this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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Andrew is approaching it the wrong way. It's usually an emotional and psychological problem. I'll explain a common angle I've experienced by being a good listener. Not everyone will have this opinion and mental path, but I found that this is a common one.
It typically starts with religion. God created Earth, and to think that we can change the climate is a way of playing God. Not only would that be blasphemous, but if God created Earth, how could we even approach the idea of being mighty enough to change the climate? God made it, and it is one part of God's miracles. We have no business thinking that we can play God like this.
Then, there's the doubling-down patterns. Scientists have determined that climate change is happening. But this means that scientists seem to know more than God. The Earth was given to us to live on by Him, so how could they possibly be right? "Scientists are ridiculous, and they should put faith in the Lord."
Rinse and repeat, and they double down harder and harder. While doing so, they find more mental gymnastics, talking points, and other rhetorics that they drum to prove their points. How could they be wrong? They're putting their faith in the Lord, and to affirm the scientists is to deny their faith.
Then come the echo chambers. They wall themselves off from scientists, because scientists keep repeating the same things that they already debunked, and they decided that they're ridiculous. The people they surround themselves with know what's good for them, and they have their own support groups with their own opinions that feel like their own facts.
No amount of software or hardware is going to change this problem. The first step, if you even want to venture into the minds of people who have walked this path, is to be a good listener, and challenge them with their own rhetoric and their own talking points to disprove them. But half the time you're doing that, you're going to be challenging their faith and the validity of God, so... good luck.
Idk, I counter the “God created Earth” argument with the Biblical injunction to Noah and his descendants to be good “stewards of creation” after the Great Flood, which usually works to end that line of flawed reasoning, at least.
E.g., “God created the world, yes, but he gave humanity dominion over the Earth and trusted us to govern it well. We’ve been given 10 talents (aka gold coins), and when the Master returns we better have used the first to earn 10 more rather than bury them like the frightened servant or waste them like the prodigal son.”
Maybe I’m too participatory, but you can sway religious peeps by arguing using the same framework they do. Worked pretty well on my Catholic parents, although they still question the “degree to which humanity is responsible for global warming,” meh.
The efficacy also be dependent on which denomination of Christianity you’re arguing with, though, since the argument kinda relies on exercising free will and choosing to be responsible as part of the effort to go to heaven, which might not play super well with crazy predestination theology…
As for the echo chambers, yeah, idk what to do about that.
Right? You're trying to convince someone that we're destroying the environment tremendously, year by year, yet somehow, what gets in the way for them to simply observe the observable is... religion? All we need is a thermometer and a pencil to witness climate change.
The other thing that really bothers me is how people act as if the current rate of things is natural. I've heard people make arguments that the Earth has always gone through changes through the centuries, even on television. Yet they don't consider for a moment how rapid or impactful these changes are.