The photoshopped image of teenager “climate activist” Greta Thunberg displaying an impatient attitude over the waters of flooded Venice, with the caption: “I told you”, has been widely circulating on Twitter.

The implication, since the Swedish girl is particularly energetic (to the point of sacrificing school attendance) in the “fight against global warming”, as she would probably put it, is that the recent high water in Venice was caused by “climate change”. I use here the inverted commas because, if there is something that climate (and weather, its short-time and local expression) always does, it is to change. To talk about climate change as an exceptional catastrophe is a bit like talking about baby birth as a very unusual occurrence: babies are always born, unless of course they are killed before, accidentally or, much more often these days, intentionally.

But those who support those theories had the clever idea of resorting to the neutral “climate change” denomination, a non-committal name which didn’t hold their views up to scrutiny as much as “global cooling” did in the 1970s and “global warming” in later years. Since climate always changes, they will always be right, they must have thought.

Here’s the news: Venice has always been sinking since the very moment of its foundation in the highly precarious environment of the lagoon, and the phenomenon known as “acqua alta” is constant and recurring every winter, with peaks of high water about as high or, in 1966, even higher than this November.

The idea of a connection between Venice floods and “climate change” holds – pardon the pun – no water.

Although Greta Thunberg herself was likely not involved in this photoshop, a society that lets a 16-year-old pontificate to UN world leaders and Swedish Parliament dictating to them what they have to do, must have reached a great level of infantilism and child worshipping.

The BBC has now announced that this adolescent will be, along with a Supreme Court president and one of the best-known senior journalists and editors in the UK, one of the five guest editors of its flagship current-affairs radio programme, the Today show.

This is what the BBC does traditionally every Christmas holiday: allowing high-profile individuals to guest edit.

The broadcaster said: “Thunberg will speak to the world’s leading climate change figures and hear from frontline activists.”

The child has also been nominated for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. Could the motivation for this honour, which at least in theory should be given to people of high intellect, be in this case that the girl displayed great ingenuity in creating out of thin air an excuse for kids who want to skip school?

The absurdity of it all is that Greta, against her intentions (and of those who sponsor her), has shown how in reality unsustainable – a word overused by environmentalists but apt here – a world without fossil fuels is: who can afford to travel by billionaire yachts and take 2 weeks of sailing instead of a few hours’ flight to go from A to B, as she has recently done when she crossed the Atlantic on the Malizia II “zero-carbon yacht” of Prince Pierre Casiraghi of Monaco?

Thunberg is often seen wearing a scowl, and her constant “How dare you?” punctuates her speeches. When she speaks without that angry scowl, as in some videos, Greta is actually a likeable person. But an exaggeratedly self-righteous teenager may become a highly toxic weapon used by adults with an agenda.