Reposted by Dr. Judith Curry’s Climate Etc.
Posted on May 6th, 2021 by curryja |
by Judith Curry
The harmful effects of creating environmental anxiety in children. Climate etc. as an antidote.
Earlier this week I received this letter by email:
To the esteemed Dr. Judith Curry:
You don’t know me, but I read your articles a lot and find them fascinating and insightful. We’re not sure if it’s even welcome to say a few words of encouragement to you, but first I want to explain in detail why I decided to email you with this rather strange method of offering a message. That’s because you completely changed my mind about global warming and climate change. Rest assured, I’m not the only one starting to see things in a different, more scientific light.
I grew up in the 90s when “acid rain is going to kill us all!” “All trees are felled!” “People do more harm than good for the environment!” Every kind of terrifying prediction you can imagine and instantly put to the test has been my subject, and at an age when I have not fully understood the meaning of “ask what you hear”. I firmly believed – literally until this year – that the earth would go up in flames, the oceans would be covered in oil, the rainforests would all disappear, and that the earth would be very similar to every circle of hell in Dante’s Inferno. It didn’t help either, considering that I grew up with an aunt and uncle from VERY Jehovah’s Witnesses who kept repeating to me that the world was going to end! Add frequent messages to the mix (I was unable to ignore them – my late mom would blow them around the house) and you have a pretty big ball of fear. No, seriously, I was diagnosed with GAD along with depression in middle school.
I flinch when I see that all the younger people (I’m in my early thirties) are acting just like me – with the mentality that people are a plague and ruin EVERYTHING that is good. That was the first trick of “something is wrong”. We live in the least polluted country of all, our air quality has improved drastically, the forests are largely intact, there is more greening and endangered species are celebrating comebacks that I could never have imagined in my younger years. Then why are we constantly bombarded with the messages “people are the disease”? The constant siren of “DO SOMETHING!” got me down to the point where I was looking for some kind of reassurance – not the best way to deal with a problem, but it was my method – and I came across your website. My “side” often scoffed at scientists who are either trying to extinguish the figurative flames created by their panic, or better yet, preventing the fires from spreading. Why should no one want to hear: “Good news! The planet is NOT doomed! ‘?
I have heard so much about these “climate deniers” and when I came to them I was concerned as if I was actually looking at the forbidden fruits from afar, thinking that any moment I would be struck down for disobedience by an avenging angel. (Growing up again in a somewhat Christian household, didn’t exactly help …) Nothing like that happened. I scoffed at first and thought, “This person is completely wrong. The climate is bad, people will die, there will be floods over the ocean somewhere – “And then I didn’t remember living near a town near the ocean for more than twenty years of my life. Nothing like that happened even vaguely! In fact, the sea level hasn’t risen much near my old hometown. We’ve only hit a handful of hurricanes over the course of two decades.
If climate deniers got so confused and so helped to help “big business,” why do their websites depend entirely on donations and why are their arguments so clear and precise? You don’t sound at all confused if you are a scientist (someone who is actively using the SCIENTIFIC METHOD to observe them! Yes, I know so many caps, but I wish there were people in the background who could hear this!). So why? the goal of dehumanizing the people who are actively dealing with the effects of the climate and the climate itself? It didn’t make sense. Then I went to Watt’s Up With That ?, Not many people know that, CFACT, Farm Babe, the list goes on and on and I wanted to question my own views (as if they were my own views … they were it wasn’t, it was impressions that were thrown into me at the tender age of ten …) and I found an abundance of points that were more solid and less theatrical than, for example, the world’s crying out for FIRE. How sad it is for actual science that its true practitioners are getting the boot in junk science. (“Because it’s done and we say it, so there!”)
Meanwhile, the really crazy “scientists” are people like Bill Nye (it hurts me to type this because I really liked him as a kid – his show was pretty entertaining and informative) who insist that people have to die so that the planet can survive. I can safely say that I would much rather avoid talking to them than someone who says, “Human-burned fossil fuels don’t change the planet, and here’s why.” At least the ‘denier’ doesn’t want me to be dead to breathe
Please, please, PLEASE … keep doing what you are doing, and I hope you and your colleagues manage to change a lot more minds before this madness comes to fruition! You don’t know, but you bring people hope rather than despair, you and Michael Schellenberger, Roger Pielke Jr., Paul Homewood and many others you could point me to many others that I may have missed. Please let me know if you tend to.
JC comments
The strategy of scaring the children is absolutely reprehensible. I grew up in the late 1950s and 1960s. The child fear tactic of that time was the Russians – they were ready to take over the US, we would be bombed (remember the air raid shelters of that time?), We would lose our freedoms, your neighbors could be Russian spies (everyone) behold the TV show The Americans? It is great). This fear was conveyed to me by a Catholic nun who was reinforced in the school yard. At the ripe old age of 8, I developed and worried about stomach ulcers. My doctor told me not to worry about this stuff, it was all silly politics, and just enjoy my childhood. I said ‘ok’ and was pretty much done with it. But explicit state-sanctioned and academic efforts in “cli-sci communication” (climate crisis, “emergency”, “extinction”) to scare children from climate change for political purposes are absolutely reprehensible.
Such fear tactics will backfire when children grow up and see that the creepy prophecies remain unfulfilled. We breed generations of people who learn to distrust scientists. More harm is done to children with creepy climate stories than the effects of climate change on their lives.
Meanwhile, Climate Etc. and other blogs are acting as an important antidote to such unjustified, objectionable and harmful rhetoric.
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