Don't Mock Greta Thunberg. Listen to Her.

There is nothing rational about opposition to teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg, who was just named Time’s Person of the Year. Critics are entitled to their subjective opinions that some other person had more impact or that some other problem is more pressing, and President Donald Trump can, predictably, mock the choice, but Thunberg is well aligned with mainstream science and with climate-savvy economists.

Despite years of hate mail, disinformation campaigns and ridicule, the mainstream science community has made a strong position even stronger, thanks to more data from the atmosphere, the ground, the oceans and ice cores, as well as better computer models. And now they’re observing the unfolding of long-predicted global changes in real time. Al Gore had been right all along to scare people in his 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth.