewed on late night US TV by comedian-host, Johnny Carson to discuss the dire predictions in his book The Population Bomb (1968).

As a result, the book shot up the best-seller lists, and Carson interviewed Ehrlich on live TV again, for more than an hour this time, to an audience in the tens of millions about population and ecology, birth control and sterilization.

Ehrlich's book became one of the most influential books of 20th Century.

This is eerie now, given the pulp fiction's opening lines:

"The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate."

Science journalist Paul C. Mann interviewed Ehrlich, and stated that his words contributed to a wave of population alarm then sweeping the world.

The International Planned Parenthood Federation, the World Bank, the United Nations Population Fund among others promoted and funded programs to reduce fertility in poor countries.

The results were horrific.

Salaries in poor countries were dictated by the number of IUDs they inserted into women.

In the Philippines, birth-control pills were literally pitched out of helicopters hovering over remote villages, millions were sterilised, often coercively.

In the 1970s and '80s many places in India required sterilisation for men and women to obtain water, electricity, ration cards, medical care and pay rises with more than eight million men and women sterilised in 1975 alone.

China adopted a "one-child" policy and enforced it mercilessly.

Here in Australia, adolescent protesters today have no memory of our own Ord River Irrigation Scheme that was to not only address Australia's presumed exponentially-increasing population's food shortage but was to help make Australia the "food bowl of Asia". For $1.45 billion we got a lemon and today Asia produces much more food than they need.

The Bible teaches "there is no fear in love." If these teenage social justice warriors want to spread the faith with fear through intimidating protests, they may well end up biting off more than they can chew and make the same mistakes socialists have made, time after time.