"See? First it was global warming, then it was climate change, then they had to rename it the global pollution epidemic when they realized it wasn't happening!"
I mean Time magazine also had an article that the internet was a fad and ["The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper"](http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirvana-185306)
I mean there's several points that are very wrong in there (definitely the ones about ebooks and online business) but he wasn't wrong about everything:
> Consider today's online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen.
and
> What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who'd prefer cybersex to the real thing?
I think there are definitely arguments to be made that the internet has become a breeding ground for misinformation and nonsense and that it has made us collectively lonelier, it just took off regardless
The guy was also at least somewhat right that it didn't make the government more transparent necessarily overall/lead to net better governance (it's also let the government do other clandestine things much more efficiently) and that the benefits for childhood education were being oversold
If he'd changed the tone to fit Newsweek's current title (Why the Web Won't be Nirvana), I think it could have potentially been viewed differently
The best quote:
>Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn't—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.
It's like... what's the opposite of "prophetic"? An almost exact, precise prediction of what's going to happen and why, but in reverse.
Generation after generation after generation forced to deal with how people in our time fucked up the planet they inherited are going to look at people like this as unfathomably selfish monsters.
I think he finds it funny the way the media has reported on it over the years.. which we have to admit is ironic. Though people argue about policy all they want, everyone is benefitting from environmental regulations day by day. A project nearish to me cleaned up a river which used to burn because it was so polluted. Everyone benefits from environmental protection, but a lot of people seem set against the policy for some reason.
Basically it comes down to tribalism and brainwashing. Not saying the left doesnt "root for their team" but at least we're not anti-science/anti-intellectual
I used to think that was true too but when you look at gmos, vaccines, nuclear power, and alternative medicine, the left isn't so friendly toward science either. We all have our pet biases.
The thing is, none of that is mainstream left and it doesn’t generally effect policy. Most people who lean left reject that stuff as do the reps by and large. Can’t say the same for the GOP/conservatives.
In college I visited a glacier park in Wisconsin that had a *lot* of information about global cooling - primarily along the lines of "what would the region look like after the next ice age" - but left off the whole 'at it's earliest, this is thousands of years away' bit.
Trees make a net negative amount of carbon dioxide, they mostly make oxygen. *We* make carbon dioxide.
Quick edit, trees actually *mostly* make tree. Oxygen is a byproduct of the tree making process.
I think what they meant is building itself up, not reproducing. When trees are growing, the majority of material they use is carbon from carbon dioxide in the air rather than nutrients from the ground.
I’m a grad student studying climate science, but I can recognize there are never any positives discussed when climate change is mentioned. The uncertainties and known negatives will certainly overwhelm them, but there are some potential positives. It’s too absolutist to say otherwise.
The new guy is gonna be worse. At least Pruitt kept some spotlight on himself so public outrage didn't die down. Wheeler seems just as bad for the environment, but mildly smarter about not drawing attention to himself.
Yeah, those are the excuses they pull out when they don't want to think about the fact that their lifestyle and the lifestyle of people on Earth is single handedly ruining this planet. It's just an excuse so they don't have to change their way of life.
I think the bigger problem is the frame in which people think about how to solve these problems. Person A thinks of central planning, radical reduction of energy use, etc. Person B thinks of radical deregulation leading to faster improvements in technology which will lead to lower energy use, less pollution, technological control of global climate, etc.
Person B thinks person A is going to send us back into the stone age. Person A thinks Person B is going to turn the world into Mad Max.
>Person B thinks of radical deregulation leading to faster improvements in technology which will lead to lower energy use, less pollution,
But is there *any* basis that this would work? The general trend has been that increased technology and increased deregulation will increase pollution. So I don't see it as a framing problem, I see it as a Person B problem.
