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I'm fairly sure it is not. Climate change is actually a good example, it has been blown out of all proportions by both politicians as well as media which has le

by Ourgon 5y ago

I'm fairly sure it is not. Climate change is actually a good example, it has been blown out of all proportions by both politicians as well as media which has led a large number of children and young adults to start worrying whether they will have a future at all before they will die from starvation/drowning/heat shock/fill-in-the-blanks. Slightly older young adults state they do not want to get children "since they will not have a future on a dying planet", all being egged on by "Extinction Rebellion"-like prophets of doom in the media. They are your children so it is your responsibility to make sure they learn to separate panic porn and propaganda from believable prognoses on things like war, natural phenomena, changing climate and its ramifications and more. Get some books on the subject - Michael Shellenberger's "Apocalypse Never", Bjørn Lomborg's "False Alarm", Steven Koonin's "Unsettled" and read up on the facts and fictional narratives around the subject of the changing climate. If you are not in panic-mode they are far less likely to be pulled into the fable of a climate-induced eschaton. Teach them critical thinking skills - that is true critical thinking, not "critical theory" thinking which is actually the opposite of what I'm getting at. Help them on their way of navigating through the rapids of their formative years and they'll be stronger and more self-reliant on the other side.

rfwhyte 5y ago
So your point is basically to teach your kids to be climate change deniers? And your supporting evidence is a reading list of pop-science books none of which were written by actual climate scientists? Sounds like you need to apply a bit more of that "Critical thinking" you're going on about, as if your reading list is anything to go by, you're not really being all that "critical" but rather seeking out sources of information that confirms your existing biases.
- Ourgon 5y ago
  You are professing a religion when you're talking in terms of "climate change deniers". It is the same primal urge which makes people call others "anti-vaxxers" even though they've had the full spectrum of vaccinations except that single one. Us versus them, good versus evil, the chosen versus the damned. I prefer to think and live in more than just 2 dimensions, the third one making it possible to take some distance and study the subject. My daughters don't believe the world will go under in a climate catastrophe, nor should they. They also learn to respect their environment. They do not crave after plastic trinkets or the latest phone. I'm fairly sure our "energy footprint" is lower than yours so if anything I should call for you to "repent, sinner!". But I won't and I'll grant you your religion just as long as you grant me the freedom of it.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
The problem is not that climate change will hurt everybody. Many areas will be just fine. But many others won't, and the people that lived there will need somewhere else to live, and productivity resources in that area are gone. That's going to be a lot of refugees needing a place in the world that's already struggling to provide for all of us. All this will make the world a lot more unstable politically and economically. And just look at the news today to see how well we're getting along before any of this really kicked in...
acdha 5y ago
Your list of source books is telling: you have a PR person with a history of being sloppy with the truth in service of conservative political goals, a political science major who has made a great deal of money from conservative funders but whose articles do not meet scientific levels of rigor and are routinely ripped apart by actual scientists, and a theoretical physicist who was a C-level officer at a fossil fuel company (BP). Beyond the lack of domain experience, what all three of those have in common is work which is widely recognized as being based on cherry-picking, misrepresenting climate scientists' claims and goals, and, especially, studiously ignoring how climate scientists' predictions from decades ago have held up well while the various deniers have rotated through a series of poorly-supported explanations with no coherent linking philosophy other than that climate change cannot be real because otherwise their funders might be expected to pay damages.
- Ourgon 5y ago
  Did you read those books? Thought so. You did, and you come up with this response? Read them again, but now without those ideologically-tainted glasses. Show me where they're totally off-base and I will listen. By the way, if you had read them - which you have not - you would have known that none of these authors claim that the climate does not change, nor do they claim that human activity does not have any influence on climate change. What these authors - and many others - do not share is the conviction, nay, the sheer joy of the "climate apocalypse". This I have in common with them and with many others - but you... seem to differ? Read those books, and others. Think for yourself. Don't just blindly follow the man with the sign "the world is coming to its end, repent!". Don't drink the Kool-Aid.
  - acdha 5y ago
    Well, I don't still have my copy of the Skeptical Environmentalist (moving cross country does that) but I bought the hard-cover when it came out because the ideologically-tainted glasses I was wearing were those of a young libertarian who loved the idea of the experts being wrong but hadn't yet learned to be just as skeptical of the knowledgeable-sounding people who were saying that. One of the big things to look at is track record: the reports by real scientists from the 1980s and 1990s have predictions which include the present and those numbers have been pretty accurate. For example, this is fully a decade old: https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/ipccs-climate-projections-on-target-so-far/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/ipccs-climate-projec... The people saying “no big deal, don't worry about it” have not had the same track record. More importantly, however, is being small-c conservative: if we get rid of high pollution fuel sources it'll definitely mean less profit for the people who fund those authors’ work but for most of us the effects will be better health and living conditions with manageably higher costs in a few areas and savings in others (buying an EV instead of a big ICE SUV is a TCO savings, for example, and ditching my natural gas for a modern heat-pump saved more summer AC than it costs in the winter). In contrast, the approach of doing as little as as the fossil fuel industry wants is guaranteed to produce much greater costs and in many cases the random nature of those makes it much harder to mitigate, especially since a lot of people who primarily hear from deniers will resist any changes until it's their personal basement flooding.

