11 ms·

It's unbelievable that we're still trying to convince people that human-caused climate change is a fact. We are doomed.

cowmoo728 6y ago
We're still convincing a significant portion of the US population that covid-19 is real. Climate change is dramatically harder in two ways: 1. the timescale is decades and centuries, not weeks and months 2. there is a trillion dollar financial interest against fighting climate change Given what we're seeing with covid-19 and how much harder climate change is to deal with, I'm not optimistic.
- colmvp 6y ago
  When I was younger, I believed all we needed was to give people information to get a better grasp on reality. That was my optimism about the potential good of the internet: the ability to access a wealth of information. Now that I'm older and have spent a lot of years reading discussion boards, my stance is people will predominantly gravitate towards sources that justify their position regardless of whether their source(s) have been wrong before.
  - dTal 6y ago
    Alas, it's true - people are not perfectly rational reasoning machines, because we aren't superintelligent with the ability to weigh every fact we've ever encountered at once. We rely on heuristics to get by. But the imperviousness of obviously wrong beliefs in the face of what you consider rational evidence should not be taken as license to give up! Consider - if people tend to want to stick to their wrongness in the face of contradictory evidence, the wrongness still had to come from somewhere. All beliefs are caused by something, even if the cause would not meet a scientifically rigorous definition of "evidence". There's always logic in it, even if the logic isn't immediately apparent. For example, "Hard-code the beliefs of the people around you when young" and "Reject evidence that upends a large proportion of your worldview" are both highly logical heuristics that, incidentally, probably aren't nearly as likely to get you stuck in dysfunctional local attractors when attacking problems like "hungry tigers" as opposed to "gigascale global realpolitik". All I'm saying is - don't be too cynical. At the end of the day, the truth still matters, and all we can do is keep plugging away at it. The wall is thick but not impenetrable, and we have come a long way already.
- dtwest 6y ago
  No, the vast majority of Americans think covid-19 is real. Vox had a poll saying it was in the area of 1%. The issue is many don't want to be forced to wear masks, which is dumb and selfish, but not what you are saying. Meanwhile as of 2019, over 20% of Americans doubt climate change, a much more significant number. This is far too high in my opinion, but it is steadily improving.
  - swiley 6y ago
    How were they sampling? I could totally believe 1% of Vox readers don’t believe it while 30% of the US also doesn’t.
  - hwillis 6y ago
    About 34% of all Republicans say that the theory that the outbreak was intentionally planned is definitely or probably true. > About a third of those who have heard this claim (36%) – a quarter of all U.S. adults – say that they think it is “definitely” (8%) or “probably” (28%) true. https://www.journalism.org/2020/06/29/most-americans-have-heard-of-the-conspiracy-theory-that-the-covid-19-outbreak-was-planned-and-about-one-third-of-those-aware-of-it-say-it-might-be-true/ https://www.journalism.org/2020/06/29/most-americans-have-he... 72% said they would not get a coronavirus vaccine: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/05/21/most-americans-expect-a-covid-19-vaccine-within-a-year-72-say-they-would-get-vaccinated/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/05/21/most-americ...
    - dtwest 6y ago
      72% say they would get vaccinated, you aren't reading your articles correctly.
  - cowmoo728 6y ago
    You're correct that I overstated my case. I wasn't making a meaningful distinction between people who say the virus is fake, or not dangerous, or not wearing a mask, or not social distancing in a reasonable way.
- chappi42 6y ago
  Climate change is hard because nothing easy can be done. We would have to dramatically change our life style, world population would have to decrease. Don't see a "trillion dollar financial interest", it's the lifestyle of you and me and also the media/politics which both avoid difficult questions (why e.g. allow/encourage migrants from countries with totally irresponsible population dynamics?).
  - ihm 6y ago
    “In 2014, there were 1,469 oil and gas firms listed on stock exchanges around the world, with a combined market capitalization of US$4.65 trillion” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel
nforest 6y ago
At this point, a lot of (maybe even most) skeptics don't believe in man-made climate change simply because they strongly dislike the most prominent speakers against climate change, because they often also have liberal/progressive ideas. They see Bill Nye with his rap about gender and think "that's who thinks we're causing climate change ? I'm not believeing in that." It seems like climate change is a right wing vs left wing debate when it shouldn't be.
- glial 6y ago
  What’s the solution?
  - lopmotr 6y ago
    For those people to publicly give up their political beliefs. But political beliefs are more important than climate change, so they won't.
    - glial 6y ago
      Are you blaming Bill Nye for people's unwillingness to believe that climate change is occurring?
    - AlexMax 6y ago
      The goal of climate change denialists is to deny climate change by any excuse necessary. If the hot button topic wasn't the existence of different gender identities, they'd find something else as a wedge issue.
  - dvh 6y ago
    Elisium
  - zests 6y ago
    Cultural change where people no longer see people with different political beliefs as part of their "outgroup".
  - rtx 6y ago
tomp 6y ago
We're still trying to convince people that US police aren't killing blacks more than whites, and that the gender wage gap is a myth. People will believe what's convenient for them and their lifestyles.