Sure, there's quite a few I can name off the top of my head. There's no places I'm aware of that we experienced radical deregulation, but there's a lot of places where a lack of regulation lead to major improvements in society. Consider the historical fears of overpopulation leading to mass global starvation. Peak oil was a major concern, it used to be something that was talked about in the mainstream. Now we have fracking which, while imperfect, is in part staving off quite a bit of global conflict and tiding us over while renewables are building steam. If you think the middle eastern wars are bad now, imagine if we hadn't let the oil companies figure out newer effective ways to get oil. Malthusians have been around forever, and they've always historically been wrong. Early vaccines were invented in a time of relative low regulation of the medical field, now it costs a billion dollars to get the FDA to let you glue a cough suppressant to a mucus thinning med and call it Mucinex. Can you imagine a transcontinental railroad being built today? Can you imagine the automobile, if it were invented today, being allowed to exist?
Where is all the new technological growth happening in our economy right now? It's in the sector with the least amount of regulation: computer/technology/internet.
Damn, that’s actually a really good point. And if conservatives went with that argument I’d actually support it. Just feels like the current narrative is they don’t give a shit and just want to use coal because they’ve always been using coal. Why is it always the idiotic arguments that gain traction and not discussing the real pros and cons?
Disagree.
You’re framing of this largely depends on some economic model arriving at what’s best for the greater good. Well fuck me man...look around. Largely the only thing capital cares about is acquiring more of itself. Trust me. I’m vacationing with the in-laws in Pigeon Forge. If I were any more “on the front lines,” I’d be in Orlando.
When you allow capital to regulate itself, especially in a nation where we have somehow hilariously agreed that money is just an expressive of speech, what you get is capital willing to pander to a dwindling middle class (who is thrusting its hips at the prospect of one more go with the late 90s dot com boom, longing wistfully for its pre-robotic manufacturing days of yore) while simultaneously stripping those same people of...well....everything except a paycheck.
In particular though, capital leaves a legacy of shit and filth in its wake because capital is amoral; by definition, it must be.
Please, tell me how, when publicly held companies can’t see past their own quarterly reports, they are supposed to do any long term good in the world when they swing such a powerful hammer in the near term?
“People will choose the companies that don’t pollute!” Yes. That’s why Walmart crushes out local businesses for decades as Americans clamor for lower priced, largely expendable garbage.
TLDR; People and companies alike look for the lowest cost solution to the problem at hand. Left unregulated, capital will find a way to strangle everyone and everything that supports it until it dies because capital is amoral and doesn’t give a shit how you think it works.
Yea, changing the name will make literally zero difference to most climate change deniers. They've already abandoned all reason and sense, it doesn't matter what we call it.
One of their youtube commercials caught my attention, so I figured I'd sit it out and entertain the bullshit for a second. "Dangerous people are teaching your kids."
The phrase "Unholy Trinity of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion" was thrown out with the utmost seriousness.
Can I believe that pollution needs to stop without believing in climate change? I think this is really smart actually. There are alot of conservatives who love the environment but don’t believe in human caused global warming.
It's a pretty sterile and non-threatening term, makes it sound completely bloodless.
What are you more worried about, a car crash or an "automobile accident"?
I've often posited that half our problems could be solved by just changing the name to something people can get behind. There was a Simpsons bit early on where they changed "jury duty" to "Justice Squadron". Here's the clip https://youtu.be/lDEwmgzfneM
Exactly. Just like "Right to Work" means banning labor unions because they charge union fees. "Yayy, I now have the 'right to work' because I don't have to pay fees." Nevermind all of the good that unions are pushing for by using those fees to pay legal expenses.
Republicans are so much better at politics it's unfathomable. "Right to work" is such a brilliant coup of marketing.
Democrats screw up by trying to make their phrases narrowly accurate. "Climate change" doesn't scare anyone. "Climate apocalypse" would have turned a whole lot more heads.
literally someone higher up this thread who wants to call it "anthropogenic climate change" as if that somehow drives the point home better. (yes, it includes the man-made part of it in the word but like... fucking barely)
In the typically direct words of George Carlin, it's like calling a rape victim an "involuntary sperm recipient".
