Letters: How dare young people want a safer future?

How dare a 16-year-old kid, Greta Thunberg, steal the limelight from the powerful adults at the United Nations.

How dare she want to enjoy the type of life I have enjoyed for the past 60-plus years.

How dare she want to have a future without the overwhelming worry of the consequences of global warming.

What right has she got to be so dramatic, what a pain in my old butt to watch her get so uptight.

I bet she's a hypocrite and owns a laptop and a cellphone.

I am going to throw the biggest hissy fit if she's awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Lesley Haddon
Rotorua

Greta Thunberg applauded

Some people appear to have joined a growing number of Greta Thunberg detractors around the globe.

One wonders why does this impassioned young 16-year-old girl makes older people feel uncomfortable or threatened?

All she is really asking is that we listen to the science. According to a UN panel of scientists, climate change is devastating our seas and frozen regions as never before.
Waters are rising, the ice is melting, and species are moving habitat and dying due to human activities.

The earth has already warmed about 1C since the Industrial Revolution, and science suggests that we must avoid 1.5C of warming to avoid widespread damage and suffering.
In my view, Greta Thunberg is to be applauded, as are the students and other thinking people who marched yesterday to raise awareness of climate change.

Young people are only too aware that when we older people have shuffled off this mortal coil, they - our grandchildren and great-grandchildren - will be the ones who suffer. (Abridged)

Jackie Evans
Rotorua

Teen's impassioned plea

To suggest that Greta Thunberg was being over-dramatic is an insult to a very brave and intelligent young person.

It has been more than 30 years since scientists raised concerns about global warming and its climatic impacts.

When the UN formed an international scientific body in 1988 to investigate and provide advice on the issue, it was named the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

It was recognised even then that the major issue was not global warming alone, but the likelihood that it would increase the severity and frequency of major climatic events.

Since then, the IPCC has issued increasingly stark warnings about ignoring the impacts of climate change, but because of short-term thinking and self-interest world leaders and industrial giants have failed to act.

We now have reached a point where the scientists' grim forecasts of 30 years ago are being confirmed, as increasingly frequent and severe climate events are causing death and destruction around the world.

Greta Thunberg, therefore, has every right to feel affronted that politicians and industry leaders have neglected to act over the past 30 years, leaving her generation to bear the brunt of the changes that will occur over this century.

If it takes an impassioned plea from someone like her to belatedly shake the world into action, that can only be a good thing.

Keith Garratt
Rotorua