sky news

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SEE MURDOCH

SE DENIAL

SEE SHILL LOMBORG

SEE ANDREW BOLT

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hmmn

https://news.sky.com/story/turn-down-your-thermostat-to-defeat-russian-energy-dominance-says-energy-watchdog-12557274

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WIKI 11 25

Sky News Australia - Wikipedia

TALK

denialism of climate change and global warming

This channel is very strong in the spreading of misinformation about climate change and global warming. This should be mention in the article. Examples of the misinformation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqKLTEQjew4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmtytPiTZAo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DGu3bzOlIo

And this is only small example. They are in the business of spreading misinformation about climate change and global warming. This should be mention in the article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 31.154.23.74 (talk) 10:40, 22 September 2019 (UTC) I found a reliable source that says that sky news Australia is spreading misinformation about global warming: https://climatefeedback.org/sky-news-australia-airs-false-climate-information-in-misleading-video-by-rowan-dean/ — Preceding unsigned comment added by 31.154.23.74 (talk) 11:24, 22 September 2019 (UTC)

Climate change and other misinformation...

...

NO LNX

Content

In 2017, Denis Muller, a senior research fellow at the University of Melbourne's Centre for Advancing Journalism, described the channel as having a "split personality", running straight news bulletins and reporting during the day with professional and independent journalists and presenters, while moving toward "right-leaning punditry" in prime time.[4]

In February 2021, Muller, commenting on former Prime Minister and former leader of the Australian Labor Party Kevin Rudd's statement that Sky News was following a pattern laid down by Fox News, described the nighttime programming of Sky News as including "the unconstrained peddling of extreme right-wing propaganda, lies, disinformation, crude distortion of fact, and baseless assertions".[7]

Political alignment and views

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Criticism

:{In August 2018, Sky News was heavily criticised for providing a platform to Blair Cottrell, leader of the far-right, Neo-Nazi organisation United Patriots Front in a one-to-one discussion about immigration on The Adam Giles Show. Sky News presenter Laura Jayes and ABC journalist David Speers were among those critical (both on-air and off-air) of his appearance on the programme due to the fact that he has expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler and claimed to have manipulated women "using violence and terror."^[84][85]

Sky News commentator and former Labor Party minister Craig Emerson resigned in protest after the interview was broadcast, stating that "My father fought Nazis in WWII and was interred in a German POW camp", and that the decision to give Cottrell a platform on Sky News was "another step in a journey to normalising racism & bigotry in our country".^[84] The activist group Sleeping Giants Oz called on advertisers to pull advertising campaigns off Sky News in the wake of the channel's interview with Cottrell.^[86][87]}:

Several high-profile figures have criticised Sky News, including former prime minister Kevin Rudd, who told a media inquiry in February 2021 that it was following the "template" of Fox News in becoming a "legitimising echo-chamber for this increasingly far-right, extremist worldview".^[88] In December 2023, former Victorian premier Daniel Andrews, who was a frequent target of scorn from Sky News pundits during his premiership, referred to the channel's after dark coverage as "bullshit" and "the worst of American politics imported into ours".^[89]

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GMAIL

Marc Morano

Weekly update ⋅ November 14, 2025

Brazil culls thousands of trees to make highway for climate COP30 meeting

Sky News Australia

... Marc Morano joined My Kenny to detail the events unfolding in the leadup to the summit.

9c08e3700df276862db22ff5f1ac7996

09 November 2025 -

Sky News host Chris Kenny highlights how the Brazilian government has “chopped down” thousands of hectares of the Amazon to make way for a highway to ease COP30 traffic. Mr Kenny said it was “unbelievable” to do this for a climate meeting. ‘Climate Depot’ executive editor Marc Morano joined My Kenny to detail the events unfolding in the leadup to the summit.

