Al Gore was neither young, a girl, nor autistic, but he received a similar response. And still does, in fact, even after years out of the spotlight. Perhaps this has nothing to do with her and is simply disagreement over the issue.
Gore did have the same message. His predictions of imminent apocalypse were wrong, and many of us old enough to remember that are naturally skeptical about the latest batch of apocalyptic predictions.
And the venom? That exists on the fringes of any political issue, and advocates amplify the voices of a few loudmouthed fools to discredit any reasoned disagreement. The perception of widespread hate is manufactured.
These are merely multipliers, not in it self constituting the whole impact. What had more impact was the record drought throughout Europe that happend when she started her thing. Even the most critical people at that time realized that the weather was doing something that it usually didn't do.
I am not an American and Al Gore is not as widely perceived here as in the US I suppose (also because the whole climate thing is not such a polarizing issue over here).
> The perception of widespread hate is manufactured.
Is it really? I didn't see such strong reactions against a single person for a long time. Middle aged men setting posers of a 16 year old girl on fire on the street. I mean really – how is that normal?
I haven't heard about that (and can't find it). How many people were burning posters? If it was just a few, that's another example of the amplification I mentioned. A few crazy people are elevated as representative of the opposition.
The Washington Post ran a story like that. "Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg is sailing to America amid a storm of online attacks"[1]. Their evidence for that "storm"? Three tweets.
1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/08/15/swedish-clim...
But beyond that the amount of such voices I wittnessed in my feeds also isn't too small and I neither followed Greta Thunberg nor do I have many environmentalists in my feeds.
Literally every news article daring to mentioning her had 40-50+ "critical" voices with a perceived majority of men that could have been her father.
So all of what I say here is obviously very subjective and I am convinced that you are right, when you speak of a loud minority. What fascinated me is how middle aged men go and under their real name rant about a 16 year old girl and still feel like they are doing the right thing. And I don't mean trolls, I mean guys that really do think this is what they need to do.
Myself I didn't really deal with Greta Thunberg. I think it is nice that she creates attention for this important topic, espcially among audiences who wouldn't be reached by pure scientific publications, but personally I am not that interested in what she says, because her points are mostly moral and ethical and I agree with the general idea that we need to drastically change things even if it hurts.
The mechanism is simple: What Greta does, feels to them like she is holding a mirror in front of their faces. They hate what they see. They cannot bring what they see together with their self-image. So instead of going to the bottom of their own feelings and exploring why that girl enrages them so much, they rationalize it: "she isn't a real environmentalist, because she didn't do X or Y propperly" etc.
The world however still thinks she is on the right side of history and then they realize that just rationalizing it to themselves won't cut it. So they open the browser, log in, ...
To their defense: most probably don't even realize it works that way. Many men are quite bad at understanding their own feelings because they never learned how to do it. But sadly lying to themselves will likely make it worse..