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Sunday, September 22, 2019

There is no excuse for spreading disinformation about climate

Sou | 9:47 AM Go to the first of 2 comments. Add a comment
This is a personal note about how I consider hard-core deniers and disinformers to be as bad as the worst of the worst of humanity. They are comparable to Charles Manson, Timothy McVeigh and other horrors in that they want to harm people and take pleasure in the thought of civilisation destroying itself.

There is no excuse for anyone these days to doubt climate change or to not accept that we are causing it. In simple terms which everyone should know by now, we are burning more fossil fuel and adding more greenhouse gases to the air. This results in less energy going to space than is coming in from the sun. Our planet is heating up. Ice is melting, seas are rising, storms are more intense and heat waves are hotter. This is killing people, reducing our capacity to grow food, and causing a great deal of harm already. It will get worse before it gets better.

If a serial climate disinformer doesn't like being compared to mass murderers, then they should ask themselves why they are working so hard to bring about death and destruction. Or, they can change their behaviour and stop acting as if they want to. (Today there was a very unpleasant denier who objected to this comparison. He is a long term disinformer about climate change and has now been banned from this blog, so you won't see his comments or my response.) [Update: That particular disinformer just sent a comment to let me know he and his hard-core denier bloggers follow in the footsteps of "Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot...", or words to that effect.]

Just wanted to put that out there.

(See also: Marginalised, alienated and put upon: climate science deniers are not innocent)

2 comments:

  1. I wholeheartedly agree Sou.

    That Twitter thread entertained me for a while, then caused me to ponder, but it now has me livid. It's this minset that has delivered the planet to the brink of societal and environmental disaster.

    There seem to be a few major categories of denier:

    1) the selfish sociopath who sees no problem in pursuing greed and baiting people in the process

    2) the fanatical ideologue who cannot countenance the notion of their own ignorance despite the overwhelming objective evidence to the contrary

    3) the gullible but useful idiots who are manipulated by their peers via the agency of their lizard brains

    4) the fearful victim who doesn't want to face the fact that they're the cause of a profound damage to the planet.

    Of course there are more types, and more than one can be present in any particular instance.

    There's no excuse though for any of these forms to have any traction through society. Even if we cannot raise the consciousness of the deniers themselves, the rest of society shouldn't pander to their thinking and the resulting years of delay it's manifested. In particular, the cynical encouragement of denialism by conservative politicians should be absolutely reviled for the repugnant antisocialism that it is (Scott Morrison and his cadre of antiscientific deniers and liars deserve especially strong condemnation...).

    I don't think that there's any grassroots pushback that can quash this insidious poison of the intellect. I suspect the only way that it can be cast into the shadows is for conservative politicians to grow some selflessness and human decency and commit to expunging this ideology from their policies. Doing so would likely alienate the worst offenders and make the movement wither.

    Not doing so will eventually kill that form of conservatism, but also society along with it...

    ReplyDelete

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