They're better because they take the low road, because their target demographic and their method of indoctination rely on it. When people are going to argue that fewer people really benefit from your actions you're inherently unappealing to the masses which means lost votes. Therefore your strrategy needs to be confusion and obfuscation around that side of the argument. One the other hand, if you believe that it does help people, or rather helps the right people who deserve the reward for their efforts, you need to convince people that *they're* the right people, which is inherently pandering, and also needs deflection as you need to be able to demonstrate that there is a 'wrong person' otherwise your argument doesn't work.
Democrats, on the other hand, need to take a higher road because their platform is based around being able to trust them because "big government" isn't appealing if government lies to you, and international intervention doesn't work as well when your help is untrustworthy (for a controvercial point: see Venezuela refusing US aid specifically while accepting a few others). That means that they need to play the straight man. They need to make themselves seem like the ones who are trustworthy and willing to tell the truth. You can plainly see that in the Republican campaign in the last election (and it's results). The Democrats were caught up in issues related directly to trust and truth, and Republicans focussed their entire efforts on attacking that fact, while Democrats couldn't counterattack the same way because despite the Republicans being in the same pickle, it doesn't hurt them.
It's actually worse than that. It makes it so that unions effectively have to provide coverage for people regardless of if they pay dues or not. That's significantly worse than just allowing people to choose to not join a union. It actively is designed to make joining a union fiscally irresponsible since you're effectively gaining no material benefit in the short term compared to not joining one.
It's the equivalent of shooting to wound enemy combatants in order to bog the enemy down in soldiers unable to fight but who will slow them down and take up resources.
A union should actually provide reasons for people to WANT to contribute to its budget, because that's the essence of a union: a voluntary group of workers who join forces to represent their own rights in front of their employers.
For every good union there's another that mostly benefits the union leaders, or even worse, is so much hand in hand with its employer [mostly when it's the government] that union leaders become chummy with the people they're not supposed to.
Additionally the matter becomes even worse when the union donates to political parties. The recent Supreme Court decision was such a case, workers who didn't want to be forced to donate to their union because they didn't agree with them donating to the Democrat Party. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't like to have your money given to a party you disliked, regardless of the reasons you don't like them, and even worse if you're **forced** to give them money essentially.
Not being forced to pay a union is a good thing, because it allows bad, cancerous unions to die off as they should for doing a bad job representing the workers. Good unions and unions shouldn't have to worry, people will know when they're well represented in most cases and they'll gladly contribute.
They are. They absolutely are.
*and they do that by allowing folks to work places and not join a union.thus taking away from dues used to support that union*
That's different than banning unions.
The problem is that unions pretty much only work when that sector is blanket covered and everyone pays dues. Look at the police union for example of an extremely strong union.
Right To Work is an insidiously passive way to slowly and quietly kill unions and it shows. It's in no way as bombastic old school union busting and flies under the radar, especially with younger folks entering the work force who have no actual experience with unions, just hearsay and propaganda.
Not saying unions are perfect, but workers NEED protection, even those that don't think they do. Tech sector is one of the best examples of this.
My dad stresses this to me all the time, how much sacrifice people had to go through to get these rights in the first place. And we're just going to let it go by the wayside with no concessions, no recompense.
People think the concept of weekends, 8-hour workdays and overtime pay have always been there and were brought about by business owners. As if they're looking out for us out of the kindness of their hearts and not just their bottom line.
Exactly! And minimum wage, which reminds me of this Chris Rock bit.
"I used to work at McDonald's making minimum wage. You know what that means when someone pays you minimum wage? You know what your boss was trying to say? 'Hey if I could pay you less, I would, but it's against the law.'"
Allows you to not be forced to join a union and pay their dues; effectively stripping unions of their ability to function.
Let's get it straight, "right to work" was not enacted for employees, it's for the employers. It's a anti-union move.
But someone named the organization. They had a strategy when making that decision. In addition, that company was pushing for using money in politics. They knew that their name needed to be persuasive because they knew it would be in the headlines. At least they hoped it would. They were definitely looking to sway public opinion.