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std RW US wingnuttery:

Dean was a regular panellist on ABC comedy series Gruen from 2008, and started writing pieces for News Corp Australia and The Australian Financial Review.^[17] Dean became editor of The Spectator Australia in 2014.^[18]

In 2016, Dean became co-host of the Sky News Australia conservative commentary program Outsiders, along with Mark Latham and Ross Cameron.^[19][20] The stated impetus for the program's launch was as an answer to the ABC's weekly Insiders current affairs talk show which, according to Dean, Cameron and Latham, was "the embodiment of an out-of-touch, inner-city Leftist class".^[21] The program has proved controversial. In July 2016, Outsiders guest David Leyonhjelm remarked on air that Australian Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young was "well-known [in parliament] for liking men", leading to an on-air apology from Dean and a producer being stood down.^[22] Dean remains the only original host of the format, with the other two initial co-hosts being fired by the channel for various controversies related to comments made during the program.^[23][24]

Dean is a frequent critic of political correctness and cancel culture and frequently speaks out on controversial cultural issues. He produced a special for Sky News titled The Death of the Aussie Larrikin, in which he and a host of guests contended that political correctness was destroying Australia's larrikin tradition.^[25] Dean has also ridiculed the modern push to rename brands and place names with offensive connotations.^[26] Dean was criticised in The Guardian in June 2016 after compiling a "Poor Me List" (a parody of a rich list) mocking prominent Australians who he perceived as displaying a victim mentality in spite of their success, many of whom were Indigenous Australians or from other ethnic minorities.^[27]

Dean has been accused of misogyny based on his comments about women and feminism.^[28] In December 2018, Spectator Australia published a column that described the Australian Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young in sexualised language, which the Greens leadership called "appalling" and demanded that Sky News and the Australian Financial Review sack Dean.^[29]

In July 2017, Dean suggested on Sky News that the Australian Race Discrimination Commissioner, Tim Soutphommasane, should "leave the country" after Soutphommasane called for more cultural diversity in Australian media and politics.^[30] On Sky News he comically mispronounced Soutphommasane's name and said "Tim, if you don’t like [Australia], join Yassmin, hop on a plane and go back to Laos" in what Junkee's Osman Faruqi called a "blatantly race-based attack".^[31] Soutphommasane was in fact born in Montpellier, France, to Chinese and Laotian parents. Several Sky News presenters publicly distanced themselves from Dean, with Sky's chief political reporter, Kieran Gilbert, describing Dean's comments as "pathetic", "low" and "reprehensible".^[32]

Dean is a supporter of former US President Donald Trump. In November 2016, Dean attended a party at The Rugby Club in Sydney to celebrate the victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 United States presidential election.^[33] In 2018, Dean described Trump as "the greatest president since Ronald Reagan".^[34] Dean prematurely predicted the re-election of Donald Trump in 2020 on Sky News based on early, incomplete results.^[35] In the aftermath of the election, Dean drew criticism from a columnist writing for The Guardian for repeating the debunked and discredited claim that Joe Biden's victory was due to large-scale electoral fraud.^[36][37]

Dean rejects the scientific consensus on climate change and has claimed that human induced climate change is a "hoax".^[38] He was widely criticised for comments he made on Sky News in 2019 that climate change was a "fraudulent and dangerous cult" and that children boycotting school to protest climate inaction was a form of "child abuse".^[39][40]

On 13 December 2020, Dean brought to the public’s attention the Great Reset on Sky News Australia, claiming that "This Great Reset is as serious and dangerous a threat to our prosperity – to your prosperity and your freedom – as we have faced in decades."^[41]

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ref

https://truthout.org/articles/white-house-uses-petition-by-fake-doctors-with-prank-names-to-push-herd-immunity/

white house officials are backing a petition purportedly signed by thousands of doctors that embraces the idea of “herd immunity” for dealing with coronavirus — yet some have called into question the validity of the document being cited, as many of the names appearing on it look to be based on jokes.

The petition cited by officials, according to The New York Times, is called The Great Barrington Declaration. The group of individuals who have signed onto it say that the best way to handle COVID-19 is not through social distancing or other restrictive measures, but by letting healthy young people contract the virus supposedly in order to reach a herd immunity threshold number while protecting older and more vulnerable populations.

The petition allegedly has around 9,000 signatures of doctors from around the world. However, closer inspection of the document has revealed that many of the names are likely fakes.

dozens of names, as reporting from Sky News has uncovered, appear to be common prank jokes — including names like Dr. I.P. Freely, Dr. Person Fakename and Dr. Johnny Bananas. Some signatures may even have been added on without the knowledge of the signers. For instance, one of the names included is that of Harold Shipman, a doctor who was arrested in the late 1990s for killing 200 of his patients.

