by Judith Curry
Harm of creating environmental anxiety in children. Climate, etc. as an antidote.
Earlier this week, I received this letter by email:
To Dr. Judith Curry of Esteemed:
You don’t know me but I am a regular reader of your articles and find them fascinating and eye-opening. Not sure if it would be welcome to offer you some words of encouragement, but first I would like to explain in detail why I have decided to contact you via e-mail with a decent texting method. this strange. 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 more scientific light.
I grew up in the ‘era’ of the 90s ‘acid rain will kill us all!’ ‘all trees will be cut down!’ ‘Humans do more harm than good to the environment!’ Any kind of terrifying prediction you can immediately think of and name, I’ve had to obey it, and at an age where I don’t fully understand the meaning of ‘question what you hear’ . I fully believe – literally, until this year – that the Earth will perish in flames, the oceans will be covered with oil, the rainforests will disappear, and the Earth will be very same as every circle of Hell in Dante’s Hell. It also didn’t help that I grew up with an aunt and uncle of VERY VERY VERY MUCH, who kept telling me over and over that the world was going to end! Add the occasional news reports to the mix (I’m not in a position to belittle it – my late mother would blow it over the house) and you have a pretty big anxiety ball. No, seriously, I was diagnosed with GAD along with depression during my middle years.
Now it makes me sick to see all the younger people (I’m in my thirties) acting exactly like I did – going out with the mentality that humans are a plague and they destroy all good. . That’s the first quirk of ‘something’s wrong’. We live in the least polluted country of them all, our air quality has improved dramatically, the forests are mostly intact, MORE greening is going on and species are at risk. extinction is returning that I could never have imagined in my younger years. So why then are we constantly bombarded with ‘man is the disease’ messages? The siren kept ringing ‘DO IT!’ got me down to the point where I was looking for some reassurance – not the best way to go about it, but it was my method – and I stumbled across your site. My ‘faction’ regularly taunts scientists trying to use the figurative flames created out of their panic or, better yet, stop the fire from spreading. Why doesn’t anyone want to hear, “Good news! The planet is NOT perishable! ‘?
I’ve heard a lot about these ‘climate denizens’ and I feel anxious coming to your site as if I’m actually watching the forbidden fruit from afar, thinking that at any moment, I’m going to be hit. the avenging angel knocks down for disobedience. (Again, growing up in a somewhat Christian household doesn’t really help matters…) Nothing like that happened. At first I scoffed thinking, “This person is completely wrong. The climate is bad, people are dying, floods are happening on the ocean SOMEWHERE– ”And then I stopped myself to remember that I have lived, for over twenty years of my life, NEARLY A CLOSE TITLE POSITIVE. Nothing of that sort even happens in a hazy way! In fact, the sea level near my old hometown has not increased much. We’ve had only a handful of hurricanes make landfall over the course of two decades.
If climate ‘denizens’ are so engrossed in helping ‘big business’ why should their websites depend solely on donations, and why are their arguments clear and short? so concise? You’re not insane at all, being a scientist (someone who actively uses the scientific method to observe! Yes, I know a lot of praise, but I wish there were people in the back who could. hear this!), so why so aim to dehumanize those who are actively studying the effects of climate and climate itself? It has no meaning. Then I went to Watt’s Up With That?, Not a lot of people know that, CFACT, Farm Babe, the list goes on and on and I wanted to challenge my own opinion (as if it were important to me). my own points… they don’t, those are the impressions that came to me at the age of ten…) and I’ve found countless spots with more sound and less stage, for example, screaming the whole world world is FIRE. How sad it is for real science when its true practitioners support mixed science. (“Because it’s settled and we say so, so there it is!”)
Whereas deranged ‘scientists’ are in fact people like Bill Nye (it hurts to type this because I really liked him as a kid – his show is quite entertaining and informative). believe) emphasizes that people must DIE for the planet to exist. I can safely say that I’d rather avoid talking to them than to someone saying “Human-burnt fossil fuels can’t change the planet and here’s why.” At least the ‘denialer’ doesn’t want me to die just from breathing
Please, please, PLEASE… keep doing what you do, and I hope you and your colleagues succeed in changing even more minds before this madness can come to fruition. realistic! You don’t know this but you give people hope rather than despair, you and Michael Schellenberger, Roger Pielke Jr., Paul Homewood and many others, I’m pretty sure I dropped out due to faulty memory ( or lack of research, if you can point me to many others that I may have overlooked, please let me know if you are so inclined.
Comments by JC
The ‘fear the kids’ strategy is to blame. I grew up in the late 1950s-1960s. The tactics of scaring the children of that era were the Russians – they were ready to invade America, we would be bombed (remember the bomb shelters of that time?), We would lose our freedom, goods and services. Your neighbor could be a Russian spy (anyone who watches the TV show American? It is awesome). This fear, transmitted to me by a Catholic nun, was amplified in the schoolyard. When I was 8 years old, I had a stomach ulcer, worried about it. My doctor told me not to worry about this stuff, it’s all silly politics, and enjoy my childhood. I said “Ok,” and I pretty much accomplished that. But government and academic efforts are evident in the ‘cli-sci media’ (climate ‘crisis’, ’emergency’, ‘extinction’) to scare children about climate change because Political purposes are utterly reprehensible.
Such scare tactics will backfire, as children grow up and they see the scary prophecies not being fulfilled. We are creating generations of people who are learning to distrust scientists. Scary climate stories are doing children more than any other consequence of climate change in their lifetime.
Meanwhile, Climate Etc. and other blogs are serving as an important antidote to such absurd, reprehensible and damaging claims.
