Mike Hosking: Hyperbole and hot air - Greta Thunberg will grow into a Jacinda Ardern

Greta Thunberg is the new Jacinda Ardern, says Mike Hosking.

COMMENT: I think Simon Bridges has a point, doesn't he? The trouble with climate change fanatics is that they hector and they lecture.

Our lecturer-in-chief Jacinda Ardern tells the United Nations Climate Summit that no one gets to cop out of climate change. Then she steps in for her ultra-hyped 20 minutes with the US President and barely says a word about it - despite the fact he's copped out more than anyone, due to the fact he doesn't believe a word of it.

Mind you Ardern was helped no end by Greta Thunberg who won the award, and it really was an Emmy-winning performance that belonged with the Kardashian on the West Coast the day before, as opposed to New York yesterday, but she won the award for world's most annoying kid by lecturing adults with a startling amount of hot air and hyperbole. Even for a group that's now famous for their hot air and hyperbole.

Greta will never forgive them, she said, through a sort of furious glare and raised eyebrow. She also said her childhood had been stolen away from her. In that is more damage to her cause than she realises, mainly because she's not old enough, or mature enough, to understand a number of life's simple lessons.

Kids telling off adults gets you nowhere. Literally making stuff up, like "my childhood has been stolen" is simply not true. And the sort of untruth she tells is transparent and she doesn't even realise it. Bursting into tears doesn't make your argument any more cogent or accurate.

And telling them she shouldn't even be there and that she should be in school merely invites a lot of people, no doubt under their breath, to go 'good, why don't you go back and try that?'

All of which is a shame. Because as is so often the case with people like her, she's an exceptional young woman driven by a passion and that's to be admired. The fact she sails around the world by herself is equally admirable.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern barely mentioned climate change during her meeting with Donald Trump.

But there is sadly no hiding the fact she suffers, like so many of her climate change lot, from a fantastic sense of self-entitlement. And it's that quality that damages the cause more than anything else.

And even more sadly it's indulged at places like the United Nations - whose very existence and annual summits are funded through such grandiose posturing.

Greta Thunberg will grow into a Jacinda Ardern. They will revel in rhetoric, they will hold meetings, they will invent phrases like "we too," they will tell you a social media company setting up yet another office full of people is an answer to terror on the net.

Their most fulfilling days are the ones where they talked themselves into exhaustion, labouring under the misguided belief that talk is action, but never really joining the dots that they keep going back year after year saying the same thing and yet nothing has actually changed.