Greta Thunberg’s prominence is sullied by the incredibly unfortunate reality that the teenager has been grotesquely proselytized and exploited by a cabal of opportunistic adults intent on leveraging a fraudulent climate crusade to elevate globalism, dispense with capitalism, and rupture the fossil-fuel industry.

Thunberg has made two particularly inauspicious remarks this year, starting at January’s World Economic Forum in Davos, where she conveyed, “I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house was on fire, because it is.”

Then, at this week’s United Nations Climate Action Summit, she intoned, “You all come to us young people for hope. How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words, and yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is the money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.”

Ricochet editor-in-chief Jon Gabriel observes, “None of this is healthy, neither for Ms. Thunberg nor for anyone else. Especially other kids.” Indeed it’s not.

As foolish as it may sound to rational thinkers, climate anxiety is blighting the impressionable minds of our youth. An extremely disheartening tweet is currently floating around Twitter in which a man informs us that a 14-year-old kid at his wife’s school took his own life due to overwhelming fear related to climate change.

Furthermore, Gabriel notes, “According to the National Institutes of Health, nearly one-third of all 13- to 18-year olds will experience an anxiety disorder. The numbers continue to go up; between 2007 and 2012, anxiety in children and teens rose 20 percent. The suicide rate for young Americans is now the highest ever recorded. Between 2000 and 2017, the number of suicides has doubled for females aged 15 to 24. Males between 15 and 19 killed themselves at a rate of 17.9 per 100,000, up from 13 per 100,000 in 2000.”

In other words, while committing suicide over something as nuanced as global warming should be incomprehensible, child anxiety isn’t all that unusual. And it can come in any form. Child suicide “is no joke,” says Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore, who broke ties with the organization in the 1980s. “Young people have always been vulnerable to feelings of hopelessness. Greta is fueling those fears.”

And yet it’s very important that we peg the real catalyst of that fear. It’s not Thunberg. It’s those who have convinced her and others that “mass extinction” is underway. The corollary is more suicides.

We’re constantly being lectured that people will die from global warming. The irony is that people are dying over global-warming rhetoric.