The general public are woefully unaware of how bad the climate situation is and how dire the straits are. Here’s where all y’all doomers and Debbie Downers can help educate them.
People don’t know about tipping points, they don’t know about the methane in the melting tundra or in rice paddies, they don’t know what the heck a carbon “equivalent” is.
I’ve stopped interacting with doomers that are over the line.
I’m just too prone to doomy thoughts myself and if someone says over and over again “stop trying, it’s hopeless, stop trying, stop trying”, that does have a huge impact on me, and that crosses over from despair to complicity.
The problem is that there’s this huge excluded middle between people who think it’s not that bad (most people most of the time; people seem to be compartmentalizing this to a pretty wild degree) and people who are completely and utterly hopeless.
That’s where you doomers can help! Educate people how bad it is without pulling them all the way to the “give up” part of the spectrum.
(Why not? Because there’s no situation that’s so bad that it can’t be made worse. World becoming a cinder heap in X years? Well, if we give up and make it even worse we’ll halve that.)
Skeptical Science is a great resource for this.
The whole 1.5˚, 2˚, 2.5˚ rhetoric was a huge mistake since it has led and is leading policy makers to sloppy and compromised decisions. Those numbers would be so small if it were local weather, and that’s the frame of reference the suits have.
We need a new approach and new reporting. Policy follows discourse, and media is a huge part of that.
This is a special case.
There’s also this whole side category of people who are like “it’s no use trying to get the public, the state to fix this, I’ll just go live in the woods with my like-minded companions”. That’s kind of a weird intersection of doomer’s hopelessness with the general public’s underestimation of how bad it actually is. Ain’t gonna be no woods or water or fresh air if things go super duper bad—and that’s a level of badness we might still be able to prevent if you sober up and rejoin the fight!
(That said: you figuring out ways to live sustainably that other people can also adopt is helping, in a big way.♥︎)