There’s a most interesting interview in Saturday’s Guardian with Swedish actor Svante Thunberg. Svante’s wife is a well-known opera singer, so Svante decided to stay at home to look after their two daughters while his wife pursued her international career. Unfortunately the two daughters developed severe psychological problems, the eldest one refusing to eat or talk for several years. Svante and his wife wrote a book about it. Three days before publication, the eldest daughter started sitting in the street with a notice round her neck. “It left us in a tricky situation” says Svante, since everyone would think it was a PR stunt to sell the book. “..so we thought the only thing we could do was give every cent away. All our earnings from the book went to charity.”
Svante’s wife Malena explained why she felt compelled to write the book. “Becaue we felt like shit. I felt like shit. Svante felt like shit. The children felt like shit. The planet felt like shit. Even the dog felt like shit.” Svante adds that hardly anybody bought either version of the book because they decided not to promote it.
The journalist suggests to the eldest girl that her parents had made huge sacrifices for her. The girl agrees:
“Yep. They changed their lifestyles. My mum stopped flying, and by doing that she stopped her international career, and I really appreciate it.”
Then he asks if she felt guilty about stymying her mother’s career.
She seemed surprised by the question. “It was her choice. I didn’t make her do anything. I just provided her with the information to base her decision on.”
Having provided her parents with the information that caused them to sacrifice their careers as actor, opera singer, and authors, the eldest girl , now an adult, has moved out of the family home to avoid the crowds of people seeking her out, and spends a lot of time doing embroidery and jigsaw puzzles. In November she’s planning to go to Glasgow.
What has all this got to do with the climate? Nothing at all.
Climate Scepticism 
As Jason D. Hill, professor of philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago points out:
Greta is partly responsible for “lowering the intelligence quotient of an entire generation.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20200303042040/https://albertapressleader.ca/professor-writes-critical-open-letter-to-teen-climate-activist-greta-thunberg/
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Joe, Jason Hill must be mistaken, “It was the entire generation’s choice. Greta didn’t make the generation do anything. She just provided that generation with the information to base their decision on.”
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“What has all this got to do with the climate? Nothing at all.”
If only. Unfortunately the notice around her neck said ‘new Nongqawuse seeks cause’, and the cause wasn’t sleeping.
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Nice one Geoff!
From the Guardian article:
“She had done so much and travelled so far (twice crossing the Atlantic by boat in 2019 to attend conferences, and journeying through America and Canada to witness the impact of climate change)”
A shame she has spent so little time in school. A real understanding of the impact of climate change requires courses in statistical analysis of meteorological and hydrological time series particularly trend analysis, frequency analysis and, most importantly, tests of significance. You hear nothing about this in “climate reporting”.
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Building your life on lies and spreading them widlely around, it should make you feel like sh*t, so no surprise. If the dog feel the same, then the dog is poorly treated …
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Svante’s statement that hardly anyone bought the book seems not to be true. Amazon UK currently rates it as number 14 best seller in global warming & ecology, number 20 in meteorology, and number 8 in environmental philosophy. Not bad for a book about autism.
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Mr Chambers,
S. Thunberg’s statement may apply to Sweden only. It was generated a great deal of negative criticism here, as the circumstances appeared to be used as promotion for the book. It was a bit too much to be a coincidence, as a close family friend with the right connections was helping them doing it.
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I’m not one for quoting biblical reference’s but this one seems applicable to the Thunberg family:
‘Which of you, if your son, asks for bread will give him a stone.’ Matthew 7.9.
In this case just substitute the word ‘daughter’ for ‘son.’
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I didn’t see the Svante interview but there was an interview with Greta in the new Saturday magazine (as a symbol of their decline, they have introduced Satuday in place of the long-lived Weekend). I haven’t read it, but the images used were a spectacular misjudgement, as if a giant hell-bird had crapped oil on her from a great height (also reminiscent of the video game “Death Stranding”).
Meanwhile, it takes no effort to bash the Guardian. Also on Saturday we had the unimpressive Ian Jack spouting nonsense about climate breakdown, denialism and apocalyptic literature: as usual, one synapse spark away from the obvious: we do not fear this thing because there is nothing to fear from it.
In the middle of the paper was a 56-page pullout “The Travel Guide” – including features on “Dubai’s hottest lifestyle hotels”, “The authentic way to experience the Arctic” (does not, seemingly, involve kayaking), ballooning over the Serengeti and scaring the **** out of all the wildebeest, etc, etc. It’s a “distributed advertorial” of course, but not exactly on message, is it?
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JIT
That’s the one. I left out the stuff about the picture of the dolly bird covered in olive oil and gouache because I thought it might distract from what I took to be the main message; of how two successful parents had their careers destroyed by a brainwashed psychopath.
On the Travel Guide: I recently came across two glossy pictorial puffs for holidays in Marrakesh – one in the lefty Guardian and the other in the conservative Telegraph. I’ve always imagined Marrakesh to be a noisy, exciting sort of place, but the dozens of photos accompanying the articles were absolutely void of human life, except for one photo showing a servant boy cleaning the hotel swimming pool.
I have a suspicion that our social class – the people who read the serious papers and dream of holidays in places like this – is at bottom a death cult, unconsciously hooked on the vision of a world without annoying people – just you and me, some nice scenery and a polar bear or two.
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