‘Where did I go wrong?’ The scientist who tried to raise the climate alarm
www.theguardian.com
Fifty years ago, Australian researcher Graeme Pearman travelled the world with six flasks of air to help prove CO2 in the atmosphere was rising
  • @[email protected]
    37•2 years ago

    Humans are incredibly bad at envisioning things on a large scale, especially something as (relatively) gradual as climate change.

    I have hope that enough people in government are/will be making meaningful inroads with regard to climate change, but I don’t think the public will get it until Florida and Louisiana have sunk into the Gulf.

    I don’t think it’s climate scientists’ fault; I think it’s incredibly difficult for average people to grasp the big picture, mixed with contrarians and oil industry lobbying/propaganda working against those efforts.

    • @[email protected]
      3•2 years ago

      It’s the fault of politicians who underfunded or hobbled education. Helped with the factors you mentioned of course, but if average people were better educated they could better grasp the big picture.

      • @[email protected]
        3•2 years ago

        We could only hope, yet well-educated people still believe gods who will come fix everything are self-evident facts of reality. Still, being better educated certainly wouldn’t make things worse.

      • @[email protected]
        2•2 years ago

        It’s the fault of politicians …

        … who are funded by Big Carbon.

        This is not about personal responsibility, it is about power. No amount of education protects you from misinformation, or a lack of information, when powerful people have a financial interest in burying the truth.

        • @[email protected]
          2•2 years ago

          Big carbon lobbies politicians to dismantle education, yeah. You can’t say education doesn’t fix this when that’s the thing they’re paying to destroy.

          A quality education should include media literacy, also, which is what inoculates you against the kind of thought viruses that misinformation presents.

          • @[email protected]
            1•2 years ago

            The people who are doing the lobbying and dismantling have the best educations money can buy. This is a structural problem. It’s not going to be solved by everyone being as clever and conscientious as you are.

            • @[email protected]
              1•2 years ago

              Education is a structural problem.

              Do you want corporate lobbyists to have less power? That would be great.

    • @[email protected]
      10•2 years ago

      until Florida and Louisiana have sunk into the Gulf.

      To be more clear about what this looks like in the medium term, consider Katrina level events in Florida happening more and more often. It’ll be hurricanes causing flooding first.

      • @[email protected]
        7•2 years ago

        Not directly on a large scale, but average people vote for candidates, from the city council to whatever the highest office is, and they do.

        If Average Person A doesn’t grasp the imminent danger, they’re not going to prioritize picking a candidate that has climate change policy as a platform issue.