The legitimacy of the petition itself is questionable, as it doesn’t appear that any authentication was needed with regards to the signer’s credentials. A person could sign on to the petition, then merely check a box saying they were a doctor, in order to be included.

Beyond the embarrassing discovery that the petition looks to be full of fraudulent names, there is the worrisome situation of the White House once again pushing herd immunity as a means of addressing COVID-19.Health experts the world over have cautioned against doing so, with many noting that the practiceis tantamount to the discredited practice of eugenics.

Herd immunity works by having such a high proportion of individuals contract a virus or diseasethat the contagion cannot effectively spread because most of the population has developed antibodies. Vaccines work in similar ways, but the type of herd immunity being pushed by the White House is going in a different direction, with the idea being that a threshold of safety can be reached in a natural way without the help of a vaccine.

The primary authors of the petition now being cited by the White House, Sunetra Gupta and Gabriela Gomes, believe herd immunity can be achieved with just a 10 to 20 percent infection rate. However, most epidemiologists disagree with this idea, as many vaccinations alone require over 90 percent of the population to have antibodies in order to be effective. The threshold for measles, for example, is thought to be 94 percent.

Most experts also believe that the percentage of the U.S. population that’s been exposed to coronavirus is closer to the 10 percent range. “More than 90 percent of the population remains susceptible” to COVID-19, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director Robert Redfield said last month.

Additionally, it’s not yet known that exposure to coronavirus creates a permanent immunity. Indeed, reinfection appears to be a real possibility, as the first confirmed case in the U.S. of a person getting coronavirus twice was discovered recently.

In short, herd immunity is a strategy that should probably be avoided when trying to combat coronavirus, in most experts’ minds, as it could lead to hundreds of thousands of additional deaths if it is widely embraced. Yet it’s a strategy that the White House seems to have adopted as its primary method of dealing with the pandemic.

As of Wednesday afternoon, more than 8.1 million cases of coronavirus have been identified in the U.S., with more than 221,000 deaths resulting from the pandemic so far.

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https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/05/01/fossil-fuel-backed-climate-deniers-rush-promote-michael-moore-planet-of-humans

Climate science deniers and long-time opponents of renewable energy, many with ties to oil and gas companies, have seized on Michael Moore’s latest documentary to argue the case for continued fossil fuel dependence.

Planet of the Humans investigates the environmental footprint of renewable technologies such as wind, solar and biomass, and argues that the green movement has sold out to corporate interests. The documentary has been viewed over five million times on YouTube since its release last week to coincide with the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day.

But the film, produced by Moore and written and directed by his long-time collaborator Jeff Gibbs, has been widely criticised by energy and climate experts, who say it fails to provide context on the benefits of renewable energy and the negative impacts of fossil fuels, and is based on out-of-date information.

A group of environmentalists and climate scientists, including Professor of Atmospheric Science Michael Mann, who was this week elected to the National Academy of Sciences, has described the documentary as “shockingly misleading” and called for it to be withdrawn.

In contrast, the film has been heavily promoted in recent days by commentators known for their rejection of mainstream climate science and support for fossil fuels, including some with direct ties to the industry.

While the film’s anti-economic growth and population control message has not appealed to the free-market philosophies of many of these commentators, its criticism of renewables struck a chord, with the narratives used generally taking one of three forms.

‘Renewables are ineffective and more damaging than fossil fuels and nuclear’

The US-based libertarian Heartland Institute, which hosts “counter-summits” alongside UN climate conferences and has taken funding from fossil fuel interests including oil major ExxonMobil, was quick to host a podcast episode dedicated to Moore’s documentary.

One of the Heartland employees contributing to the podcast praised it for doing a “really good job of ticking off all the downsides” to renewables, which he claimed were the “least efficient way that you can try to generate electricity”.

Another said the “green weenies” could have “learned all of this stuff about the folly of wind and solar” by “coming to Heartland Institute conferences and reading our website”.