- droopyEyelids 6y ago
  I mean, some of this stuff gets confusing. Here in Chicago we just had an episode where a white person was selling food by pushing around a little cooler like hispanic people typically do, and we all had to learn that only certain races can do certain types of jobs or else it's appropriation. The killings thing has to be judged _per capita_ or else you get the wrong answer, and that of course make sense but the way you phrased it, it's tricky. I think you have to remove the effects of childbearing, hours worked, and type of job to get the gender wage gap to show the real numbers, too. Life isn't simple.
  - klyrs 6y ago
    > I think you have to remove the effects of childbearing... The fact that childbearing is unpaid work is a significant part of the problem.
    - tomp 6y ago
      It's not unpaid in Europe. But regardless, that's a question of fairness and/or government's social policy. Not something that should be reflected in your wage (which is the exchange for productive work for your employer) or otherwise a responsibility of your employer.
nabla9 6y ago
Climate change skepticism is largely Anglo-Saxon phenomenon. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/about/news/item/article/poles-apart-the-international-repo.html https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/about/news/item/a... It exists in the fringe everywhere but only in the US and some other English speaking countries it's hotly debated issue. This not by accident. There is a book everyone should know about: "Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming" written by science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. The bottom line is connection between deniers of dangers tobacco smoking, acid rain, DDT, ozone layer hole, and climate skepticism. Small number of core people and think tanks. Physicists like Fred Singer, Bill Nierenberg, Fred Seitz, ... The Heritage Foundation, George C. Marshall Institute,Competitive Enterprise Institute, ... with corporate backers that change with every issue.
- nwienert 6y ago
  I think you and GP are both presenting a very narrow and biased view here. The thing is, there’s a huge propaganda machine behind climate change. Backed by Hollywood, politicians everywhere on the left, universities.. there have been lots of distorted and hyperbolic claims made over years and years that didn’t turn out to be true. Lots of politicians making extreme claims that are just obviously false. I’ve personally seen nearing the order of hundreds of exaggerated claims that fall apart if you look in any detail, especially on MSM news sites. Tons of pressure is put on scientists to match the narrative (multiple Climate scandals over decades where scientists were blackballed for misalignment or caught colluding to fudge numbers to paint a picture they admit they are trying to paint). Just this year you have two books being published by left leaning scientists who basically say climate change has become a force beyond itself. Both cite data heavily. Both were attacked heavily by the press, or ignored. One was a former activist and leader in the cause originally, used to get a lot of attention and now has his posts literally deleted from Facebook. To me it’s like this: when you hear the “dumb Americans” going on about climate change and you can’t believe how dumb they have to be to be skeptics... what you need to realize is they saw a lot of smoke, less fire, and they basically are tired of the left puffing the flames of everything they touch. Sure, there’s probably fire there. But how much can we tell? Our universities, the media, a lot of core institutions are actually not trustworthy. Skepticism is not irrational in the face of that. I’m sure a lot of them would come around to admit some portions of climate change are legit, but it would take some really careful accounting. But they are in their own way calling out what they see as a bigger and more dangerous phenomenon: the distortion of fact gathering and science itself towards political gain. It’s an unfortunate reality. And really it’s hard to argue that isn’t true. For reference, I am absolutely not a climate denialist but I would say I’ve burst my bubble that it’s so black and white after carefully looking at a lot of research. The main posts are likely true, the models have consistently overestimated our impact, and we focus on the wrong things more often than the real harms. I totally get why people would be skeptical. Even smart people who have been right in contrarian ways have said exactly what I’m saying (look at Thiel). So to simplify it down to “stupid righties” is always an error.
thecleaner 6y ago
Lets analyse the crowd who we must convince. These are either executives with vested interests who will not be affected by the current crisis or poor and uneducated people who have very little faith in the government or the social system. After all these people have all some point in time needed help from the government which was denied. This is open knowledge that governments are lobbied to pass laws in the interests of corporations. So people tend to lose faith. Same with society. These people have seen that they had to work very hard in life to just scrape by whereas there are others (some very young people) who just coast by. People not believing in climate change is not the problem it is the symptom of a society with very high levels of income inequality and lesser access to tools that lift people out of poverty. The cost of education just keeps rising every year and most manufacturing jobs are gone in post industrial societies. Without the tools to better your life conditions and diminishing access to tools of life improvement, when others ask these people to listen to a warning, of course they refuse.
dang 6y ago
Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.