by Ourgon 5y ago

rfwhyte 5y ago

So your point is basically to teach your kids to be climate change deniers? And your supporting evidence is a reading list of pop-science books none of which were written by actual climate scientists? Sounds like you need to apply a bit more of that "Critical thinking" you're going on about, as if your reading list is anything to go by, you're not really being all that "critical" but rather seeking out sources of information that confirms your existing biases.

Ourgon 5y ago
You are professing a religion when you're talking in terms of "climate change deniers". It is the same primal urge which makes people call others "anti-vaxxers" even though they've had the full spectrum of vaccinations except that single one. Us versus them, good versus evil, the chosen versus the damned. I prefer to think and live in more than just 2 dimensions, the third one making it possible to take some distance and study the subject. My daughters don't believe the world will go under in a climate catastrophe, nor should they. They also learn to respect their environment. They do not crave after plastic trinkets or the latest phone. I'm fairly sure our "energy footprint" is lower than yours so if anything I should call for you to "repent, sinner!". But I won't and I'll grant you your religion just as long as you grant me the freedom of it.

GekkePrutser 5y ago

The problem is not that climate change will hurt everybody. Many areas will be just fine. But many others won't, and the people that lived there will need somewhere else to live, and productivity resources in that area are gone. That's going to be a lot of refugees needing a place in the world that's already struggling to provide for all of us. All this will make the world a lot more unstable politically and economically. And just look at the news today to see how well we're getting along before any of this really kicked in...

acdha 5y ago

Your list of source books is telling: you have a PR person with a history of being sloppy with the truth in service of conservative political goals, a political science major who has made a great deal of money from conservative funders but whose articles do not meet scientific levels of rigor and are routinely ripped apart by actual scientists, and a theoretical physicist who was a C-level officer at a fossil fuel company (BP). Beyond the lack of domain experience, what all three of those have in common is work which is widely recognized as being based on cherry-picking, misrepresenting climate scientists' claims and goals, and, especially, studiously ignoring how climate scientists' predictions from decades ago have held up well while the various deniers have rotated through a series of poorly-supported explanations with no coherent linking philosophy other than that climate change cannot be real because otherwise their funders might be expected to pay damages.

Ourgon 5y ago
Did you read those books? Thought so. You did, and you come up with this response? Read them again, but now without those ideologically-tainted glasses. Show me where they're totally off-base and I will listen. By the way, if you had read them - which you have not - you would have known that none of these authors claim that the climate does not change, nor do they claim that human activity does not have any influence on climate change. What these authors - and many others - do not share is the conviction, nay, the sheer joy of the "climate apocalypse". This I have in common with them and with many others - but you... seem to differ? Read those books, and others. Think for yourself. Don't just blindly follow the man with the sign "the world is coming to its end, repent!". Don't drink the Kool-Aid.
- acdha 5y ago
  Well, I don't still have my copy of the Skeptical Environmentalist (moving cross country does that) but I bought the hard-cover when it came out because the ideologically-tainted glasses I was wearing were those of a young libertarian who loved the idea of the experts being wrong but hadn't yet learned to be just as skeptical of the knowledgeable-sounding people who were saying that. One of the big things to look at is track record: the reports by real scientists from the 1980s and 1990s have predictions which include the present and those numbers have been pretty accurate. For example, this is fully a decade old: https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/ipccs-climate-projections-on-target-so-far/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/ipccs-climate-projec... The people saying “no big deal, don't worry about it” have not had the same track record. More importantly, however, is being small-c conservative: if we get rid of high pollution fuel sources it'll definitely mean less profit for the people who fund those authors’ work but for most of us the effects will be better health and living conditions with manageably higher costs in a few areas and savings in others (buying an EV instead of a big ICE SUV is a TCO savings, for example, and ditching my natural gas for a modern heat-pump saved more summer AC than it costs in the winter). In contrast, the approach of doing as little as as the fossil fuel industry wants is guaranteed to produce much greater costs and in many cases the random nature of those makes it much harder to mitigate, especially since a lot of people who primarily hear from deniers will resist any changes until it's their personal basement flooding.