I’m not saying that a thing’s label doesn’t matter, but there are a couple important facts to keep in mind:
A label is not enough space to fully communicate any idea.
A person’s willingness to disagree is not rational.
If I could pretend to be a conservative, uh… pedophile for a moment, what might I say about “climate destabilization”?
That’s not going to happen; that’s ridiculous.
We go through seasons and extreme weather all the time—what’s “stable” about that?
You’re some alarmist tree-hugger just trying to scare people, aren’t you?
If destabilization is so bad, companies would never let it happen. Why would they when they need the planet too?
“Destabilization”, brought to you by the same irrational, ruled-by-fear people who can’t handle an unloaded gun being in the same room as them—heh heh!
What does destabilization mean, anyway? Like, one more hurricane a year? Just don’t live in Florida.
“Oh no! The climate is destabilizing!”—meanwhile in reality, birds are chirping, nothing has changed.
Everything “destabilizes”; man makes plans, God laughs.
We all have ACs and heaters now anyway, so what’s the problem exactly?
All of these bullet points come from the same place: what you’re suggesting, that climate change is a problem, is both a lot of difficult effort to solve and very scary to think about. So, emotionally, they just refuse to. It’s easier to refuse to. You don’t have to live anxiously if you refuse to.
There are a large number of complicated and diverse sociological reasons why climate change isn’t taken seriously, and making the label scarier would only really be effective if it represented an across-the-board rhetorical tactic to scare the public into action. That means posters, flyers, ads on television, tv programs and movies, fiction and non-fiction, politicians who will not shut up about it, constant news about the worst-case scenarios and what people watching need to do right now to stop it, companies who pollute being depicted as evil and villainous and a threat to us right now and legally blocked from being allowed to advertise for themselves (e.g. tobacco companies).
Climate change needs strong, inciting propaganda, and for the last 50 years has had very piss-poor propaganda, mostly because money doesn’t want it to.
The only problem I see with your explanation is that it seems to boil down to defeatism:
emotional people are more numerous than rational people
emotional people cannot be convinced, any argument will get shot down
politicians in any democratic society will follow majority opinion
So… why bother? It’s a fight minority cannot win and majority does not consider to be worthwhile or even real.
Also - I honestly hate the american meaning of word “conservative”. Conservative should be someone who wants the law of his country to stay as it is, not be changed. Republicans are not conservatives, they are radicals. Conservative is someone who responds to idea like for example “gay marriage” with logic “if this was legal when I was a kid, it should be legal now and in the future”.
In my country when you say “organization of pedophiles” we either think Catholics or Americans…
To be effective at convincing people, you need to get to the core of what is driving their beliefs.
A pessimist, for instance, cannot see a beautiful sunset. Not until they can learn how to see love.
It may be that their life is falling apart right now, and they feel abandoned by what were their friends, and that this isolation makes the sunset feel trivial and stupid to care about when they have real problems to solve.
It may be that they are irritated by crowds and so dislike going outside, and they reject the beautiful sunset because to accept that they cannot see it would make them grieve.
I gave us a solution for action around climate change: strong propaganda. A fight-forward message in a cultural climate that believes in its ability to win. These are things we can build, I’m just describing the nature of the problem.
Conservative should be someone who wants the law of his country to stay as it is, not be changed. Republicans are not conservatives, they are radicals.
Well, Republicans are fascists.
And, a lot of American Conservatives would think that they are exactly what you say a conservative should be. I mean, gay marriage wasn’t legal when they were kids, they think they want to regress to the society of when it was, to conserve those laws—but this is because they are stupid, dumb animals that must be corralled like sheep toward the future.
I don’t have a lot of sympathy for any politic in any country that fears change as a concept. It’s honestly anti-intellectual.
they are stupid, dumb animals that must be corralled like sheep toward the future
Hm, this is what Nazis and Communists both said about my countrymen. The idea that fearing change is anti-intellectual… hmm… anti-abortion laws are changes too, introducing mass surveillance is also a change. Not every change is as good as you imply.
You’re really going to have to work with me to not read every comment in the most uncharitable way possible. Nothing about that first comment was “defeatist”, that’s a battle in your mind only.
