Anger found to be the primary driver of climate activism
You know what really makes me angry? Statements like this:
&gt;&quot;In this new study, the researchers sought to better understand why so little is being done to save the planet&quot;<p>Save the planet? Really? Is it going to explode in a ball of fire&#x2F;lava destroying the moon in the process? No it will not.<p>Using hyper-alarmist language like this has an opposite effect to the one we want. What is it &quot;we&quot; want? An informed debate on the subject focused mostly on how to prepare for and mitigate climate change, not panic. This kind of language (&quot;we&#x27;re all going to die&quot;) has twofold negative consequences. One, it triggers many people making actual informed conversation impossible. Second, it makes people that do believe it will be exactly like that(usually young people) very depressed.<p>There is precisely zero impact on &quot;The planet&quot; if for example humanity decides to blow itself to smithereens with 5k nuclear warheads. Few hundred thousand years later (a blink of an eye in geologic timescales) there will be no difference. Some species will go extinct. Perhaps overall diversity will take a nosedive for a bit, just like in a dozen prior &quot;mass dying&quot; events before. To quickly recover and exceed previous numbers.<p>It&#x27;s like this with anthropogenic climate change, &quot;the planet&quot; doesn&#x27;t care(if it could care for anything) that the climate during this recovery from the last ice age is warming up a bit faster thanks to our civilisation. The planet had periods before where average temperatures were 30C higher. No, it will not cause a chain reaction for the Earth to end up as Venus. We had huge amounts of co2 (and methane) in the atmosphere before and it didn&#x27;t happen.<p>You know who it maters for though? People. Yes, changing climate will matter a lot for people. Especially people living in places like Bangladesh and many other places. You want to know how climate change will look like? Consider the fact there were lions, giraffes, hippos in huge numbers all over today&#x27;s Sahara mere 15k years ago. It&#x27;s actually a great example(despite the fact human emissions had nothing to do with it back them it is still a great case study) . A huge value got destroyed by desertification of this area, entire civilisations dissapeared and others came to be (Egyptians) but it didn&#x27;t happen in one person&#x27;s lifetime.<p>This climate change will be slow too. I very much doubt humanity can cooperate to stop or seriously curb greenhouse emissions. It(the climate change) will happen. On average everyone will loose on the climate change, but there will still be entire nations that will profit. If we can&#x27;t even cooperate enough to stop atrocities like mass slavery&#x2F;organ harvesting in places like China what makes anyone think they will not just continue to lie about the greenhouse gas emissions and they will just laugh at us as we continue destruction of our industries? In the short term (next 50 years) it is much more important for The West to recover its industrial advantage to not end up being ruled by the Chinese Communist Party. Is climate change an important problem to consider? Sure it is, but it&#x27;s important to understand two things. First, it is very unlikely China will not just pick up all the emissions The West stops, second anything including climate change activism is likely being used as a weapon by enemies of democratic rule to make us weaker. OMG, we&#x27;re all going to die. SHUT DOWN EVERYTHING! Is precisely the reaction They (China&#x2F;Russia) want us to have.<p>If we really want to seriously slow down anthropogenic climate change, we(The West) have to be in position to enforce changes on countries like China. Making us dependent on them for 100% of our steel production for example accomplishes the opposite.