When I picture why certain family members have a hard time accepting the reality of global warming, it certainly comes down to difficulty grappling with emotions, not a hard review of the literature.
Recognizing emotions as part of the problem and solution feels like a big step.
I think this is actually the worst thing we can do. Science is facts, cold hard facts.
If you want to get rid of the science and focus on emotions, then the solutions to the _real_ problem will get distorted.
The author talks about cancer diagnoses. This is an apt analogy, and there is a huge body of science for helping individuals cope with personal tragedy. Global warming is a global and personal tragedy. People will have their livelihoods ruined, and people will die. People already have, but (since this is a anglophile community) this forum is mostly insulated from developments in North Africa, the Middle East, Central America... how it impacts us is in the nationalistic/xenophobic movements around the resulting human migrations. Acknowledging this will prevent conflict and harm those that cynically try to take advantage of groups of people in vulnerable states through demagoguing.
The science should be cold an unemotional. The policy dictated by the science should be sensitive to the mental health of everyone as they absorb the magnitude of this disaster.
I'd rather have a cold hard doctor that fixes my cancer, than feel good about dying.
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/should_we_trai... https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/wps.20146 https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnbeh.2014.0045... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21300514 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21248604
Otherwise, I will argue that emotions are directly linked to our personal health, but not the climate. It's an entirely different system that has no emotions.
You're not going to fix anything without convincing people do act, and its more likely that you can convince people to act if you can connect with with on an emotional level, rather than just tell them the facts and saying what needs to be done.
We've been telling people the facts for years and it's not done shit.
All a politician has to do is present a real solution, and you will have lots of support. That hasn't happened yet. It wasn't hard to get people to stop littering, because the leaders did something about it, and the followers followed.
It's a leadership issue, not a follower issue. So stop blaming the followers, and blame the leaders.
Can a warm fuzzy doctor cure cancer with science? Yes.
Can a warm fuzzy doctor cure cancer with emotions and no science? No.
So, this is not a false dichotomy. The climate can not be changed by feeling different about it.
Is there a solution to climate change that does not involve science? I would argue no.
What they're talking about is how important emotions are when dealing with humans, and you need to deal with humans to solve this problem.
It's a childish ploy to play with emotions, and you will end up with a childish solution playing this game.
Science has won over millions of people with the truth time and time again. To pretend like this issue can only be solved by emotions is a giant lie. We have history to demonstrate this.
However, there's no solution to climate science that doesn't involve engaging with humans either. Pathos is a fundamental part of engaging with humans.
That is a tautology. Exactly how much warming are we looking at by 2100? Is it an emergency, an annoyance, or nothing much?
Will higher CO2 concentrations avert an Ice Age in a few thousand years?
The fact is that market forces are looking as if they will greatly reduce CO2 emissions over the next few decades. The wildcard is how quickly China, India, and emerging third world countries will wean off of coal. Nuclear must be a much bigger part of the mix (see ThorCon and others).
In the meantime, most of the "mitigation efforts" look more like unrelated social engineering.
Electric cars still cost to produce what non electrics do, we have to take into account the backend (mining ect) as well. Gas is most likely as bad according to many reports. Countries which have made the switch like Brazil in cars haven’t produced the results expected, again the production is still not clean.
Wind is unreliable in most cases and non scalable. Solar is ok, but expensive and we can’t deploy it for everything(think maritime transport).
The way to solve our problem is with innovation that can really replace our main source of consumption. Think population bomb/explosion in the 50-60s. Whaling shift to electricity and vegetable oils late 1800s. All was replaced by new tech, which has decayed into bad tech, and the new tech we develop will probably also decay into bad tech again in 100years. That’s the way it works. Only realistic current solution is fusion.
Fusion, carbon-sequestering tech, geo-engineering, betavoltaics(One can dream) and new innovations are always the way forward. The rest are bandaids on the dam + have cost us a lot of money/time at subpar results.
