16-year-old Greta Thunberg has recently risen to fame due to her activism to find solutions for climate change. Her great measures of success and achievements have made her a leader to many, as well as a target for criticism.

Thunberg urges change for the rising climate crisis. She first became known for her activism in August 2018 when, at age 15, she began spending her school days outside the Swedish parliament to call for stronger action on global warming by holding up a sign saying, in Swedish, “school strike for climate”.

Greta’s most impressionable quality is her direct manner of speaking to high authorized figures. She stated that she is this way because “I was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, OCD and selective mutism. That basically means I only speak when I think it’s necessary”, in her TED Talk in Stockholm. She called out the government during the UN Climate Action Summit on September 23, at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City, by saying “we are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can think of is money and fairytales of eternal growth: how dare you”.

Those authoritative, older figures have been lashing back on this passionate 16-year-old girl.

Steve Malloy, a member of Donald Trump’s presidential transition team, posts several tweets that oppose climate change, so obviously he would eventually call out Greta Thunberg. On August 10, 2019, he tweeted “when you’ve resorted to a teenage puppet for your public policy argument… you’ve lost.”

Verbal attacks on Greta Thunberg have been coming from many different people for quite some time. Most of them are privileged middle-aged men from the right side of the political spectrum.

Thunberg did not let the insults directed toward her divert her attention from what needs to be done. During her speech at Montreal, she said, “I don’t know why grown-ups choose to mock children and teenagers for just communicating and acting on the science when they could be doing something good instead.”

Greta Thunberg is not interested in fighting these political figures. She is not even interested in the politics of the movement, but she is willing to do what she needs in order to accomplish her main goal. With a young, passionate figure leading the most prominent issue facing her generation and the Earth, a solution for the climate crisis is much more possible than ever before.