AI is Taking Greta's Job

Meet the new bogeyman, same as the old bogeyman

Didn’t get your invitation to the World Economic Forum (WEF) happening January 15 to 19, 2024 in Davos, Switzerland yet? Well, you’re not alone. Word is that Greta Thunberg, girl activist, has not been invited, either. Greta used to be a fixture at these clambakes—in fact, you couldn’t really have an elitist cabal of globalists convene anywhere without Greta at the microphone. But her 15 minutes of fame may be about to expire, and it is not because Greta has changed her tune or even gotten over her apoplectic fits of rage.

The tide has turned.

Climate change, also known as global warming and now sometimes called “extreme weather events” are no longer that scary. In this election year, climate change has gone from news to snooze. In a rising tide of globalist talking points nobody cares about, nobody cares about climate the most.

Besides, WEF has found something that is even scarier than the changing weather … artificial intelligence (AI). AI is actually a good choice for these fear-monger-fests, since unlike a teenage millionaire screaming how the world has been unfair to her, AI is genuinely scary. The AI terror will pull the conclave of power-mad rich people more in the direction of technology, privacy, security, Big Data, and foreign policy, which is the direction they want to go.

The Davos crowd has an agenda, and their agenda is neither climate change nor AI. WEF is a group of unelected and self-appointed individuals who want to redistribute wealth and resources in a system totally controlled and managed by them. To do this, they need to gin up enough fear to make their ideas seem more palatable than the alternative. And since their ideas are grotesque and unpalatable, they have to create massive amounts of fear. In other words, if they can scare you about the “existential threat” of climate change or AI or ten-foot-aliens invading a Miami mall, maybe you’ll give up your car.

Most of the hysteria around climate warming/cooling/change has been diluted and worn thin, if not outright debunked. The world has not ended, the polar bears have not died, the oceans have not risen, and the experts with their dire timetables turned out to be trying to serve us a big nothing-burger, hold the cheese. Even the Obamas live in a big mansion on the sea. Climate change just ain’t happening.

That’s where AI comes in. AI is scarier than a teenage girl with a mad face and the shift to AI will fuel the mad objectives of WEF better than melting ice caps. So it’s hello AI and goodbye, Greta.

I do have to give Greta some recognition for the amazing phenomenon that she was. Nominated (but never winning) the Nobel Peace Prize every year from 2018 to 2022, Greta Thunberg burst onto the scene about five years ago when she launched a school strike in Sweden and started to give nearly apoplectic speeches about global warming. Back when she was just getting started in 2018, Greta tweeted that, “A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years.” Hello 2023. She’s since deleted that tweet and I never did find out who this “top climate scientist” was. But that was the sort of rhetoric that put Greta on the map. The funny thing is, nobody holds these climate activists accountable for their highly specific predictions of stuff that never happens. I wish we monitored false predictions with the same fervor we chase down misinformation.

The daughter of an opera singer and actor, Greta Thunberg was iconic, and I mean that in a mass totalitarian propaganda way. She was the perfect image of the “little girl in pigtails,” an established media and communications symbol used by propaganda artists. Hitler used that same image—a bright-eyed girl with pigtails urging people to be Nazis. Mao used the girl in pigtails too, as did Stalin. You can Google “little girl in pigtails propaganda” and find tons of these images.

We used that image ourselves in World War II. Greta may not have intended it, but she had the look. And she had that serious, pained demeanor, and somebody gave her the talking points.

Like most little girls in pigtails, Greta was no expert or scholar or scientist or investigator. The biggest “tell” that Greta was all hat and no cattle was when she forfeited education in favor of activism. She became the focal point of the climate movement not because she knew the most or because she offered sound solutions—she was just the angriest. It made a nice juxtaposition—the sweet-faced little girl with the rage of a thousand demons.

But Greta could not sustain her role for many reasons. First, she is aging out of it. A 20-year-old on a school strike is not as compelling as a 15-year-old who marches for climate change. After all, Greta is now too old to go to school now, and a “university strike” isn’t really much of a thing. The little girl in pigtails cannot be replaced by the young adult woman in pigtails. And since time marches on, Greta will fall increasingly out of favor. The climate propagandists (if they are even still around) will have no use for “the middle-aged woman in pigtails,” much less the “old lady in pigtails.”

Second, Greta has no scientific credibility. She is an articulate and energized public speaker and she maintains her near state of apoplexy flawlessly and without cracking a smile—but she has no scientific credentials. You can only listen to an angry person for so long before you want facts, data, and dispassion. You want solutions. I once had a boss that did not tolerate complaints from anyone who did not come to him with a viable solution.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, climate change isn’t the source of panic WEF and the cabal thought it would be. It’s aged like fine mayonnaise out in the sun. After 50 some years of being told the world was going to be destroyed

• unless we voted a certain way

• unless we did a certain thing

• unless we stopped doing certain other things

• unless we gave money to a specific cause

• unless we marched in this or that parade or demonstration

… we now see through the grift. The people who did as Greta commanded have not solved one single problem. Greta has not solved anything. Yawn, we’re bored.

Now I don’t want to brag, but I have survived dozens of “end of the world” scenarios already. Back in 1962, Rachel Carson wrote a best-seller fear-mongering pot-boiler called Silent Spring. She predicted that the use of pesticides would kill all of the animals, so that we wouldn’t have birds singing in the springtime anymore. She was a prominent “environmentalist,” as it was called then. I read Silent Spring long ago and I never experienced a season since then when we didn’t have birds. I saw birds this morning.

