For thousands of years, there has been a creepy-looking guy on the corner, with a cardboard sign that says "REPENT - THE END IS NEAR", and just because she's a 20-year-old autistic Swede right now doesn't make the message any more credible or relevant.
I personally prefer the guy carrying the sign that reads "KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON" because that's the best individual action we can take.
While I do agree that panic is unhelpful, the "who" is holding the doom sign does make quite the difference, in the same way you'd pay more attention to an oncologist giving you 6 months to live than you'd do to a random guy with a cardboard sign giving you 6 months to live.
The issue is not so much the sign being held by a young activist, but from all the other 100's of k's of scientists and experts behind it.
And what about when you get to see their doomsday come and go? I don't mean to pick on our young Swede, as she's hardly alone in this pattern. But this [1] is a Tweet from her from 5 years ago: "A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years." She chose to delete that Tweet recently, which makes it look even worse.
One can try to argue that she was misinterpreting or misrepresenting something, or her source was junk, or whatever else. But in the end that's what she chose to put on her sign. Where were those "100's of k's of scientists and experts" 5 years ago, telling her that such comments were inappropriate sensationalism? This is really pushing people, including myself, away from caring at all about this issue.
So a 15 year old posting an article with bad predictions is enough for you to not care about climate change? Did it predict that the doomsday would be in 2023 or later if we did not reduce or stop emissions by 2023?
EDIT: Found a Forbes article on it. Seems pretty reasonable, though Greta posted a sensationalised headline of it so I guess all climate change science can be safely ignored now.
Read the post that started this, "The issue is not so much the sign being held by a young activist, but from all the other 100's of k's of scientists and experts behind it."
Those "100's of k's of scientists and experts" are completely happy to abide sensationalism, and that's the problem. It leaves me with 0 confidence in anything of what's said, and climate papers are written, in my opinion, in an intentionally obfuscating fashion. I can comfortably read the latest papers in astrophysics or quantum mechanics, yet I find climate papers completely, and needlessly, obtuse.
So I clearly cannot trust what anybody says, I cannot comfortably read the papers. That leaves me left to look at what I've seen happen over the past ~20 years (and what apparently happened in the 20 before it, though that was before my time) and assume that will be the ongoing trend. In that case, climate change is really just not a particular concern for me anymore.
What about the Pakistan floods? What about the rising temperature trends and acidification of the oceans? What about the heatwaves and etc. I mean I could go on forever...
Yes, there is sentationalism sometimes. But things are looking potentially really dire. Maybe they are overestimating probabilities but "the chances of being eaten by a lion on wall streets are very, very low. But one time would be enough". If the cost of an event is very severe, the Expected value of the risk is high.
> This is really pushing people, including myself, away from caring at all about this issue.
That is, at best, a childish reaction and, at worst, a sign of oppositional behaviour disorder.
Think about it. Virtually every climatologist is in unified agreement — a rarity among scientists — that extremely difficult climate conditions are going to cause extreme suffering and upheaval. Just the crop failures alone will force mass migration and, inevitably, mass conflict.
But because some kid half a world away engaged in hyperbole, you reject it all. “I just don’t care any more, because «100’s of k’s of scientists and experts» didn’t put her in her place.”
I agree for some of us, Greta is not doing good PR for this topic.
I like the more calm, scientific approach.
That being said i think that many people really don't care UNTIL it hurts them directly.
Until then i am on the Kepp calm and carry on boat, but i share my practices of ressourcefulness to others.
That starts with how i wash my hands over better planning my food logistics to reduce spoilage/waste to driving around unnecessarily.
I think small things multiplied by thousands of people go a long way and it's really the only thing i can do.
I've been thinking a lot about what my problem is.
It's the talking itself. and talking and talking.
It's this instagram-twitter good-riddance "i spread the message for karma" thing that's so hip today.
Everybody presents the message, and only the corpos are to blame.
Where's the leverage the consumer has with their behaviour? Why don't we use that?
Because it's uncomfortable. People want to travel 2 times a year, they want infinite stock in the supermarket, they want more, now, fast.
I don't mind people talking. But at the end it's useless if these people don't act also until we're fully renewable (or near that)
We still need the talking before anything an happen. In the past 3 years a lot in the public discourse has changed, and climate change is no longer a fringe alarmist issue. It's not enough, but it's one of the few ways to sway the public opinion.
You're low-key confirming the belief that this whole climate change hysteria is more about reducing the economy and quality of life in the west out of racial hatred than anything else. The men at climate change protests are almost exclusively white when I see them, but facts be damned, huh?
If you had said this about any other race your comment would be flagged right now and you might even lose your job if your employer got wind of it. But as things stand, you'd probably be showered with praise if your employer is a big tech, mainstream media, or academia institution.
I get it, your mind has been under constant assault for a decade to make you buy into a certain narrative and beliefs, to the point where you think it's OK (virtuous, even! Proclaim it as loud as you can on social media for good boy points! Self-hatred is the most virtuous of hatred after all.) to be racist, because it's against a target deemed valid.
Damn, the shit you've let the establishment feed you...
I think part of the problem is that "the calm scientific approach" may be apparent to people who work with scientists, read original research study reports, sometimes listen to NPR for entertainment, and generally move in egghead circles.
However, to the general public, science looks like the mild hysteria or sensations attached to every new study by the mainstream media that reports on them. The mainstream media is how the general public consumes their science, and so it's through a deliberately ignorant and sensationalistic filter that wants their engagement and enragement, not their thoughtful and curious discussion.
But hey, it's been about the same for a long time. Remember Greenpeace, and the rainforest controversies in the 70s and 80s? Remember the hole in the ozone layer? There's always room to panic over the environment, calm scentific approach be damned.
People keeping calm and carrying on is the reason we are in this mess. I'm feeling quite weirded out myself how most don't want to talk or understand much about it, just pretending it's not there.
I personally prefer the guy carrying the sign that reads "KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON" because that's the best individual action we can take.