The mere mention of Greta’s name here may prevent the climate deniers and nay-sayers reading further. Such is the nature of the closed mind. The shame is that these are precisely the people who need to hear the message.
The book is small and short, 106 pages of accessible text. These are the speeches Greta made to various world and local bodies over the period from 8th September 2018 to 27th September 2019. One whole year in which a sixteen-year-old girl made a real impact in the world by her selfless dedication to a task that should have been the top priority of every politician in the world.
Yes, I’m an environmentalist. I could be nothing less after having been a member of Greenpeace since it started up in Great Britain in the early 1980s. As a result, I’ve been following the science for years. Yes, the science, which is conclusive and supported by 97% of the appropriate scientific communities.
Sorry, I may be preaching to the converted by now.
So, to the book. As this is a collection of her speeches, there is inevitably some repetition. But the urgency of her call, her passion, her genuine concern for the future of her generation and those to follow are all so very manifest. She uses those known CO2 figures to press home her point about the urgency of action needed, and she quite rightly castigates those in authority who have done no more than make spurious and meaningless promises that have led to no actual change at all.
But there are messages here for the general public of the world. We are all in this existential crisis together. And that’s what the climate emergency is, make no mistake about its seriousness. If we fail to act, all of us, on this issue, the very strong probability is that life on this planet will become untenable within a very short time. Greta stresses the urgency, the need to ACT NOW, not next week, not tomorrow, but now, today.
I wish everyone would read this small, informative, book of common sense and fact. The tragedy is that very few will make the effort. Ten years from now the world we know will have changed radically. If we fail to act, that will be our fault. But it will be our children who will suffer from our complacency, neglect, and failure to accept the reality of the science.
Stuart Aken 
I am not a fan of Greta Thunberg, especially since she has recently jumped on the bandwagon with the Free, Free Palestine and Pro-Hamas crowd. I appreciate that she woke people up about the environment but her scolding, harsh language when she speaks is very off-putting.
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I don’t think she’s pro-Hamas, to be fair, Noelle. I think she feels strongly about the injustices being repeatedly visited on the civilian population who, in common with most of us, have little control over what their governing body does.
As for her manner of speaking, she is autistic and sees things entirely in black and white, a feature she admits to. She believes it makes her less open to the obfuscation commonly applied to the climate emergency by many of the fossil-fuel backed organisations trying to downplay the situation. She is passionately aware that her generation and those who follow are the ones who will suffer most from our inactivity on the climate crisis, so her passion is, perhaps, understandable.
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