Myron Ebell, Director of Energy and Environment at the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute and a regular speaker at Heartland conferences, has written a blog lauding the film. In the article, since reposted by the UK-based climate science denial campaign group the Global Warming Policy Foundation,Ebell claims the film “exposes” every type of green energy as “phony, useless, and inextricably dependent on fossil fuel production and large-scale hardrock mining”.

Both Heartland and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which has similarly received funding from Exxon and the Koch family, owners of the largest privately owned oil company in the US, have sought to pressure Donald Trump into removing the United States from the Paris Agreement on climate change action.

Environmental commentator and nuclear enthusiast Michael Shellenberger also reacted positively to Moore’s film, tweeting that it proves “renewables are worse for environment than fossil fuels”.

... no lnx pix twt

Environmental commentator and nuclear enthusiast Michael Shellenberger also reacted positively to Moore’s film, tweeting that it proves “renewables are worse for environment than fossil fuels”.

In a column for Forbes, he argued that nuclear was the only answer to our energy needs, claiming solar panels require more materials to build and create more waste than nuclear plants. While solar panels can create a certain amount of potentially hazardous waste, around 80% of a panel is recyclable and solutions are being developed for the remaining materials.

Later interviewed by Sky News Australia’s Andrew Bolt, who has been criticised for repeatedly dismissing mainstream climate science, Shellenberger claimed most countries would need to use roughly 50% of their land to produce 100% renewable energy. Many studies have found the figure to be considerably lower.

The far-right news website Breitbart similarly claimed the documentary reveals that the solar and wind industries “pretend to be saving the planet from climate change while consuming more fossil fuels than they save”, despite research showing their carbon footprint to be many times lower.

In the UK, pro-Trump commentator James Delingpolewrote on the same website that Moore’s documentary was the “most powerful, brutally honest and important documentary of his career”.

He said it “clearly shows that renewable energy is damaging to the landscape and to wildlife and does NOT reduce the use of fossil fuels”. He suggested it could help Trump win the upcoming US election because it “undermines the entire basis of the Green New Deal” advocated by some Democrats. Elsewhere, Delingpole has called Moore his “new hero” and praised the film for “causing greenie heads to explode”.

Breitbart News, whose UK branch Delingpole edits, was co-founded by Steve Bannon, former White House Chief Strategist for Donald Trump, and board member of scandal-hit political consultancy Cambridge Analytica. Breitbart and Cambridge Analytica were both financially backed by long-standing funders of climate science denial, the Mercer Family.

Matt Ridley, an author and former chairman of the Northern Rock bank, whose collapse precipitated the 2008 financial crash in the UK, has also applauded Planet of the Humans for being “extremely critical of the green renewable energy industry, saying it’s just as industrial as the fossil fuel industry, in fact it’s dependent on it”.

Speaking in a webinar organised by the British Conservation Alliance, a student network that describes itself as the “home of conservative climate solutions”, Ridley, who has a coal mine on his family estate, said you “simply cannot run a modern economy on wind or solar because there just isn’t enough space for putting up the panels or the windmills. And there isn’t enough resources.”

‘Renewable energy is a profit-driven scam and the environmental movement is corrupt’

These groups and individuals have also used the film to promote the narrative that renewable energy is a scam, backed by crony capitalists colluding with environmentalists.

In his blog about the film, theCompetitive Enterprise Institute’s Myron Ebellcalled it a “stunning evisceration of so-called green energy and the people profiting from it”.

Moore’s documentary was also the subject of an interview by the Canadian far-right news site Rebel News with Marc Morano, Communications Director of CFACT, a Washington-based free-market think tank that has claimed carbon dioxide is a “harmless trace essential gas in the atmosphere”.

Morano called Planet of the Humans an “amazing film” during the interview with host Ezra Levant, with the only downside being that Moore “believes in climate alarmism severely”.

Asked by Rebel News host Ezra Levant whether Moore produced the documentary because “he hated the fact these billionaires were tricking everyone”, Morano said the filmmaker “sees all the con that they’re doing and who’s profiting and who’s making money”. CFACT has taken funding from ExxonMobil and billionaire industrialists the Koch brothers.

A similar narrative was used by Robert Bradley Jr, founder of the Koch-fundedInstitute for Energy Research, when pre-release screenings of the documentary took place last summer.

