Nothing. You can’t logic someone out of a position they didn’t use logic to get to in the first place. There’s way more unmotivated and un-mobilized people out there that believe in human caused climate change that are more worth your time and energy.
If your house is too warm and you’re running 20 electric heaters but for some reason think it’s something else causing the heat, it’d still pay to turn off some of those heaters to compensate for the external cause since you actually have control over the heaters.
If you really think that anything you say will have any impact on them then maybe it doesn’t matter what the cause is as long as you can get them onboard with the solution. The two are inextricably linked so if they’re really adamant about this you’ll probably not be successful in this endeavour but it’s worth a try if you have some faith in them. If they think it’s all long term cyclical solar patterns or some other non anthropogenic cause it might be worth pointing out that it’s still happening and causing consequences. The trouble will be not implying too heavily as I have in my heaters example, that the solution is obviously linked to the cause, even if it is. Otherwise they will not believe you have common ground.
Slap them in the face. If they complain, tell them the pain is real but human activity didn’t contribute to it.
I came to post pretty much the exact same thing 🤣
Just show them that one xkcd about how abrupt the current warming is and how nicely it lines up with industrialization. The comparison between the natural slow shifts in global climate vs. what’s been happening the last century or so is the clearest counter to “but the climate has always been changing”.
The other times that things have changed in comparable timescales, it’s been caused by supervolcanoes or other such calamities.
Edit: Oh yeah one caveat: The xkcd is ten years old and we’re now actually already around +1.5°C.
I showed that to my father. Completely ignored it.
I guess it didn’t align with his beliefs.I was about to find that same xkcd. 😅
It really is a good way to portray that.It also shows quite well that shit is hitting the fan, almost horizontally, in a time period where we have proper temperature measurements from all around the world. Even if humans were not at fault, we need to do something about it.
Yeah, as if “Mass extinctions are a natural occurence!” were an excuse to carry on business as usual :D
You’re not going to convince anyone with a shitty drawing of the “Earth Temperature Timeline” and then start at 20000BC.
Why not? In my opinion it’s doing an excellent job at showing the speed difference between the slow preindustrial climate changes and the sharp acceleration of the human made postindustrial climate change
It looks like a cherry picked tiny fragment of earth’s time to make a simplistic point.
“Look how never anything happened for all this time you’re scrolling down and then wow!”
20000BC in itself is only a small portion of a percent of earth’s time.
Yes the speed is remarkable but it has still been much warmer or colder over a longer period.
Leaving this out is not the best way to make a point IMO.
Certainly when there have been cases where people have exaggerated or plainly lied on these matters.
It’s doesn’t help with credibilityYes the speed is remarkable but it has still been much warmer or colder over a longer period.
This is precisely the point that comic is making tho. Yes, our planet has been a lot warmer than it is now, but as far as we know the changes we’re currently making to the climate are by far the most rapid in human history and this is bound to cause some civilization-scale issues. Even ignoring all the usual problems that will happen again due to a warmer climate (sea level rise, desertification etc), there are some novel ones. There will be no time for ecosystems and societies to adapt to different agricultural conditions, leading to widespread ecosystem and crop failures, cascading down to every aspect of human life.
You’re a jerk
🤣
This seems to have worked with my boomer mom: “be that as it may, wouldn’t we all be better off by reducing pollution?”
Nothing, having arguments with people that lack basic critical thinking skills is a waste of time. A simple google search can give you all the data and numbers and you can show it to them but it doesn’t matter if they believe they know better than actual scientists. There are people out there that believe the Earth is flat.
Met a director of my company in the UK that made a joke about vegans. I said, say what you want but they’re good for the climate! He went off on me about how climate change was fake. I tried my best to just move onto a different topic but he just kept going at me and ended it with: “you started it” … to which I said, “yes and let’s move on shall we?”
They’re not worth the effort.
I had that happen with some random guy over the Iran war where I just made an offhand comment about how bad the US was doing and he starts going on a tirade about how America is #1 and yadda yadda. Anyway I kinda laughed and said I wanted to move on and was uncomfortable. A couple days later I saw him again and he said, “I looked it up and you were right about that one thing you mentioned but I’m still right about most of it.” Like sure buddy.
