"For nearly two decades, the percentage of Americans who are committed climate skeptics has been pretty consistently below 10%. Likewise, if you ask Americans whether global warming is happening, roughly 4/5ths will say "yes".
[This graph] didn't change me because I got a useful piece of data, it changed me because this did not align with my perceived understanding of the situation. If you had asked me before I saw this graph, I would've told you that probably 50% of people in America thought that climate change is a scam or a hoax [...]
But if you believe that, you are fighting the wrong fight every day. You think there's a bunch of people who are impossible to convince so you're not trying to convince them. When actually the situation is mostly they're convinced, they're just not convinced that it is the thing that we need to be concentrating on right now because they're dealing with some other problem like the price of eggs at the grocery store.
So 1) you're caught fighting the exact wrong fight and 2) you're fighting it with the weight of despair tied around your neck.
If we could say this in the fewest words possible, it would be something like, With today's information ecosystem, it is very easy to believe that 50% of people hold the views of the most extreme 10% of them [...].
And it is no use to be weighed down by a world that isn't actually this one. This one's hard enough as it is."
The Illinois native’s comments come a week after the U.S. president derided the fight against climate change.
Pope Leo XIV sends Donald Trump's climate-denialism straight to Hell.
Pope Leo XIV denounced people who deny climate change on Wednesday, arguing that they are contributing to the destruction of God's creation.
"Some have chosen to deride the increasingly evident science of climate change, to ridicule those who speak of global warming and even to blame the poor for the very thing that affects them the most," Leo said.
The pope's comments come just a week after U.S. President Donald Trump, in a speech at the United Nations, called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.”
Linger on that papal phrase, "the increasingly evident science of climate change".
The Chicago area pope will have none of Trump's fossil-fuelled denialism.
"We cannot love God whom we cannot see while despising his creatures, nor can we call ourselves disciples of Jesus Christ without participating in his outlook on creation and his care for all that is fragile and wounded," Leo said.
Following in the footsteps of Francis, Leo called on "everyone in society ... [to] put pressure on governments to develop and implement more rigorous regulations, procedures and controls" to fight climate change and protect the environment.
It's Pope Leo, not some "woke leftist" who is calling for more rigorous environmental protections.
There's never going to be a moment where the deniers and Climate Skeptics "snap out of it". It's time to recognize the reality of what we're dealing with.
Imagine you’re fifty years old and you’ve been a two pack a day smoker since age fourteen. You notice you’ve been coughing more than usual, losing weight, and feeling tired, so you go to the doctor and are told you have lung cancer.
The good news is there’s a treatment. Unfortunately, this treatment will be very expensive and unpleasant, but if you quit smoking and undergo this treatment, the prognosis will be excellent. If you do nothing, the doctor tells you that you will probably die within six months.
You're skeptical and you aren’t willing to give up cigarettes and submit yourself to this painful and costly treatment. You go home, days go by, you lose more weight, you start coughing up blood, and you can barely get out of bed. Then one morning, you look at the calendar and notice it’s been seven months since your diagnosis. The doctor said you would be dead in six! If the doctor was wrong about that, what else was he wrong about?
To get a second opinion, you send your medical file out to 100 doctors, not just oncologists but all kinds of specialists. The neurologists tell you it’s spread to your brain. The orthopedic surgeons tell you it’s metastasized to your bones.
Out of those 100 doctors, 97 of them agree your situation is very dire and you will almost certainly die soon if you do nothing. Some of them think it’s too late no matter what. Two of the doctors are a bit concerned and would like more testing done. You decide the fact that they don’t all precisely agree on the exact time and date of your death or the severity of the situation is proof none them has any clue what they’re talking about.
The last doctor has a PhD in sociology, works as a lobbyist for a tobacco company, and tells you the other doctors are just trying to sell you this unnecessary treatment to make money. Dr. Sociology points you to a few decades-old studies that show doctors used to think smoking was actually good for you. Were the doctors wrong then or are they wrong now? You figure no one actually knows anything and they’re all just guessing.
Two more months pass. Your health continues to decline but you rationalize that you actually felt kind good yesterday and it’s been days since you last coughed up blood, so maybe cancer isn’t really all that bad. Maybe you don’t actually have cancer at all. Maybe cancer isn’t even real!
This is the logic of climate change denial. Only it’s not just your life at stake if you’re wrong, it’s the lives of hundreds of billions of humans and animals.
One of the biggest cultural shifts in recent years is the rise of fake news - where claims with no evidence behind them (e.g. the world is flat) get shared as fact alongside evidence-based, peer-reviewed findings (e.g. climate change is happening).
Ignoring science is a Bad Thing™:
“Anti-vaccination movements cost lives. Climate change skepticism slows the global response to the greatest social, economic and ecological threat of our time.”
It’s tempting (and easy) to dismiss those who reject science as just foolish or ignorant. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case:
“Researchers found that people who reject scientific consensus on topics such as climate change, vaccine safety, and evolution are generally just as interested in science and as well-educated as the rest of us.”
So what is the problem? Good ol’ confirmation bias: accepting “facts”--even when they’re false--that support what one wants to believe, and ignoring actual facts that don’t:
”The issue is that when it comes to facts, people think more like lawyers than scientists, which means they ‘cherry pick’ the facts and studies that back up what they already believe to be true. So if someone doesn’t think humans are causing climate change, they will ignore the hundreds of studies that support that conclusion, but latch onto the one study they can find that casts doubt on this view. This is also known as confirmation bias, a type of cognitive bias. ... ‘People treat facts as relevant more when the facts tend to support their opinions. When the facts are against their opinions, they don't necessarily deny the facts, but they say the facts are less relevant.’ ... The results suggest that simply focussing on the evidence and data isn’t enough to change someone's mind about a particular topic, seeing as they’ll most likely have their own ‘facts’ to fire back at you.”
And yes, it’s getting worse:
“We grew up in an era when it was just presumed that reason and evidence were the ways to understand important issues; not fear, vested interests, tradition or faith. But the rise of climate skepticism and the anti-vaccination movement made us realize that these enlightenment values are under attack.”
And yes, it’s primarily the fault of politicians and others who try to bolster their most insupportable positions by turning everything into a political issue:
“A big part of the problem, the researchers found, is that people associate scientific conclusions with political or social affiliations. ... people have actually always cherry picked facts when it comes to science - that’s nothing new. But it hasn’t been such a big problem in the past, because scientific conclusions were usually agreed on by political and cultural leaders, and promoted as being in the public’s best interests. Now, scientific facts are being wielded like weapons in a struggle for cultural supremacy.”
