In times like ours, questions are more important than answers. Everybody seems to have an answer, but only few know which are the right questions to ask.

But we need to ask questions, and the right ones. Greta Thunberg, the sixteen-year-old 'child' who, somehow like Joan of Arc, has embarked on a personal crusade to save humanity raises a lot of questions. Not necessarily the right ones.

Greta Thunberg is a Swedish schoolgirl, the daughter of an opera singer and of an author, and granddaughter of a film director and actor. She has been campaigning since last year to raise awareness on climate change.

She has said that she has Asperger syndrome (AS). Her mother confirmed that, when she was younger, Greta started reading about global warming and climate change and was so impressed that she fell into a depression.

What are the questions raised by Greta's message and public persona?

Let's start with the latter.

Does AS make Greta less credible? Is the girl delusional? If the girl is delusional because of her condition, then whatever she's saying amounts to rubbish.

The respected website WebMD has this to say about AS: "When you meet someone who has Asperger syndrome, you might notice two things right off. He's just as smart as other folks, but he has more trouble with social skills. He also tends to have an obsessive focus on one topic or perform the same behaviors again and again."

I haven't found anything that suggests that Asperger syndrome gives rise to delusions. What it does is enable the emergence of an obsession ­- and Greta is clearly obsessed - with climate change. Is this a bad thing? Not at all, if her obsession serves the Common Good.

So questions relating to her personally are useless; actually, they deviate attention from the more important questions - those related to her message.

Let's be frank: Greta is naïve. She ignores completely the complexities of life, the realities of big business, lobbies, politics (national, institutional, party, and so on), and all the other contours of the political and economic topography of modern capitalist, industrialised societies.

She looks at the world through the eyes of a child, even though she is 16 years old.

How does a child look at the world? A child is unaware of all the intricacies that grown-ups are aware of. A child simply sees 'facts'. Whereas all grown-ups keep quiet when the king goes about naked, it is a child who says what everyone else sees but doesn't have the courage to pronounce.

What are the 'facts' that Greta sees through the eyes of a child, that is to say, the facts in their complete, unadulterated bareness?

Greta has said that she spent innumerable hours absorbing information about climate change. Then her Asperger syndrome kicked in and she got obsessed with these 'facts'.

Now the most important question of all: are the 'facts' that obsess Greta real 'facts'? It is a fact that there is a lot of din about climate change. Which means that Greta is not delusional. The din is there.

But is this din based on real 'facts'? Is the information that Greta absorbed and is obsessed about based on evidence or is it fake/incorrect?

Is the cause of the din real? Is climate change real?

These questions give rise to two corollary questions. If climate change is real, is it caused by humans? And if so, is it caused exclusively by humans or only in part?

This is where the issue becomes thorny. If climate change is caused exclusively by humans, then we must stop what we are doing, and save ourselves and future generations.

If climate change is only in part caused by human activity, then we have to determine the extent to which human activity is contributing and, once we're done with that (it's a humongous task, by the way), analyse the economic argument  that we can wait another 50 years before doing anything to stop climate change while permitting the poor to catch up with the well-being created by the polluting rich.

Now begins the cacophony.

On January 27, 2012, The Wall Street Journal published a letter signed by a sizeable number of scientists and meteorologists titled, 'No Need to Panic About Global Warming: There's no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to 'decarbonize' the world's economy'. You could tell me that it's The Wall Street Journal and that it supports the cause of the polluters, those whose fortunes depend on the shameless abuse of the environment. That would be a most valid point.

Another example of the cacophony: earlier this year (in February), The Guardian reported that the German transport minister, Andreas Scheuer, called for a review of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) limits claiming that 'increasing voices' in Germany's medical profession were casting doubt on the science behind clean air benchmarks. It would seem that 107 German lung specialists argued that health fears about vehicle exhaust emissions had been overblown.

Another example: In 1999, the journal Nature reported that environmental degradation can be reduced when the affected animals evolve quickly. Cornell biologist Nelson G. Hairston Jr. wrote that it appeared "that ecological events that we think of as occurring relatively quickly - such as nutrient enrichment of a lake - can be influenced by the rapid evolution of the animals that are affected." Phosphorus pollution in a German lake had given rise to a different kind of bacteria and crustaceans that feed on bacteria adapted by changing their diet - in less than 30 years.

So, on the one hand, we have the science 'establishment' (the stuff Greta read and obsessed about) telling us that climate change and pollution will destroy wildlife, the Earth, and... well... humanity. On the other, we get different voices telling us that there is no scientific evidence to back such dramatic claims, and that evidence shows that wildlife adapts to pollution.

If, like yours truly, one is not a scientist, one ends up confused. In whom should we repose our trust? In the establishment? In dissenting voices?

As usual, the ultimate question has to be, 'Cui bono?' Who stands to gain from anything that we hear?

The big problem is that the world has become so complex and information channels so corrupt, that we simply do not have enough reliable information to be able to answer that ultimate question. Despite the internet and the information deluge, we do not have reliable information. We are strangers in a strange world that is rich in information but poor in authority.

One school of thought tries to convince us that climate change is a hoax, cooked up by certain companies that would stand to gain financially from environmentally friendly measures, and by governments that want to use climate change as an excuse to curb our freedoms.

But are hoaxes real? The case of the German transport minister seems to corroborate the 'conspiracy theory' view that hoaxes can be real. In his case, by denying the connection between car exhaust fumes and lung disease, he was clearly trying to help the struggling German car industry. Something similar had happened a number of decades before, when doctors helped the tobacco industry convince consumers that smoking had no effect on lungs.

So is it all a hoax? Are the scientists who insist that there is no climate change accomplices in a hoax, possibly financed by big multinationals that make a killing out of killing the planet? Are the scientists who claim that there is climate change victims to the power of an ideological dogma?

But more importantly, is human activity the sole cause of climate change? If in the pre-industrial past there were different ice ages (in the plural), what caused them?

If human activity is only partly responsible for climate change, should we still be doing something about it?

We need answers. But first we need to focus on the right questions to ask.

In the meantime, Luxembourg - only slightly larger than Malta geographically, but much much bigger mentally - will contribute €200 million to support developing countries in the fight against climate change. The funding will cover the next five years and is almost twice the amount of Luxembourg's previous contribution. This was declared by Luxembourgish Prime Minister Xavier Bettel during a UN meeting. Our own prime minister, who also went to the UN, seems impervious to all this, and instead focussed on LGBT, women and children in his speech. It's all a matter of priorities, but something tells me that Mr Bettel's priorities are more attuned to the real needs of humanity than the priorities of our own prime minister.

 

A propos of the UN

We are once again being taken for a ride. The script was the same Helena Dalli so eloquently explained in that video-clip some time ago, when she proudly described how the Maltese electorate was taken for an epoch-making ride. On 23 September, Malta participated - with 57 other countries - in the Kaag statement, insisting on the availability of "all health services, including sexual and reproductive health, and rights."

This was nothing but play with words.

The Kaag statement is to be understood in the light of another statement, also made at the UN, the Azar statement, which reads: "We do not support references to ambiguous terms and expressions, such as sexual and reproductive health and rights in UN documents, because they can undermine the critical role of the family and promote practices, like abortion, in circumstances that do not enjoy international consensus and which can be misinterpreted by UN agencies. Such terms do not adequately take into account the key role of the family in health and education, nor the sovereign right of nations to implement health policies according to their national context. There is no international right to an abortion and these terms should not be used to promote pro-abortion policies and measures."

Malta took part in the Kaag statement without any reservations.

Why do we care? Because without any popular mandate and in the most dishonest fashion, it seems that plans are again afoot to introduce abortion in this country.