Seems like that company doesn’t have very good direction
ha… I’m vegan, me sitting at a table to eat is enough for people to feel the need to defend themselves and their choices without me saying anything other than kindly answering their questions from a conversation they start. It forces one to train the skill of not engaging with people like that.
Also he’s the one that started it with the (likely bad-taste) joke, not you, but good on you for taking one just to end it. Some people just can’t deal with their cognitive dissonance because it would mean facing their actions not matching with their idealized version of themselves, you can’t have reasonable conversations with them.
Maybe show them this:
I tell people that burning a 100 million barrels of oil a day, everyday, has to have an impact.
Imagine how much exhaust that is everyday.
The idea that burning a million barrels of oil everyday would not have an impact on the atmosphere is absurd.
I think CO2 is good for life, but cement in cities, deforestation and the heat produce by burninf fuel must be bad.
I don’t trust too much the CO2 crisis, we got other pollution like micropastics and eternal chemicals I believe are more serious.
Anyways I still commute by public transport even though I have a company car with petrol, everyone can help.
Well without a real sense of the size of the atmosphere (which most people don’t have), that doesn’t really mean anything, other than it being a big number. Any impressively big number can be insignificant in relation to something big enough to easily absorb it.
However, we’ve added to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere by 50%. I think that says it really is significant.
So… where’s the extra heat coming from? If you acknowledge it exists where’s it from?
Is it a problem? If it is shouldn’t we prevent or prepare for it?
Save your breath. It’s honestly not worth it.
Exactly, just say “you are too stupid to understand the explanation” and walk away.
I told my dad that even if climate change isn’t real, or if it is humans don’t contribute… what’s the harm in doing something about it? What’s the harm in doing something to help your grandkids have a world to grow up in and enjoy?
He installed solar panels a few years ago and now likes to talk about how he heats and cools his home without paying ConEd
What if that person think CO2 is good for life?
We have people like this running Egypt. They’re constantly cutting down trees!
Trees in Egypt?
Yes for sure, it’s not a desert
Don’t. Nothing you could say is going to change their mind. They’d need to hear it from new sources they trust and their peers and then it still wouldn’t be guaranteed they’d reconsider their position. Confirmation bias and a whole host of other brain stuff makes changing someone’s mind incredibly difficult. Save your breath.
Personally, now I would say ‘fine, it doesn’t matter what you believe. We are severely fucked and we are going to be lucky to survive. Making one person accept reality is not going to change anything.’
I’ve become more and more pessimistic… simon Clark on YouTube has a bunch of accurately hopeful climate content that helps a bit, but so much hinges on ‘if we don’t actively make it worse’ which is exactly what is happening.
My one hope is we will have enough mortally devasting weather before it’s too late so that doubters will convince themselves.
My one hope is we will have enough mortally devasting weather before it’s too late so that doubters will convince themselves.
I’m sorry to say that but it’s kinda “too late” already, to some definition. Even if we stop burning fossil fuels right now, human societies will not escape unharmed, there will be more crop failure leading to more famine leading to more war, even ignoring the “minutia” such as heat-related deaths and so on. Of course that’s not to say we shouldn’t fix our shit right now, because we still can reduce the impact and try to save our global “civilization” (or whatever you want to call the sum of human knowledge, connections, industry, material culture etc).
On a more hopeful level, I also think that pretty much whatever happens, homo sapiens as a species will probably survive. As primates, we are excellent at organizing in small groups and adapting our environments to suit us, however hostile they may be. Earth is huge, its flora and fauna is diverse, and even at +6-8℃ there will be some areas with ecosystems sturdy enough to sustain small populations of hunters-gatherers and even basic agricultural societies. And then, in a few thousands or tens of thousands of years, as the nature recoils from the shock and more and more land becomes habitable for humans again, they will rebuild. Since there won’t be any easily accessible oil or gas in the ground anymore, the new industrial revolution will naturally have to be more sustainable than ours.