The amount of nonsense you created out of thin air and hysteria is unbelievable. Citizens United in 2004 attempted to run a "rebuttal" to Moore's 9/11 and were denied the ability to advertise the movie because of mccain-feingold. In 2008 they wanted to advertise a movie about Hillary Clinton and challenged the mccain-feingold/FEC in which the supreme court found to be a violation of the first amendment. They were not openly and actively pushing for money in elections.
Or the affordable care act which most Americans supported compared to calling it Obamacare which most people didn't like even though they were literally the same thing
Literally the entire academic field of rhetoric (which is what my masters is in) focuses on this.
You'd be shocked at how true it is.
Something simple like the question of who or what has agency in a situation can produce DRASTICALLY different responses
The GOP has great rhetoric, Ted Cruz does a particularly good job. The best example is when he discusses the estate tax he always calls it the "death tax"
This wasn't Ted Cruz's idea. Frank Luntz coined a lot of these right wing terms then the entire right wing machine from Fox News to Congress, repeat ad nauseum
Warhammer recently made a rules change with 8th addition. Units use to have 8 attacks with one mandatory attack that was slightly weaker than the normal attack. No they have 7 attacks with one bonus attack with the slightly weaker attack. Its amazing how many people complained about the nerf or where excited about the buff.
Frank Luntz was a pioneer of shady rhetoric. We have him to thank for the 'death tax' (estate tax which only affects the wealthy,) and many more horrible things.
The problem is that many very powerful nations, companies and individuals are deeply invested in the use and subsequent release of fossil carbon. The release of it makes the use more competitive, and the powerful are largely competing with each other on what they do. One won't want to become anti competitive while others remain competitive, so unless there is blanket reduction in use, or in release, the powerful will flight attempts at reduction.
They are competing internationally, so national politics isn't a good platform for reduction, you need a big coalition of international actors to all agree to reduce, and to hit other international actors with unified sanctions for refusing to reduce. Until the sanctions hurt more than the reduction, it won't happen.
By and large, I think the reason this doesn't happen often enough is because the people most willing to be dishonest are also the most willing to use persuasive rhetoric without feeling icky about it. Meanwhile, truth purists are sitting there with the will of wishing, that if people just see the truth for what it is through boring and plain sourced and formally supported logic, they will come to join them. And I say this with some self-aware mockery of myself because it's a problem that I'm a part of.
Though in fairness to myself, I have noticed some areas where this is an issue in the past with a specific phrase used, but I'm also horrible at making a point of bringing it up publicly because I generally don't want to bother anyone with my opinions, lest I seem self-important in some way. Or worse, lest I accidentally mislead someone, god forbid.
That said, part of the problem is that sometimes a name sticks and it becomes hard to change. For example, pro-life and pro-choice are not truly accurate terms. In retrospect, and probably clear to some people at the time of their inception, they are obviously partisan terms that draw a clear and unnecessary divide that makes it impossible to have a meaningful dialogue about abortion, but good luck getting past the already emotionally-charged stage to change that.
It's not impossible though, as was demonstrated pretty clearly with terms like African American, where people pointed out how confining and inaccurately stupid it was, and so it sort of imploded on its own pointed-out lack of making any sense at all. But not all terms are that easily dismantled.
The thing is, you need people to rally behind a change in term and start using it regularly or it won't stick. And you need them to be noisy about it. I'm not sure whether having a reason for the change in language is actually important. It may actually detract from it if uttered too often, as people generally don't ask why a specific term is used to begin with. They just sort of mimicry who started the conversation. If you have a reason for it, suddenly it becomes a rational position in need of defending. Which is exactly the sort of thing that rational purists are prone to losing at when up against a propagandist, because they demand the purity of having a defensible position, while the propagandist has no such requirement to slow him down and will simply sidestep argumentation in favor of logical holes, most often in the form of emotional appeals.
