Ross Clark Ross Clark

Child climate change protestors aren’t truants, they’re traumatised

Earlier this week I wrote a blog here accusing children who were planning to take part in today’s Youth4Climate march of wanting to play truant. I realise now that I may have been a little harsh on them. Having read and heard what they have been saying and posting this morning, I fear that some of them at least may be suffering from trauma. They are victims of the hyperbole they have been fed constantly ever since they were born.

Here, for example, is 10 year old Zane: ‘The reason I climate strike is because the Earth is burning before our very eyes’. According to Hannah, from Birmingham, ‘there is no point in going to school if we have no future’. Lottie tells BBC Breakfast ‘if we don’t strike now then we are getting educated for a future that we don’t know is going to exist in the way it does now’.

These are quite disturbed statements. There are children who really do seem to think they, along with the rest of humanity, are about to die as a result of climate change – an irrational fear with no basis in science. The IPCC’s projections of global surface temperature rises by the end of century produce a range from 0.3 Celsius and 4.8 Celsius, while its median projection of sea level rise is 0.3 metres and 1 metre. The upper end of that temperature range (a very low probability) would present a significant challenge for adaptation in some countries, but would hardly be fatal to civilisation.

But then is it really any wonder that many children have developed an apocalyptic vision of the near future? An 18 year old today would have been three years old when the film The Day After Tomorrow was launched, showing western cities being simultaneously frozen and engulfed with floodwaters.

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