Sorry for the quick type, but you can see more here: https://link.medium.com/4p3O0AuImZ
One more thing. The only reason fusion is 10-20 years away is because we are still focusing on failed technologies (wind and gas) and not throwing enough resources at fusion. If the government took a Los Alamos approach to fusion and nuclear energy in general we could be up and running in 5 years.
We can't people to stop murdering each other, stealing, lying, or many other harmful things.
You are arguing that propaganda is the solution to climate change. That manipulating people by appealing to their emotions will lower the carbon in the air.
But, you are missing that whoever controls the best manipulation tactic decides the outcome of that manipulation. Want to guess who that will be? The rich and powerful is my guess.
I think we could fix the climate in one simple way, stop polluting. The problem with this is that then the US isn't the biggest polluter, so that is not a "feel good" message.
As adults we have to do things we don't like every day to achieve our goals. We have to choose things that make us unhappy and miserable so our kids have food. Emotions are more often our enemy than our friend.
Science and truth are always neutral, and must be the basis of decisions, unless you are going to agree that we must act like adults and tell everyone they need to chose misery to make a change.
I agree with that, but the people saying it aren't doing it first. That is hypocrisy and the worst form of leadership, and is the enemy of change. Therefore, until the current hypocrite leaders of climate change are replaced with honorable doers, nothing will change.
And shaming the followers into following hypocritical leaders is a recipe for disaster. Hypocrites have no moral base, and act to their own benefit, not yours, the planets only their own.
How do you figure?
Therefore feelings are irrelevant to both the scientific process and the results found from using it.
Have you ever met a scientist in their element? They are passionate, mercurial creatures who will bitterly feud as well as sing the highest praise about their work. This seems to be integral to the process. Curiosity is a feeling, too.
I think you're idealizing science and I don't even think your ideal is a particularly useful aspiration for scientific activity.
I am not idealizing anything, it's an indisputable fact that repeatable scientific results are repeatable by anyone.
There are real solutions to climate change, they can be implemented today, right now. And the followers in society have nothing to do with it, it's the leader responsibility to implement.
“If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell”
― Carl Sandburg
The problem with this is that who decides what solution? If the motive for the solution is emotions, then any solution that "feels good" or "appears to solve" the problem will suffice.
This is a stark misrepresentation of my point. Persuading people to accept climate change is (or at least may well be) part of the solution. Persuasion involves an emotional aspect for the majority of people.
On a broader note, motives unavoidably involve emotion, or at least a value judgement. Scientific results never inform what ought to be done. Science does not provide values. It's a tool that helps us to achieve valued outcomes.
This is a political/social issue that has to be approached this way. The science should inform our decisions but in order to reach that goal one might have to do more than insist that the science is correct and doesn’t care about your emotions.
Those that argue against science tend to argue that myths are real. Like the existence of aliens, crystals have magic powers, aligning of chakras, etc...
Edit: An example of science fixing pollution:
You may consider the case of pure mathematics, where intensely creative and open-minded individuals manipulate exotic structures atop towering ladders of abstraction; such exploration is the source of much of our most powerful technology and insights into reality. If you listen to explanations of the working methods employed by mathematicians many of them will claim that among the tools they rely upon most heavily are intuition and "feeling".
Once you move beyond the unfortunate anti-human perspective of what I'll half-jokingly call "extreme scientific materialism" and accept the fundamental role of the human experience in the unfolding of the cosmos you might come to see that a mind bent on pure rationality (to the exclusion of all else) is like a beautiful, fueled-up airplane idling on the runway with no pilot in it.
A non-functioning solution that feels good won't fix the climate. Arguing that feelings are relevant isn't a fix.
The great leaders down through history did not rely on making people feel good, they did the opposite. They inspired people to take on real difficulties. To face _not_ feeling good.
That is the problem right now, hypocritical leadership has no ability to inspire or motivate and will not make any changes to the climate.
After you’ve had 100 people tell you that, you’ll probably change your mind.
Social media has made the problem worse. For some reason, deniers flood the discussion with silly statements like that.
I keep the xkcd cartoon handy for any discussions:
Nothing I said can be interpreted as saying this.