| I think it's hard to get people to give credence to experts whose claims can be demonstrated to be outlandish. E.g. James Anderson, famously known for helping to discover and mitigate the Antarctic ozone holes in the late 20th century, said in 2018 that the chance there will be any permanent ice left in the Arctic by 2022 is "essentially zero"[0]. Yet a NASA site reports that in September 2022 (when the most recent measurement was taken), the Arctic sea ice minimum extent was ~4.67 million square kilometers. [1] To be very explicit: I'm not saying that climate change doesn't exist. I'm not saying that Arctic sea ice is not diminishing (the NASA site says it's diminishing at ~12% per decade). I'm not saying that the Nobel prize is a good indicator of expertise. I'm saying specifically that I believe it's more difficult to convince people to trust a source making claims of negative consequences when those consequences are less bad than the source says. An analogy I might use is drugs (specifically in the US). I've heard a few people, who went through an anti-drug education program forced on them in their adolescence by parents/teachers, mention that marijuana was portrayed as just as bad as other, harder drugs. Then, when they went on in high school and college to smoke weed and discovered that they did not ruin their lives by getting stoned a few times a week, or even every day, they subsequently gave less credence to what the anti-drug advocates were saying. [0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2018/01/15/carbon-p... [1]: https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/arctic-sea-ice/ |
I brought in the analogy of Chicken Little, inflating the scope of a threat to one of apocalyptic proportions, which is exactly what is taking place here.
First responder to me brought in the climate analogy, presumably as a means of getting me to think that maybe I'm the fool here by ignoring the real scientist who, hey, has a Nobel Prize! Or at least, the theoretical meteorologist in his metaphor does, and therefore maybe me, with no Nobel Prize, should just be respectful of the expert here.
I responded by pointing out that the Nobel committee are morons who gave a Peace prize to one of the worst war criminals of the 20th century and pressed the fact that we have thirty years+ of scientific concensus about climate change, along with a lot of corporate funded think tank noise that is running ideological interference, successfully so far. But you can only fool people for so long, it caught up to the tobacco industry and it will catch up to us.
The idiots amping up the FUD to seize control and the assholes pumping money into think tanks that generate endless climate denialist noise are the same people.