In a blog post for a pro-fracking website Natural Gas Now, Bradley Jr described renewables as “mostly a hedge-fund scam”. The Pennsylvania-based Natural Gas Now is run by Tom Shepstone, a former employee ofEnergy in Depth, a PR campaign launched by the Independent Petroleum Association of America to promote fracking, with funding from oil majors including Shell, BP and Chevron.

In Australia, Sky News’ Andrew Bolthighlighted a scene from the documentary showing corporate executives awkwardly trying to explain where the energy for the electric vehicles they were promoting was coming from.

Bolt assured viewers he didn’t agree with many of the points the film makes, but nonetheless claimed “all this effort of green power, all this expense, is for next to nothing”, despite studies repeatedly finding that electric vehicles reduce emissions even in heavily coal-dependent power grids.

Another presenter on the same channel, Rowan Dean, similarly described renewables as a “hoax”.

In Canada, Terence Corcoran, comment editor for the Financial Post section of the Toronto-based National Post, said Moore’s film showed green energy was a “giant capitalist fraud” and should be the “hottest doc of the year”.

Corcoran has previously dismissed warnings about climate change from the UN and downplayed threats the Arctic, criticising the “sensational language in the media and elsewhere that implies the Arctic is heading into some kind of oblivion. A changing Canadian Arctic might even be good.”

In the UK, James Delingpole wrote on Breitbart that renewables were “a monstrous, dirty, ugly scam, orchestrated by a cynical few at the expense of the many”, while Andrew Montford, Deputy Director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, tweeted that the documentary showed “the green movement is just a way to make a few dishonest capitalists very rich. Greens have been lying to everyone for 25 years”. The GWPF refuses to disclose its sources of funding, but has been revealed to be bankrolled by a number of wealthy donors, many of which financially supported the UK’s pro-Brexit campaign, including billionaire hedge fund manager Michael Hintze and currency trader Neil Record.

‘Environmentalists are now trying to cover up the truth’

Following the call from some environmentalists to have the film removed, opponents of climate action have since accused them of censorship.

The GWPF’s Montford tweeted in response: “You know the Michael Moore film is right about renewables because the greens are trying to have it taken down rather than arguing their case. Just as they always do”.

Another GWPF employee, Harry Wilkinson, Head of Policy at the organisation’s campaign wing, tweeted: “This is a classic. The Guardian endorse censoring a film exposing the environmental consequences of renewables, labelling it 'full of misinformation'. But fail to identify a single inaccurate fact in the documentary.”

The letter, organised by the director of the anti-fracking documentary Gasland, Josh Fox, and co-signed by climate scientist Michael Mann among others, said Moore’s film “trades in debunked fossil fuel industry talking points” and “ignores the last ten years of peer-reviewed renewable energy planning and policy”.

In the US, an article on the film in the Daily Caller, founded by Fox News host Tucker Carlson and majority funded by the Charles Koch Foundation, reported that climate activists had failed to “browbeat” the Films for Action website, which is hosting the documentary in addition to YouTube, into taking down the film. The article was reposted by the popular climate science denial blog, Watts Up With That?

Sky News Austrlia’s Chris Kenny also hinted that Australia’s public broadcaster ABC was deliberately burying the film, stating: “it seems the ABC has forgotten about Mike Moore and this film. Last I checked they hadn't reported on it at all. It seems to present too many inconvenient truths.”

The ABC was widely praised for its coverage of the Australian wildfires at the beginning of the 2020, while Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, which owns Sky News Australia, was criticised for its “irresponsible” coverage of the fires. Murdoch’s son James said he was “disappointed” with the media company’s climate science denial and a News Corp employee resigned saying she could no longer work for an organisation that she claimed was running a “misinformation campaign” around the wildfires.

