My review of Greta Thunberg's classic "No one is too small to make a difference" (2019)
A Wikipedia-article about the book is here.
I feel like I have to write a review of Greta Thunberg's book "No one is too small to make a difference". I have, since she stepped into publicity, been a fan of her, and have much appreciated her work. Though, I have not agreed in all her sayings, and now I think I have to mention the things in which I don´t agree with her. This I will do in a review of her book, a book which has already become something of a classic.
The book is a concentrated (in 80 pages) revival speech, to wake up people, a little like religious revival preachers tried to wake people up in, say, the English protestant methodist revival in the eighteenth century.
After Greta, the world is not the same any more. We haven't been able to ignore her, and a massive climate revival has taken place. Especially among young people.
Greta has become a notion (ett begrepp). So famous she has become. Who is not aware of her?
The book consists of eleven speeches that Greta has held in different circumstances, some very great, high in the world of the elite. The first edition was published on 30 May 2019. An expanded edition was published on 21 November 2019 with five new speeches.Think about it, a fifteen years old girl is invited to speak to United Nations Climate Change Conference, Katowice, Poland, 15 December 2018, and World Economic Forum, Davos, 22 and 25 January 2019. And what has media said about the speeches there? "She roasted them", I have read some write about her speech at World Economic Forum.
Greta is radical. She is a climate revival preacher. But she is not more radical than many of our climate scientists, when it comes to the facts she presents. She has for example the notion that we have a carbon budget, i.e. an amount of carbon that we can burn before it is too late in the game. In the more pessimistic climate movements and blogs on the internet, they have to confess that we do not have a carbon budget at all, so for example the people around Sam Caranas blog "Arctic News" and the people around Guy McPhersons blog "Nature bats last". The "Near-term human extinction movement" that both Carana and McPherson are a part of, seldom believes in a carbon budget. Me neither.
I have followed the two aforementioned blogs for a long time, since 2014 or 2015. When you read them, you also easily stop believing that the world climate today is a little above one degree above preindustrial temperatures, as many climate scientists believe, and as Greta believe. That makes room for a carbon budget, because the official climate warming targets is to avoid 1.5 C or 2 C above preindustrial, but if you believe like the very learned and detailed climate scientist Sam Carana that we are already 2.28 C above preindustrial (see this article), and then you have to remember that Carana counts what has happened to the climate since around 3480 years B.C., then you simply can't believe in a carbon budget. Everything is worse than Greta told us. Greta always refers to the official scientists (Sam Carana is a blogger, not an official climate scientist), "listen to the scientists" is a well-used phrase by Greta. How could she do otherwise? She is only a child, after all, who listens to the authorities and has done her homework. How could she possibly find her way to the fringe of the climate debate, where people like McPherson and Carana are positioned? Believing that we already have crossed the 2 C benchmark isn't specially mainstream, to say the least. But thrut is seldom mainstream.
Greta mentions several times the issue of climate justice, or equity. That the greatest changes has to take place in the west, for we have polluted most, and we cannot point finger to the third world and require big sacrifices from them, because they must have access to the basic wellbeing that the western people enjoys, our basic technology, in other words. This is true to some degree, but it will not serve the climate very well. We have to be more radical than that to save the climate, because we have no carbon budget. In fact it requires the whole world to move to a nineteenth century farmer lifestyle, all of us. Or even more radically, it requires that we all live as the wild indigenous people of the world today. That last option is my opinion. And then we have to be much fewer people on this earth. It requires, in other words, collapse and death on an unimaginable scale. And it has to happen now. And still, if we do that, the climate will warm for several decades, putting in motion a lot of tipping points. In other words, it is too late in the game. But to live as the wild indigenous people is our best hope for the climate, the more we do that the better chances we have to avoid the worst scenarios. I can't do that, I'm a prisoner of psychiatry and this society. I would like to live as a homeless, but I'm not allowed to do that. And furthermore, my right foot is broke.
There is one very important thing that Greta omits, and which almost every climate scientist misses. And that is the fact that if we follow their recommendations, civilisation will collapse. It is already on the brink of collapse, because of corona. Civilization requires eternal growth, and "green growth" is a very obvious illusion in the effort of saving the planet. If civilisation doesn't grow, it collapses. It functions like that. So fragile it is. And more and more climate scientists are calling for "degrowth", so for example the world-famous Swedish climate scientist Johan Rockström, but I have never heard them mention that degrowth will collapse the global economy.
