When she spoke to the United Nations General Assembly on Monday, 16-year-old Greta Thunberg of Sweden made her disappointment with the progress of world leaders at combating the threat of climate change palpable.
For those with similar anxieties about the future of our planet, Thunberg's passionate speech put years of mounting frustrations to words.
If any part of of it stood out the most for viewers, it was the following section:
"This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet, you all come to us young people for hope."
"You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words and yet I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!"
According to Yahoo News, the Singaporean Instagram influencer who goes by xiaxue has been vocal about her support of Donald Trump in the past and seemed to share his sentiments that Thunberg's passion was overly dramatic.
Thunberg has previously submitted the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2018 UN report in lieu of making prepared statements.
She also seemed to be under the impression that Thunberg thought her tears would stop climate change or that her own childhood views preclude any other child from showing maturity or ambition for making a positive change in the world.
In it, she apparently goes from saying people are dumb for assigning any value to her opinion to worryingly presenting suicide as a climate change solution.
She also based her disbelief of climate change on statements that Al Gore made in the late 2000s, which were selectively cherry picked from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association and Dr. Wieslaw Maslowski.
The latter said Gore interpreted an exact prediction for the total melting of the polar ice caps when he hadn't offered one, while the NOAA also made no such prediction and said the recorded sea ice at the time was the lowest in history.
Who has a "one-dimensional" view of climate change again?
However, that apparently hasn't stopped enough people from seeing them, considering that each of her posts now features negative comments about the way she addressed Thunberg's speech.
Let me make this clear: no matter how much you disagree with a person, it's not okay to attack innocent people that happened to be in the same picture. Especially when that other person being targeted is a baby.
At the time of this writing, she has a poll in her stories asking if her audience wants a whole video about her climate change views, so this whole thing may not be blowing over any time soon.
h/t: Yahoo News
