Atheist Forum

Buckle up, because this is kind of a long one and it's dissecting a form of manipulation on a politically-divisive and emotionally-charged topic, climate change. So naturally, it's pretty incendiary. Or it would be if the calm delivery of the manipulator didn't help lull the manipulated to sleep. It appears calm and collected and matter-of-fact, but it's not - it's lying to people and giving people a false impression of reality. It's peddling a subtle form of denialism while claiming that it's just correcting for "alarmism" and "misleading charts".

Essentially, there's a YouTube video making the rounds that "climate activists" are being alarmists with those hockey-stick graphs and really, if we just fudge stuff a little bit and draw on it with a sharpie (a best fit line, but it's suspiciously linear, which isn't correct - it's really an exponential curve). "It's not so much that we're having lots of hot days, we just have less cold days, isn't that great?" No. It's not great. There are places in the world that are supposed to hit certain temperatures at certain times of the year and they often don't. That's the problem. That's what we're talking about when we talk about global warming or climate change or whatever you want to call it. Why does that matter? Sure most people can just crank the A/C or heat. You know who can't? Animals and plants. Us humans need those things in order to live. That's why climate change is important. It's not because climate scientists love the limelight or grant money or anything like that. Climate change is cutting human civilization at the ankles. And if you cut deep enough, it's game over.

Personally, I don't have Hank's faith in billionaires. The idea that they'll jump to the rescue when things get dicey is a bit absurd. Some of them are funneling their vast wealth into denialism as we speak. Why are they doing this, if it'll just hurt them in the long-term? Because it protects their bottom line in the short term. It's all short-term thinking, not long-term thinking. My prediction, and sorry for being a downer about this, but even if it hurts them in the long-term, they'll never stop themselves. They'll keep on going until nothing is left. Drill baby drill, all the way down to Hell.

To paraphrase Dr Seuss, the only way any of this is going to change is if someone like you cares a whole awful lot. And just caring isn't enough, you and I have to successfully lobby for real solutions, like phasing out fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas) as the primary way that power is produced and the bedrock (no pun intended) of the economy. We either make that happen or the future state of the world is honestly pretty bleak. To their credit, some countries are really doing a good job at this. Others, not so much.

And like so many other problems we've faced, there are political games going on. Some people take this stuff seriously and some people don't and cash fat checks. So when a candidate doesn't take this stuff seriously, they should lose enough votes to lose their election. It's that simple. Only when there's a lot of public pressure on politicians to do stuff to make a serious dent in climate change will any meaningful change materialize.

It is ironic when billionaires wish to colonize Mars while at the same time pushing Earth's atmosphere to become more and more like Mar's. All it took was one asteroid to wipe out all large terrestrial animals and set life on Earth on a totally new mammalian course.