We're still convincing a significant portion of the US population that covid-19 is real. Climate change is dramatically harder in two ways: 1. the timescale is decades and centuries, not weeks and months 2. there is a trillion dollar financial interest against fighting climate change Given what we're seeing with covid-19 and how much harder climate change is to deal with, I'm not optimistic.

colmvp 6y ago
When I was younger, I believed all we needed was to give people information to get a better grasp on reality. That was my optimism about the potential good of the internet: the ability to access a wealth of information. Now that I'm older and have spent a lot of years reading discussion boards, my stance is people will predominantly gravitate towards sources that justify their position regardless of whether their source(s) have been wrong before.
- dTal 6y ago
  Alas, it's true - people are not perfectly rational reasoning machines, because we aren't superintelligent with the ability to weigh every fact we've ever encountered at once. We rely on heuristics to get by. But the imperviousness of obviously wrong beliefs in the face of what you consider rational evidence should not be taken as license to give up! Consider - if people tend to want to stick to their wrongness in the face of contradictory evidence, the wrongness still had to come from somewhere. All beliefs are caused by something, even if the cause would not meet a scientifically rigorous definition of "evidence". There's always logic in it, even if the logic isn't immediately apparent. For example, "Hard-code the beliefs of the people around you when young" and "Reject evidence that upends a large proportion of your worldview" are both highly logical heuristics that, incidentally, probably aren't nearly as likely to get you stuck in dysfunctional local attractors when attacking problems like "hungry tigers" as opposed to "gigascale global realpolitik". All I'm saying is - don't be too cynical. At the end of the day, the truth still matters, and all we can do is keep plugging away at it. The wall is thick but not impenetrable, and we have come a long way already.
dtwest 6y ago
No, the vast majority of Americans think covid-19 is real. Vox had a poll saying it was in the area of 1%. The issue is many don't want to be forced to wear masks, which is dumb and selfish, but not what you are saying. Meanwhile as of 2019, over 20% of Americans doubt climate change, a much more significant number. This is far too high in my opinion, but it is steadily improving.
- swiley 6y ago
  How were they sampling? I could totally believe 1% of Vox readers don’t believe it while 30% of the US also doesn’t.
- hwillis 6y ago
  About 34% of all Republicans say that the theory that the outbreak was intentionally planned is definitely or probably true. > About a third of those who have heard this claim (36%) – a quarter of all U.S. adults – say that they think it is “definitely” (8%) or “probably” (28%) true. https://www.journalism.org/2020/06/29/most-americans-have-heard-of-the-conspiracy-theory-that-the-covid-19-outbreak-was-planned-and-about-one-third-of-those-aware-of-it-say-it-might-be-true/ https://www.journalism.org/2020/06/29/most-americans-have-he... 72% said they would not get a coronavirus vaccine: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/05/21/most-americans-expect-a-covid-19-vaccine-within-a-year-72-say-they-would-get-vaccinated/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/05/21/most-americ...
  - dtwest 6y ago
    72% say they would get vaccinated, you aren't reading your articles correctly.
- cowmoo728 6y ago
  You're correct that I overstated my case. I wasn't making a meaningful distinction between people who say the virus is fake, or not dangerous, or not wearing a mask, or not social distancing in a reasonable way.
chappi42 6y ago
Climate change is hard because nothing easy can be done. We would have to dramatically change our life style, world population would have to decrease. Don't see a "trillion dollar financial interest", it's the lifestyle of you and me and also the media/politics which both avoid difficult questions (why e.g. allow/encourage migrants from countries with totally irresponsible population dynamics?).
- ihm 6y ago
  “In 2014, there were 1,469 oil and gas firms listed on stock exchanges around the world, with a combined market capitalization of US$4.65 trillion” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel

nforest 6y ago

At this point, a lot of (maybe even most) skeptics don't believe in man-made climate change simply because they strongly dislike the most prominent speakers against climate change, because they often also have liberal/progressive ideas. They see Bill Nye with his rap about gender and think "that's who thinks we're causing climate change ? I'm not believeing in that." It seems like climate change is a right wing vs left wing debate when it shouldn't be.

glial 6y ago
What’s the solution?
- lopmotr 6y ago
  For those people to publicly give up their political beliefs. But political beliefs are more important than climate change, so they won't.
  - glial 6y ago
    Are you blaming Bill Nye for people's unwillingness to believe that climate change is occurring?
  - AlexMax 6y ago
    The goal of climate change denialists is to deny climate change by any excuse necessary. If the hot button topic wasn't the existence of different gender identities, they'd find something else as a wedge issue.
- dvh 6y ago
  Elisium
- zests 6y ago
  Cultural change where people no longer see people with different political beliefs as part of their "outgroup".
- rtx 6y ago

tomp 6y ago

We're still trying to convince people that US police aren't killing blacks more than whites, and that the gender wage gap is a myth. People will believe what's convenient for them and their lifestyles.

