> We grew up with the threat of nuclear destruction
The difference is that nuclear destruction required some sort of action. Climate catastrophe just requires inaction. "Do nothing and we're OK" vs. "do nothing and we're toast" is a pretty big difference psychologically. The idea that it might be too late for any action to change the outcome only makes it worse.
> as well as global warming
I was old enough to be aware at the time, and the level of concern about global warming then is practically nothing compared to what it is now. People were at least as concerned about a nuclear winter.
Responding to others' concerns with "big deal, I had it worse" is almost never helpful. Regardless of whether those concerns are objectively valid or among those you personally share, an empathetic and curious response would be to understand why those concerns loom so large and what can be done to allay them.
- It was only a possibility. You also knew the nukes might not launch, the world might not end.
- If the nukes did launch, it wouldn't be due to a moral failure of your own.
- Although you may sometimes have felt scared or depressed about the USSR and MAD, you weren't being constantly told by your society that optimism was illegitimate thoughtcrime.
Climate doomerism is pretty much ideal for creating mental health issues. It tells adherents that they have no future outside of some hellscape, that it's all their own fault or maybe their parents fault, the root cause is moral failure, that maybe it can be stopped except SURPRISE no it can't really, and that any deviation from any of these beliefs makes you utterly evil and depraved, absolutely worth of immediate and total ex-communication from your friendship groups.
Personally I think it's more likely to be the phones, but there are enough anecdotes about real young people whose thought processes around the future have been totally broken by climate propaganda, that it's worth taking seriously.
I have no idea what you mean by "climate propaganda".
I just lived in a place that experienced 8 consecutive heat waves that shattered all known records in the area and which will destroy the regional economic livelihood.
A totally unprecedented event, which we know with quite a bit of certainty will begin to occur frequently.
I have no idea how you expect polite society to accept that without distress.
When people don't even realize it exists, that's the mark of truly successful propaganda!
"8 consecutive heat waves that shattered all known records in the area"
Yeah, where is this? I doubt it's actually true. For sure it was reported as true, but one of the many reasons to call it climate propaganda is that that reporting of "records" doesn't mean what you think it means. Government agencies and other parts of the climate lobby continually adjust past historical data such that records become made and unmade without anything actually happening. They also like to change definitions and seriously truncate datasets at convenient places to create the appearance of endless trends when longer term data exists showing otherwise. This is so dishonest people think it can never happen, but it does.
Here's an example. Retraction Watch is a blog that follows
retractions and bad scientific publishing:
"NOAA noted in a Friday press release that the previous record was set in July 2016, and tied in 2019 and 2020. But as Bill Frezza, a sharp-eyed reader of Retraction Watch noticed, the agency’s website tells a different story. This press release, dated Aug. 15, 2019, and still live on noaa.gov, proclaims July 2019 to be the hottest month on record for the planet"
In this way they get to announce "record breaking temperatures" that were lower than previously announced temperatures.
You also have to watch out for lots of other problems and tricks, unfortunately. Even if they aren't doing that specific trick here, there can be others, even simple things like asserting patterns and trends in noise.
You have absolutely no idea about climatology and are just parroting garbage.
You're not a climate scientist, you have no idea how scientists reach the conclusions they have, you don't understand the evidentiary lineages that have brought us to the current understanding of the climate. You cite a single paper yet conveniently ignore the entirety of the research being carried out throughout the globe, by agencies and institutions with no relationship to each other, all reaching the same conclusions.
You haven't even the slightest understanding about the climate yet you claim "propaganda".
It's not a paper, so this makes me think you didn't read the cited document.
"by agencies and institutions with no relationship to each other"
They're all closely related to each other and tend to rely on the same small number of data sources to draw conclusions, which is why the fact that these data sources are subject to continuous retroactive editing is a problem.
Yeah, instead we had our teachers reassure us that if we saw a nuclear explosion that we should hid under our desks and that would protect us. We ran drills practicing this, as if it were expected to happen any moment now.
I agree with you that it's worse these days. Now, the kids practice active shooter drills. It turns out the USSR never did launch the missiles, but kids shooting up their school is so common it barely makes the news anymore.
It surprises me that folks (presumably technical) regress to the "same thing as the old thing" logic. I'm not downplaying the end-of-times drama every generation surely went through, but whatever drill you can think of, it ended, and kids went home, and they most likely played outside. At worst they sat in front of the news which didn't have to compete with the Internet and YouTube thus was very different.
Now? They go through a drill, leave, check their phone 4,000 times between that drill and dinner time which gives them a constant stream of a) the world is terrible, b) the other side is evil, c) your peers are all better looking, smarter, richer, and more popular than you.
The example you're referencing was mentioned in the article, and I think is part of the reason Haidt took the time to prove that this phenomenon is _not_ isolated to the US, and that US specific issues (like school shootings) are unlikely to have an effect elsewhere.
> And it certainly can’t be caused by the most popular theory we hear in the USA: school shootings and other stress-inducing events. Why would school shootings or active shooter drills implemented only in the USA lead to an immediate epidemic across the entire English-speaking world?
