Canadian MP Laurel Collins does not like the term climate hysteria. She made that clear in this video:

Use of the terms: climate emergency, climate crisis, climate breakdown, climate collapse, climate threat, and climate chaos are permissible forms of expression, but the use of the word hysteria in conjunction with climate is tantamount to a personal insult to her womanhood. This is an all-too-common tactic employed by women and minorities on the Left. She feigns outrage and then anoints herself as the arbitrator of what constitutes permissible language in a debate. The aim is to capture the moral high ground from your opponent and restrict his ability to express himself.

MP Collins wanted to convey the message that she was not being hysterical when she gets emotional over climate change. Instead, she ended up reinforcing every stereotype that one might harbor about hysteria being a womanly infliction. She started out by subjecting her audience to a tedious lecture on the linguistic origin of the word hysteria and then went off on a hysterical tirade about her womb, her children, and the intersection of gender and climate. You would not want to be in a foxhole with this woman when the enemy is approaching.

Laurel’s rant was instructive in one respect: she brought to my attention the widening gender gap that exists on the issue of climate change.  Climate change is turning more and more into an issue that exclusively animates educated, middle-class white women and leaves everyone else yawning. Why is that? In my estimation, no one offers a better explanation than Prof. Dick Lindzen in the following passage from his lecture in 2018 at the Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF):

Interestingly, however, ‘ordinary’ people (as opposed to our ‘educated’ elites) tend to see through the nonsense being presented. What is it about our elites that makes them so vulnerable, and what is it about many of our scientists that leads them to promote such foolishness? The answers cannot be very flattering to either. Let us consider the ‘vulnerable’ elites first.

1. They have been educated in a system where success has been predicated on their ability to please their professors. In other words, they have been conditioned to rationalize anything.

2. While they are vulnerable to false narratives, they are far less economically vulnerable than are ordinary people. They believe themselves wealthy enough to withstand the economic pain of the proposed policies, and they are clever enough to often benefit from them.

3. The narrative is trivial enough for the elite to finally think that they ‘understand’ science.

4. For many (especially on the right), the need to be regarded as intelligent causes them to fear that opposing anything claimed to be ‘scientific’ might lead to their being regarded as ignorant, and this fear overwhelms any ideological commitment to liberty that they might have.

None of these factors apply to ‘ordinary’ people. This may well be the strongest argument for popular democracy and against the leadership of those ‘who know best.’