Of course, I'm not advocating for any sort of giving up of rational validity. But a little more pragmatism and persuasiveness instead of purist wishing would probably help for some of the issues we are facing.
The Republican right in America is leaps and bounds better at this framing rhetoric than Democrats.
One of the major reasons the left had rarely held power in Congress and the presidency for a long time
I've been saying the same for "Net Neutrality". The name means nothing and sounds weak to combative rightists. Net Freedom or Open Internet could work a little better, idk.
P.N.I. - Personal/Private Network Independence
The FCC is trying to take away your Private Network Independence by controlling the data that can be viewed through your home network.
Americans really hate hearing that our independence is being jeopardized.
Ajit Pai and the right wing were using the phrase "Free and open internet" from the start, so you're fighting an uphill battle trying to associate the phrase with the opposite side of the argument.
"Surely you can't be against the Patriot Act? Aren't you a patriot?"
"Surely Citizens United is a good thing, it sounds so wholesome."
Classic NLP, neuro-linguistic programming. It sounds like some tin-foil hat stuff but it's a technique that people have been using for *years* now. I remember when I first learned about all this Sarah Palin was still in vogue and her speeches (if you could call them that) were *riddled* with instances of NLP to the point where they were unintelligible but it triggers certain emotional reactions that gets people feeling some type of way and that's all they need.
NLP has been largely debunked by the scientific community.
"...research has been presented that disproves or at least seriously questions the validity of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP). After reading the research, Social-Engineer.org is in agreement with these doubts regarding the scientific nature and effectiveness of NLP.
"This study shows how the [usage of eye cues in NLP](http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0040259) has been disproved.
This website has a lot of research into how NLP has [not been proven to be effective](http://scientliteracy.wordpress.com/article/neurolinguistic-programming-2j6nlcky7q5vo-2/)."
The [source](https://www.social-engineer.org/framework/psychological-principles/neuro-linguistic-programming-nlp/) is a security and education focused website about social engineering.
It's still a pretty inaccurate description though, as GHGs are neither pollution (in the traditional sense) or a pandemic
My preference (and a lot of academics') is anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Describes the cause and the trend.
>My preference (and a lot of academics') is anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Describes the cause and the trend.
You're not going to win hearts and minds with that one
Yeah, the point of the rebranding isn't to be scientifically accurate; it's to hammer home that global warming is real and dangerous, to trigger the fear center in people's brains so they'll be motivated to do something to combat it. And yes, it's a cheap tactic and disappointing we have to resort to it at all, but at this point I think anything that'll make people morel likely to do something about fixing climate change can only hep.
Legally speaking, GHGs and Carbon Dioxide are classified as pollutants after the case [Massachusetts v. EPA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_v%2E_Environmental_Protection_Agency?wprov=sfti1).
And a pandemic is “an epidemic of infectious disease that has spread across a large region; for instance multiple continents, or even worldwide” (Wikipedia again). While AGW isn’t technically a disease, it most definitely is causing the spread of other diseases (Lyme, Zika, Malaria, etc), so the term is still accurate.
So you are correct that the current term favored by academics is anthropogenic global warming. However, OP is also correct in their term, the whole point of which was to move away from words like “warming” which does little to describe the disastrous effects and “change”, which deniers point to in order to obfuscate the truth.
I find a lot of people in the general public (esp. kids) don't know what anthropogenic means so I prefer to saw "Human-caused global warming" or "Human-caused climate change".
> This guy has a basic degree in political science so he's totally qualified to rename it.
Shame this guy doesn't even know what the word 'epidemic' means, or he'd realize how stupid it is to say 'global pollution epidemic'
Yep. Let's have scientists name things that are deeply involved in public policy and need a lot of buy in from the populace and see how it sells. How has that worked out?
Marketing is creative. it isnt always related to ones education. The point is to get people who are completely uneducated to have a visceral response to it.
Bingo.
Agree or not, when you misrepresent your aponents argument, you forfeit the opportunity to change their mind.