Around that time, Senator Gaylord Nelson (D, WI) said that 75% to 80% of all species of animals would go extinct by 1995. The World Wildlife Federation has said that about 0.01 to 0.1% of species go extinct each year. Hey, Senator Nelson, that’s a swing and a miss.

Then in 1967, there was a prediction that the world would experience a severe and global famine by 1975. Instead, we have an obesity crisis.

The 1970s was the golden age of fear mongering. First, we had the “population bomb.” The world was going to end due to overpopulation. This hysteria led to China’s disastrous one-child policy and maybe even the declining birth rates in many developed countries. In 1970, the population of planet earth was approximately 3.7 billion. In 2023, it hovers around 8.1 billion. So the population did go up… but they were wrong that it meant the world would end.

Not to be outdone, the 1970s also preached to us about “global cooling” although that cause did not offer us a cute kid in pigtails to yell at us. The experts told us we were going to undergo another ice age. A guy named Kenneth Watt who was into ecology (that’s what we called it then) said, “The world has been chilling sharply for about 20 years.” He further predicted back in the 1970s that if that trend continued, temperatures would be so cold by 2000 that we would have another ice age. Experts joined Watt when the World Meteorological Organization said that cooling has been so extreme since 1940 that it could no longer be reversed and that the new ice age would be a source of disaster on par with nuclear war. Well, that crisis was averted, and the reputation of weathermen around the world for not knowing the weather has been upheld.

There were other random eschatological predictions in the 1970s, too. In 1972, we were told that oil would be completely used up by 1992. “Killer bees” were going to sting us to death. In 1970, the claim was made that we would be rationing water by 1974 and food by 1980. In 1970, Al Gore told us that there would be no more snow on Mt Kilimanjaro in a few years. Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, I guess they must have a category for “guy who makes absurd predictions that never happen.” There is not only still snow on Mt Kilimanjero, it never melts. It’s there year-round.

If you were around in the 1980s, you probably remember “acid rain” that was going to kill off our lakes. And then there was the “hole in the ozone” which somehow magically patched itself later on. In 1988, we were told that the Maldives Islands would be underwater by 2018. In 1989, the UN said that entire nations would be wiped off the map due to global warming by 2000. You would think the fear-mongering camp would stop issuing predictive timelines, but perhaps couching your absurd and baseless claims in the future is a way to avoid fact-checking.

In the 1990s, things quieted down a bit until the “big one” hit with Y2K. Remember the panic as people predicted our digital communications would stop short, banks would close, money would be unavailable, gas stations would not have fuel, and the economy would collapse? And with the turn of the millennia, a new genre of horror movie was born in the form of the zombie apocalypse movies. Art was supporting the fear-mongering crowd.

Since global cooling turned out to be fake, the fear-mongers switched over to global warming. In 1999, some U.N. guy named Noel Brown said that “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by 2000.” In that same year of 2000, a climate scientist (that’s what they’re called now) said that England would stop having snow due to global warming. In fact, he said that if it snowed in 2020, it would cause chaos in England because no one would know how to handle snow. Ironically, a major blizzard hit England in 2018. Nevertheless, England is pretty edgy with climate stuff. Back when he was still a prince, now-King Charles III stated we had 96 months to save the world, setting the apocalyptic deadline at 2017. You have to admire his precision and the determination to offer no specific solutions. Of course, the deadline came and went, as they always do, and we’re still here, and he’s wearing a crown.

Notice that the people who wear crowns and have private jets are the most concerned about climate change.

In 2005, it was predicted there would be 50 million “climate refugees” by 2020. The open southern border in the United States has caused a lot of people to enter the country illegally, but I see no reason to think it is because of climate change. In fact, some of these people who were resettled in places like Chicago are complaining that it is too cold. (You would think some of that global warming would take the chill off Chicago.)

In more recent years, we have started to call this alarmist grab-bag of bizarre speculations “climate change,” because global cooling turned out to be a hoax and global warming is a little too specific. The WEFsters hoped that climate change would panic us all, but it turned out to be a bore. This did not stop the global overlords from continuing to make strangely specific and fake claims about the end of the world. James Anderson of Harvard said in 2018, “The chance that there will be any permanent ice left in the Arctic after 2022 is essentially zero.” Did not happen. In 2019, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said that the “world will end in 12 years” unless climate change is addressed, meaning, unless we do what she tells us. Unfortunately but true to form, there was no solution offered and no real science behind the claim, just a call to docile obedience to the progressive agenda. Of course, she still has a few years left on the clock.

So what is going on? The fact is that climate change has never been about climate change. It’s about fear-mongering. It is easy to con people, to trick them, to get them to do things they might not normally do when they are very afraid. It’s the reason that criminals point guns at people to persuade them to give up their wallets.

The fear has worn off climate change. All of these preposterous gloom-and-doom scenarios have fallen apart.

The Davos cabal’s focus on AI is a bit more concerning, because unlike climate change, killer bees, and global cooling, AI actually exists and there are some serious concerns about it. But make no mistake—WEF is about scaring us, not helping us navigate the many new challenges posed by AI. If you’ve never gone to the WEF website, it may be worth a trip. Click the link and scroll down to “The Top 10 Risks.” There, WEF lists the things we should be most afraid of, a sort of cheat sheet for WEF’s version of Fear Factor. Extreme weather is near the top, but so is “misinformation and disinformation.”

Irony is so ironic. The WEF and other groups that promote bogus “science” and unsupported descriptions of pending apocalypse are the very same ones telling us we have to be careful about misinformation!