In a very real sense I’d say this sort of thing belongs in Leopards Ate My Face.
There are a lot of these people who are all of a sudden “Oh, this was not just doomsaying on the part of some radical scientists, this is a real thing.” Now that they’re actually experiencing the consequences of the last 40 years of complete and total inaction, they are expressing their regret. And, I’m sorry but you all voted for this. You all actively decided to ignore the problem because it was not affecting you at the time. And you didn’t really think it would ever actually affect you. And now that it is, you’re sad about it. And a lot of these people were even mocking people like Greta Thunberg for her anger at the complete indifference to the global climate crisis we were headed towards. And, to that and them, I say fuck you! We all tried to warn you and you simply ignored us. And now we are all in the same sinking boat together. And for my money, you deserve any and all hardships that you experience due to this climate crisis.
Gore won his election and the supreme court took it away from us. You can’t blame the voters completely, at least in the USA.
And then you all shrugged and said, “this is fine”
“Only now is it clicking???” They literally said they believed in it! This thread is a perfect example of why so much of the fediverse is fucking insufferable. This is not a climate change denier, you fucking morons. So determined to find enemies absolutely everywhere that when someone says something as innocuous as “several years ago I hadn’t noticed the physical changes yet,” hundreds of people are upvoting unproductive, misdirected, snide mockery.
Scientists have been raising the alarm since the late 70s. It’s been 50 years.
Don’t shame people for how long it took them. Be grateful for the insight they now show. Shaming them online makes it scarier for people to change their world view
I think it is mainly the fact that we have been shouting this from the rooftops for years, and all we got was ridicule.
And now, suddenly, when they realise they are also fucked, we are expected to be the bigger person.
These are the same people who always had a “what about…” ready. The same people who never wanted to sacrifice anything or make hard choices. No, they needed the bigger car, the cheap flights, the endless convenience, and they laughed while others tried to go net zero.
“It is pointless anyway, because big industry are the real polluters,” they said, as if that excused doing absolutely nothing.
I do not fear what is coming for me. I fear what is coming for my children because of years of selfish, egocentric people refusing to think about what they were doing to everything around them.
So yes, I understand the point about not making it scarier for people to change their worldview. But I am not going to pretend it does not matter how much damage was done while they mocked the people who saw it coming.
But you didn’t “only get ridicule”. It’s accepted fact in wide swathes of population. You don’t even know (I don’t think?) that this person was any kind of skeptic, they’ve just adjusted how important they think it is.
I think you’re doing exactly the wrong thing here: you’re taking the worst example of anti-climate-science people and projecting it onto this example you have a single sympathetic post from.
“It’s accepted fact in wide swathes of the population” who still mostly didn’t do anything to change their behavior in response. What’s the difference between a climate change denier who refuses to reduce driving and a climate change acknowledger who refuses to reduce driving? Practically speaking, not much!
It is what it is.
Scientists and experts have tried for 50+ years to warn about it but now it is what it is.
The Greenhouse Gas Effect should have been enough. Altering the reflective properties of the atmosphere and increasing the energy budget of the planet surely must be a terrible idea.
But do we know that it is a terrible idea?
They looked back in time to show that historically more CO2 means increased temperature and changes in the climate system that we may not want.
They looked forward in time to simulate how our emissions will lead to a hotter climate and how it might change in ways we might not want.
They even took all these models that admittedly vary and depend on initial conditions and assumptions and they combined them all so that we aren’t sensitive to only one kind of model and method.
Still, people think we cannot know such things.
It is what it is. But one thing I do know for sure is that we have lost the excuse to go back and question things. We can’t say “If only we were warned”. “If someone really knew, why didn’t they say anything?” “Why weren’t they more persuasive?” This has been screeched about for most of our lives. Every single person on the planet knows about it. Any skepticism and doubt has been explicitly against the advice of those who know. We chose not to listen.
It is what it is, but I will spend what little money I have and what little democratic say I have to move us into a world with less emmisions. It may be too late, but I’d like to be able to sleep at night.
I have no hope, that the system will change in time for us or those who come after us; humans and other walks of life. But I still do things and make choices, that mitigate my impact on the planet. Not because I think I can steer us away from this path, but because it is the right thing to do. I am morally obligated to do it even if the result does not change and I take a weak solace in that fact. And of course it always matters whether we hit 3, 4, 5 or 8 degrees above pre-industrial mean to other evolutions of life.
Well, I maybe have good news for this person… AMOC collapse is an anticipated effect of global warming and it would paradoxically make it much, much colder in Ireland. As in “Ice Age” colder.
When?
