[TheFattestNinja]

While I do agree that panic is unhelpful, the "who" is holding the doom sign does make quite the difference, in the same way you'd pay more attention to an oncologist giving you 6 months to live than you'd do to a random guy with a cardboard sign giving you 6 months to live.

The issue is not so much the sign being held by a young activist, but from all the other 100's of k's of scientists and experts behind it.

[somenameforme]

And what about when you get to see their doomsday come and go? I don't mean to pick on our young Swede, as she's hardly alone in this pattern. But this [1] is a Tweet from her from 5 years ago: "A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years." She chose to delete that Tweet recently, which makes it look even worse.

One can try to argue that she was misinterpreting or misrepresenting something, or her source was junk, or whatever else. But in the end that's what she chose to put on her sign. Where were those "100's of k's of scientists and experts" 5 years ago, telling her that such comments were inappropriate sensationalism? This is really pushing people, including myself, away from caring at all about this issue.

[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20210520015841/https://twitter.c...

[Hikikomori]

So a 15 year old posting an article with bad predictions is enough for you to not care about climate change? Did it predict that the doomsday would be in 2023 or later if we did not reduce or stop emissions by 2023?

EDIT: Found a Forbes article on it. Seems pretty reasonable, though Greta posted a sensationalised headline of it so I guess all climate change science can be safely ignored now.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2018/01/15/carbon-p...

[somenameforme]

Read the post that started this, "The issue is not so much the sign being held by a young activist, but from all the other 100's of k's of scientists and experts behind it."

Those "100's of k's of scientists and experts" are completely happy to abide sensationalism, and that's the problem. It leaves me with 0 confidence in anything of what's said, and climate papers are written, in my opinion, in an intentionally obfuscating fashion. I can comfortably read the latest papers in astrophysics or quantum mechanics, yet I find climate papers completely, and needlessly, obtuse.

So I clearly cannot trust what anybody says, I cannot comfortably read the papers. That leaves me left to look at what I've seen happen over the past ~20 years (and what apparently happened in the 20 before it, though that was before my time) and assume that will be the ongoing trend. In that case, climate change is really just not a particular concern for me anymore.

[TheFattestNinja]

"come and go". Did it go?

What about the Pakistan floods? What about the rising temperature trends and acidification of the oceans? What about the heatwaves and etc. I mean I could go on forever...

Yes, there is sentationalism sometimes. But things are looking potentially really dire. Maybe they are overestimating probabilities but "the chances of being eaten by a lion on wall streets are very, very low. But one time would be enough". If the cost of an event is very severe, the Expected value of the risk is high.

[big-oof]

> This is really pushing people, including myself, away from caring at all about this issue.

That is, at best, a childish reaction and, at worst, a sign of oppositional behaviour disorder.

Think about it. Virtually every climatologist is in unified agreement — a rarity among scientists — that extremely difficult climate conditions are going to cause extreme suffering and upheaval. Just the crop failures alone will force mass migration and, inevitably, mass conflict.

But because some kid half a world away engaged in hyperbole, you reject it all. “I just don’t care any more, because «100’s of k’s of scientists and experts» didn’t put her in her place.”

I mean, seriously? That’s just mental.