Criticism of the film

Dana Nuccitelli,Yale Climate Connections: “Michael Moore's 'Planet of the Humans' documentary peddles dangerous climate denial”

Ketan Joshi: “Planet of the humans: A reheated mess of lazy, old myths”

Leah C. Stokes, Vox: “Michael Moore produced a film about climate change that’s a gift to Big Oil”

Dan Gearino, Inside Climate News: “Inside Clean Energy: 6 Things Michael Moore’s ‘Planet of the Humans’ Gets Wrong”

Brian Kahn,Gizmodo: “Planet of the Humans Comes This Close to Actually Getting the Real Problem, Then Goes Full Ecofascism”

A Siegel, Get Energy Smart Now: “Planet of The Humans: An Annotated Collection“

---

cpac vid

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKET8Hs2aac

sky news aust murdoch

Self-proclaimed "climate realist" and "anti-Greta Thunberg sensation" Naomi Seibt says while she doesn’t deny the climate is warming, "the effect is absolutely insignificant”. Ms Seibt said the world "did benefit from some amount of warming” because it encouraged “better crop yields” which she said allowed the earth to sustain a growing population. According to Ms Seibt, Greta Thunberg’s rejection of the European Union’s proposal of zero net emissions by 2050 was “just another way to spread panic”. “I have never heard her talk about the science so how is she supposed to know anything about the perfect political measures to take when it comes to climate change,” Ms Seibt told Sky News host Chris Smith. “We need cheap and reliable energy” and "we cannot drive people into eco-depression, eco-anxiety and energy-poverty. “It’s fantastic if we invest in research on alternative energy sources” but we must be careful not to “demonize alternative sources like nuclear energy,” she said.

Greta Thunberg, at age 16, has quickly become one of the most visible climate activists in the world. Her detractors increasingly rely on ad hominem attacks to blunt her influence.

Thunberg gained prominence after she began skipping some days of school to protest climate inaction outside Swedish parliament. She spearheaded the school walkouts that saw more than a million children across the globe leaving their classrooms to demand action on global warming.

She has addressed world and U.N. leaders and has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Later this month, she'll sail across the Atlantic Ocean in a 60-foot yacht powered by solar panels and underwater turbines on her way to participate in the U.N. climate talks in New York (*see related story*).

But the success of Thunberg — who describes herself on Twitter as a "16 year old climate activist with Asperger" — remains a sore point for those who reject mainstream climate science and some who have helped shape or encourage the Trump administration's rollback of climate policy.

They frequently point to Thunberg's autism, claim she is used by her parents and compare her call to young people on climate change to "Hitler Youth." They have pointed to her "monotone voice" and framed her as a "millenarian weirdo" with the "look of apocalyptic dread in her eyes."

A recent opinion piece in The New York Times prompted an outcry among climate hawks and Thunberg's allies, who said the newspaper was validating these types of personal attacks on the teenage activist.

Experts say relying on ad hominem attacks has significant collateral damage in that they dissuade people with intellectual and developmental disabilities from speaking publicly. While the language of describing someone as a "puppet" or abused by adults may appear coded, it's clearly a dog whistle that signals her words should be discounted because her mind works differently, said Steve Silberman, author of "NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity."

"It's classic autism bashing," he said. "They feel at liberty to do it because autism has been framed as a pathology for decades, so they feel like they don't have to hold back, than just 'other' her, turn her into a freak when she's actually making more sense than 95% of the adults who have addressed this issue for the last 30 years."

Patrick Moore, chairman of the board of directors of the CO2 Coalition, which promotes the benefits of carbon dioxide, wrote on Twitter that "Greta=Evil." In an interview with E&E News, Moore denied that his numerous mentions of Thunberg's autism in media appearances and on social media were attacks on her disability but that he instead was "comparing her masters to Hitler."

He said that Thunberg's public speeches were written for her, that she was a "puppet" and that she was unable to answer questions in interviews because her ideas were not her own.

"They aren't her ideas," he said. "There's a reason why 16-year-olds don't vote, don't drink, don't drive, don't whatever. At that age, she is not an adult, and therefore she has no right to influence people in a political process."

Moore's group has been increasingly active on Capitol Hill and in the Trump administration. CO2 Coalition co-founder Will Happer is now serving on the National Security Council at the White House and spearheaded a shelved plan to conduct an "adversarial" review of climate science. Moore was recently invited by congressional Republicans to downplay an alarming U.N. extinction report.

Earlier this year, Trump enthusiastically tweeted a quote from a Moore performance on Fox News in which Moore said climate science was "fake news" and that more carbon dioxide would be good for humanity.