droopyEyelids 6y ago
I mean, some of this stuff gets confusing. Here in Chicago we just had an episode where a white person was selling food by pushing around a little cooler like hispanic people typically do, and we all had to learn that only certain races can do certain types of jobs or else it's appropriation. The killings thing has to be judged _per capita_ or else you get the wrong answer, and that of course make sense but the way you phrased it, it's tricky. I think you have to remove the effects of childbearing, hours worked, and type of job to get the gender wage gap to show the real numbers, too. Life isn't simple.
- klyrs 6y ago
  > I think you have to remove the effects of childbearing... The fact that childbearing is unpaid work is a significant part of the problem.
  - tomp 6y ago
    It's not unpaid in Europe. But regardless, that's a question of fairness and/or government's social policy. Not something that should be reflected in your wage (which is the exchange for productive work for your employer) or otherwise a responsibility of your employer.

nabla9 6y ago

Climate change skepticism is largely Anglo-Saxon phenomenon. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/about/news/item/article/poles-apart-the-international-repo.html https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/about/news/item/a... It exists in the fringe everywhere but only in the US and some other English speaking countries it's hotly debated issue. This not by accident. There is a book everyone should know about: "Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming" written by science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. The bottom line is connection between deniers of dangers tobacco smoking, acid rain, DDT, ozone layer hole, and climate skepticism. Small number of core people and think tanks. Physicists like Fred Singer, Bill Nierenberg, Fred Seitz, ... The Heritage Foundation, George C. Marshall Institute,Competitive Enterprise Institute, ... with corporate backers that change with every issue.

nwienert 6y ago
I think you and GP are both presenting a very narrow and biased view here. The thing is, there’s a huge propaganda machine behind climate change. Backed by Hollywood, politicians everywhere on the left, universities.. there have been lots of distorted and hyperbolic claims made over years and years that didn’t turn out to be true. Lots of politicians making extreme claims that are just obviously false. I’ve personally seen nearing the order of hundreds of exaggerated claims that fall apart if you look in any detail, especially on MSM news sites. Tons of pressure is put on scientists to match the narrative (multiple Climate scandals over decades where scientists were blackballed for misalignment or caught colluding to fudge numbers to paint a picture they admit they are trying to paint). Just this year you have two books being published by left leaning scientists who basically say climate change has become a force beyond itself. Both cite data heavily. Both were attacked heavily by the press, or ignored. One was a former activist and leader in the cause originally, used to get a lot of attention and now has his posts literally deleted from Facebook. To me it’s like this: when you hear the “dumb Americans” going on about climate change and you can’t believe how dumb they have to be to be skeptics... what you need to realize is they saw a lot of smoke, less fire, and they basically are tired of the left puffing the flames of everything they touch. Sure, there’s probably fire there. But how much can we tell? Our universities, the media, a lot of core institutions are actually not trustworthy. Skepticism is not irrational in the face of that. I’m sure a lot of them would come around to admit some portions of climate change are legit, but it would take some really careful accounting. But they are in their own way calling out what they see as a bigger and more dangerous phenomenon: the distortion of fact gathering and science itself towards political gain. It’s an unfortunate reality. And really it’s hard to argue that isn’t true. For reference, I am absolutely not a climate denialist but I would say I’ve burst my bubble that it’s so black and white after carefully looking at a lot of research. The main posts are likely true, the models have consistently overestimated our impact, and we focus on the wrong things more often than the real harms. I totally get why people would be skeptical. Even smart people who have been right in contrarian ways have said exactly what I’m saying (look at Thiel). So to simplify it down to “stupid righties” is always an error.

thecleaner 6y ago

Lets analyse the crowd who we must convince. These are either executives with vested interests who will not be affected by the current crisis or poor and uneducated people who have very little faith in the government or the social system. After all these people have all some point in time needed help from the government which was denied. This is open knowledge that governments are lobbied to pass laws in the interests of corporations. So people tend to lose faith. Same with society. These people have seen that they had to work very hard in life to just scrape by whereas there are others (some very young people) who just coast by. People not believing in climate change is not the problem it is the symptom of a society with very high levels of income inequality and lesser access to tools that lift people out of poverty. The cost of education just keeps rising every year and most manufacturing jobs are gone in post industrial societies. Without the tools to better your life conditions and diminishing access to tools of life improvement, when others ask these people to listen to a warning, of course they refuse.

dang 6y ago

Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.