To borrow a quote from one of your other posts: > climate change (in the popular conception) feels fundamentally unresolvable. For context, I have a graduate

To borrow a quote from one of your other posts: > climate change (in the popular conception) feels fundamentally unresolvable. For context, I have a graduate degree in physics. I am 31 and I have spent my entire adult life studying climate change and its management at a hobbyist level. I regularly get lost in academic papers about the phenomena or the technologies that may be used to address them. So try not to write me off as incurious when I tell you it is obviously silly to blame a false perception — that climate change is unresolvable — on the real facts about climate change. Reality does not cause people to believe falsehoods. A far better explanation for this belief would in fact be social media itself, which has a miserable track record of amplifying both climate change denialism and doomerism. Someone who has absorbed misleading claims about impending collapse from social media could certainly believe that the cause of their anxiety is climate change itself and not the people who helped them down that road. Look at the graphs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics >I can’t think of any real reason why he doesn’t (it makes his argument strictly stronger, and results in the same conclusions) Reducing social media and smartphones to the status of an "accelerant" rather than a primary cause weakens the case for urgent government intervention, which is Haidt's major focus. It is also jargon creep, since "accelerant" is harder to interpret than "cause".