Moore said he was seeking to show Thunberg "is a full-blown tool of adults."

"She is being abused by her parents, by Al Gore, by society at large that is on side with this ideology as if there is a climate emergency," he said. "What a nonsensical, stupid concept, there is no climate emergency, I think you know, otherwise people would be fleeing from it."

While her critics claim to attack Thunberg for ideas, critiques that mention her personal traits are harmful and reliant on "prejudiced ideas about autistic people," said Zoe Gross, a spokeswoman for the Autistic Self Advocacy Network. People are quick to label autistic traits, including tone of voice and facial expressions, as "creepy." She said criticism of Thunberg that highlights the way she speaks, answers questions and displays emotions is clearly an attempt to belittle her.

"Some people may be making assumptions out of ignorance ... but others are explicitly saying that autistic people are not worth listening to," Gross wrote in an email response to questions. "It's upsetting to see any person being belittled because of their disability, especially a child. People with all kinds of disabilities can form and express opinions, speak up for ourselves and others, and become advocates and leaders."

Thunberg's critics include those who have been close to the Trump EPA.

Steve Milloy, who served on the Trump administration's EPA transition team and has pushed to restrict the use of science at the agency, has referred to Thunberg as an "adult-exploited empty-headed child."

"She's ignorant, maniacal and is being mercilessly manipulated by adult climate bedwetters funded by Putin," he wrote recently on Twitter.

At his congressional hearing, Moore testified alongside Marc Morano, who works for the conservative Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow and has a blog that misrepresents and attacks climate science. Morano has been invited by the Trump administration to EPA events weakening the role of science at the agency; he was photographed giving his book "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change" to former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. Morano's blog describes Thunberg as an "autistic prophet." In his Twitter feed, Morano retweets criticisms of her that center on her autism.

"She hasn't been called a mascot. Which; is really what she is. She'll get a Nobel Prize and a wanna-be Ph.d. from Harvard. For being autistic and not going to school," wrote one follower retweeted by Morano.

Conservative media have also begun using Thunberg's character traits in an attempt to minimize her words. A columnist at The Federalist, for instance, recently wrote that Thunberg's struggles with autism while growing up "bred in her an absolutist attitude that is far from attractive." An editor of the right-wing British magazine Spiked, which receives funding from the Koch brothers network, called Thunberg a "weirdo" and wrote that "there is something chilling and positively pre-modern about Ms Thunberg."

Andrew Bolt, a Sky News host, recently wrote a column that called Thunberg "deeply disturbed."

"I have never seen a girl so young and with so many mental disorders treated by so many adults as a guru," he wrote. "But Thunberg has something very rare as well: a sense of absolute certainty. She shows not the slightest doubt and forgives not the slightest compromise. This allows followers who are tormented with doubt and burden of freedom to relax into her totalitarian certainty. And in Thunberg's case, that certainty comes from what normally would be seen as a disability."

In the New York Times opinion piece, The Weekly Standard editor Christopher Caldwell called Thunberg a "complicated adolescent."

"Intellectually, she is precocious and subtle," Caldwell wrote. "She reasons like a well-read but dogmatic student radical in her 20s. Physically, she is diminutive and fresh-faced, comes off as younger than her years, and frequently refers to herself as a 'child' — about the last thing the average 16-year-old would ever do."

Thunberg's autism actually informs her activism and motivates her to speak out against the falsehoods spouted by climate deniers, said Silberman, the author of "NeuroTribes." He said she doesn't pay any attention to the false notion of a "debate" in climate science.

Thunberg speaks like "one of the few people who has woken up out of this fever dream of bullshit that's spread by these right-wing politicians and oil company misinformation," Silberman said.

"Unlike most neurotypical people, she can't just shrug off the fact that of course oil company executives are going to lie and politicians who are beholden to them are going to lie," he said. "She can't abide that, it bothers her almost viscerally."

For her part, Thunberg has said that autism is "not a 'gift'" but that it "CAN be a superpower."

"I've had my fair share of depressions, alienation, anxiety and disorders," she wrote in a Facebook post in April. "But without my diagnosis, I would never have started school striking. Because then I would have been like everyone else."

Twitter: @scottpwaldman Email: swaldman@eenews.net