There is also another very important omission, and this also almost every climate scientist miss, and that is the issue of Peak Oil and net energy decline in society. They do not seem to be aware of the issue. Strange. These topics also have ties to the inevitable collapse of civilization. We experienced Peak Oil in November 2018 according to many energy bloggers, and we are now in net energy decline. Those who omit Peak Oil seem to believe that climate change will collapse our civilization, but I believe that Peak Oil is an even bigger immediate threat, since we cannot grow our civilization if net energy is declining, and without growth, the economy will collapse. We have delayed the collapse with gigantic financial bubbles, but we cannot overcome the laws of physics that operate in the energy bussiness. God won't save the evil economy.
We don't have the time to 2030, as Greta says we have, before we have triggered the tipping points in the climate and the chain reactions beyond human control begins, we are already there. And we have already been there for some time, i.e in abrupt climate change. The science is just so conservative that it cannot see it. Abrupt climate change is so obvious, that it already has found it's way into a blog name, namely the climate scientist Paul Beckwith's blog, here. A growing number of climate scientists now uses the notion of us being in "abrupt climate change".
And what is the greatest climate threat? For me it is the methane gas escaping from the Arctic ocean sea bed. I have mentioned it many times on this blog. For professor in oceanograpy Peter Wadhams it is the greatest threath to humanity today. Greta does not mention it. She just mentions "Arctic permafrost", but when we hear that we usually think about the onshore permafrost in Siberia or Alaska and northern Canada. The Arctic sea bed methane has not become as popular in science as the onshore permafrost in those mentioned areas. I don't know why.
But what will save us? Greta omits the greatest factor, the spirit world and the angels, yes God and Jesus. Who mentions that God is the Lord of the climate? In debating the climate, we all suddenly become so materialistic, not reckoning with the spiritual factors in everything. If God, Jesus and the angels exists, as I believe they do, they have a perfect plan for the End Times, and everything will change in the second coming of Jesus, spoken of in holy scriptures and visions and dreams. Does Greta have a faith? I don't know.
Climate change is due to the entropy laws in the second law of thermodynamics (two very important terms in physics), but who asks how the spirit world fits into these laws, and by which laws the spirit world is guided? Physics must be reimagined if we count spiritual factors. Yes, the very notion of entropy must be reimagined. Does heaven have entropy? Or is it eternally selfsustaining, making eternal happines possible? The angels do seem eternally happy. Perishability, which is the core in entropy laws, does not seem to work in heaven, nor in miracle healings and many other miracles. We are promised that we will step into a world of miracles in the End Times, when heaven and earth unite and create a new heaven and a new earth, in the millennial kingdom, in the second coming of Jesus.
Don't you believe that Jesus and the angels are aware of the climate?
Greta says in her book that "we can still fix this" (p.44), but I belive it is too late for human effort, if we think we can save the climate with that, only divine miracles can now save us, but they will not save civilisation, so full of evil and greed as it is, it will instead give us a renewed earth where spirit world and the world of matter is reunited. It will doom civilisation but save nature for us to continue to live on, in the purity of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. So great is our God, so able to fix things he is, but he will not fix our evils, but doom them and give us the perfection of Adam before the fall instead, yes even more, we have learned now the hard way to stay away from sin and civilization, which Adam probably did not understand at the time of the Fall.
Climate geoengineering will not save us, and although it has been in operation in secret for many decades, Greta is not aware of this, neither most of the climate scientists. But follow Dane Wigingtons work on Geoengineering Watch and you cannot but become aware. Geoengineering is in full operation, but it has not succeeded, only made things worse.
Greta thus misses to mention our greatest threat, the methane gas, and our only salvation, the second coming of Jesus.
Some gems from the book are worthwile to quote, like these (I use the first edition of the book in this whole review):
"It's clear that the answers we seek will not be found within the politics of today" (p.42)
"We live in a strange world, where we think we can buy or build our way out of a crisis that has been created by buying and building things." (p. 42)
"Our civilization is so fragile it is almost like a castle built in the sand." (p.46)
