RE: Climate Predictions Are Useless – So What?
I haven't checked but I'd bet the actual number of climate deniers is a minority, exacerbated by the media presence of the US which is a uniquely religious and skeptical-of-science nation.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. If we take a recent study by YouGov as basis, then there appears to be quite a strong distinction between eastern/western countriesref.
There is, however, a notable East/West divide. People in Eastern and Middle Eastern countries tend to be much more likely to think that climate change will have a great deal of impact than those in the West. For instance, while fully 75% of Filipinos and 65% of Qataris expect to have their lives disrupted in a large way (the highest rate in Asia and the Middle East respectively), in Europe the most worried nation is Spain, at only 32%. The Nordic nations come at the very bottom, with only between 10% and 14% thinking climate change is set to disturb their lives a great deal.
This is in accordance to my own experiences in Germany.
So dodgy science predictions aren't the problem, it's the approach. We should be glorifying the scientific accomplishments that are happening constantly - positive reinforcement, but we almost never see or hear that. Instead, we just hear complaints about what isn't happening, desperately finding blame on someone for cars still using fossil fuels, rather than cheering a new solar efficiency milestone or something.
Personally, I think it goes both ways. I do think positive reinforcement is a valuable characteristic to pursue, but that shouldn't lead astray from the challenges we are facing today. Because the odds are very high this time.
There are several ideas which pose as possible solutions, but currently I don't know which one might be the best. I will probably write about different approaches in the future and try to evaluate how high their respective impact could be.
Either way, interesting read. I guess I'm quite fascinated in complex systems too =D
Glad I could intrigue someone else :)
This is not what I said though, I said deniers. Of course, the Spaniards and wealthy countries will think less impact, because they are wealthy with a wealthy government in relatively mild climates. Impoverished, corrupt-to-the-point-of-a-joke government-led countries built in the middle of the tropics are going to suffer - it's completely out of their control.
In terms of denial, I just looked it up and I was pretty dead-on; according to a YouGov-Cambridge collaboration, the US is considered a 'hotbed' of denial at a high of 13% who believe climate change is real but not anthropogenic, and a whopping 5% deny it altogether.
Maybe, but we certainly don't see that at all. Doom and gloom get a lot more clicks, after all.
Case and point - We get an overall feeling that the world is full of climate deniers, that the world will end in 8 years, that Donald Trump has killed millions with his decisions and is an actual Nazi, that the Amazon has almost entirely burnt down thanks to a cackling, evil dictator (the leaked messages say nothing about it from him, and, according to the NYTimes: 'Much of the land that is burning was not old-growth rain forest, but land that had already been cleared of trees and set for agricultural use' - and the rate of deforestation is significantly lower than in the past and hardly skyrocketing), and so on.
Your post's point is still entirely valid in all of these cases, however, I genuinely believe an honest depiction from reporters on what's going on is easily sufficient to get us on our feet and taking action. By overstating the truth, we enable the skeptics to deny, dismiss and ridicule with some level of legitimacy - this is my biggest qualm