If you don’t believe in the power to build, then you believe in regression de facto. You don’t get points for being pro gay marriage if you’re also anti-immigration.
Yeah it’s not helped by the fact that there’s no real consensus in climate science about what will happen. I’ve seen models that run from global desertification to an ice age.
This is why it’s frustrating. It’s not a lie, it’s not wrong, it just fuels anti-climate-change crowd.
During last 30 days my region had:
But because it’s summer, the “below 20C” is the one people usually focus on. “If there is global warming, how come summers are colder?”
In fact ever since COVID my region had much colder summers…
I’m not saying that a thing’s label doesn’t matter, but there are a couple important facts to keep in mind:
If I could pretend to be a conservative, uh… pedophile for a moment, what might I say about “climate destabilization”?
All of these bullet points come from the same place: what you’re suggesting, that climate change is a problem, is both a lot of difficult effort to solve and very scary to think about. So, emotionally, they just refuse to. It’s easier to refuse to. You don’t have to live anxiously if you refuse to.
There are a large number of complicated and diverse sociological reasons why climate change isn’t taken seriously, and making the label scarier would only really be effective if it represented an across-the-board rhetorical tactic to scare the public into action. That means posters, flyers, ads on television, tv programs and movies, fiction and non-fiction, politicians who will not shut up about it, constant news about the worst-case scenarios and what people watching need to do right now to stop it, companies who pollute being depicted as evil and villainous and a threat to us right now and legally blocked from being allowed to advertise for themselves (e.g. tobacco companies).
Climate change needs strong, inciting propaganda, and for the last 50 years has had very piss-poor propaganda, mostly because money doesn’t want it to.
The only problem I see with your explanation is that it seems to boil down to defeatism:
So… why bother? It’s a fight minority cannot win and majority does not consider to be worthwhile or even real.
Also - I honestly hate the american meaning of word “conservative”. Conservative should be someone who wants the law of his country to stay as it is, not be changed. Republicans are not conservatives, they are radicals. Conservative is someone who responds to idea like for example “gay marriage” with logic “if this was legal when I was a kid, it should be legal now and in the future”.
In my country when you say “organization of pedophiles” we either think Catholics or Americans…
I’m actually not saying this.
To be effective at convincing people, you need to get to the core of what is driving their beliefs.
A pessimist, for instance, cannot see a beautiful sunset. Not until they can learn how to see love.
It may be that their life is falling apart right now, and they feel abandoned by what were their friends, and that this isolation makes the sunset feel trivial and stupid to care about when they have real problems to solve.
It may be that they are irritated by crowds and so dislike going outside, and they reject the beautiful sunset because to accept that they cannot see it would make them grieve.
I gave us a solution for action around climate change: strong propaganda. A fight-forward message in a cultural climate that believes in its ability to win. These are things we can build, I’m just describing the nature of the problem.
Well, Republicans are fascists.
And, a lot of American Conservatives would think that they are exactly what you say a conservative should be. I mean, gay marriage wasn’t legal when they were kids, they think they want to regress to the society of when it was, to conserve those laws—but this is because they are stupid, dumb animals that must be corralled like sheep toward the future.
I don’t have a lot of sympathy for any politic in any country that fears change as a concept. It’s honestly anti-intellectual.
Hm, this is what Nazis and Communists both said about my countrymen. The idea that fearing change is anti-intellectual… hmm… anti-abortion laws are changes too, introducing mass surveillance is also a change. Not every change is as good as you imply.
Change as a concept, not any individual change.
You’re really going to have to work with me to not read every comment in the most uncharitable way possible. Nothing about that first comment was “defeatist”, that’s a battle in your mind only.
If you don’t believe in the power to build, then you believe in regression de facto. You don’t get points for being pro gay marriage if you’re also anti-immigration.
Yeah it’s not helped by the fact that there’s no real consensus in climate science about what will happen. I’ve seen models that run from global desertification to an ice age.
That disparity is because there is more than one runaway trigger involved and which one hits first decides the way we go.
Where I am, we’ve been getting pretty heavy rain during 100F/37C heat, and it’s kind of unnerving how quickly it dries up.