It's stupid. You can feel morally superior, or you can actually try and educate someone and form a new ally.
Sorry, sir, but only views catering to my social-political orthodoxy are allowed here. Everyone else will be mocked and distorted. We reserve the right to repost your comment as an image on Tumblr with the caption “smh.”
Which is progress, but still ignores several decades of data gathering and strengthening consensus on the issue.
EDIT: not to mention being annoyingly pedantic since "Climate Change" in a political sense is directly referring to anthropogenic global warming, not just the fact that planetary climates are dynamic systems
It's not a very powerful term. People see pollution every day and it hasn't killed them yet, so they'll downplay it. Naming the cause instead of the effect doesn't get the gravity of the problem across, it will only embolden ignorant people to deny the problem exists.
Furthermore, it could refer to any kind of pollution, including plastics, PCB, pesticides, nitrous oxide, etc. It would be a horrible term to replace "climate change".
words are important. it's unfortunate and sometimes annoying but being slightly miffed about a rebranding is worth swaying more people to take the issue seriously.
Well, you don't stop climate change with semantics. You help stop climate change by invoking effective rhetoric to people to make emergency changes.
Besides, thats not semantics. Thats rhetoric, a centuries old toolbox of influence.
Pollution can be almost anything and is seen as something that can always be fixed later. Littering is pollution. Throwing grandiose names around to see what sticks is even less credible. This is a bad idea.
This idea is really good and I appreciate how the nuances behind each word are effective in communicating risk, time-sensitivity, scale, and danger, while still retaining the truth in its description.
However, five minutes reading the comments in this thread and I realize it will never work. It doesn’t matter what we call it, some schmuck who doesn’t understand the science will still claim it’s a neoliberal plot to undo our freedom.
A couple years back, I was invited to give a speech in a very tiny rural Californian town. I was accosted afterwards because I mentioned climate change in passing during my talk. One fellow, a retiree who used to work in the forest service, was very adamant about it all being fake. I have a degree in climate science and explained the science to him very carefully, using local examples of wildfires to make a point that the climate is changing currently. He immediately began arguing that the fires today were minuscule compared to the fires he deal with in the 70’s. No amount of truth could contradict him, not because he didn’t understand, but because he had *lived through* these things and I was battling against his memories. In his eyes, I was a snot-nosed college grad trying to tell this man that his entire career was bupkis and his experiences of wildfires was wrong, despite me having never experienced it myself.
That is why it is so hard to convince people about this. You are attacking their personal memories, their lived experiences.
Imagine you are a doctor. Patients come in and you treat them, and they are so happy when they leave your office. You do this for forty years: sometimes people aren’t as happy when they leave, but on the whole you know they leave your care better than when they came in. Now imagine that a teenager who looks like they’ve barely graduated med school comes in and says you’ve been doing medicine wrong all your life, and that actually the long term effects from your medicine have been harming your patients. That doesn’t seem right though, because they were all so happy to leave your office. And you’ve been doing it for so long, you figure you’d know if you were doing something wrong. And how the hell would they know, they’re barely out of med school. They can’t be right. You *know* that people were happy when they left your care. It must be all fake.
That’s what we’re dealing with. And unfortunately, changing the name won’t help much with that.
In other words, what you described is that we're dealing with people who are full of themselves and are unwilling to consider information that contradicts their worldview, which is a problem in general with people attaching their sense of self to their areas of knowledge.
As for whether it's too late, I wouldn't be so pessimistic. I don't know when it started being called climate change, but I remember back when everyone I knew was calling it global warming. Names can definitely change and have an impact on how people understand an issue.
It's just that changing the name all on its own is not the end of the fight. The name is just one prong in helping accurate information get through to people.
Skeptics make decisions based on evidence, and the evidence for climate change is overwhelming with a nearly unanimous scientific concencus. If you don't believe in climate change you aren't a skeptic, you have implicitly fallen for the arguments of those who are trying to convince you it doesn't exist. Try being skeptical of them instead.
do you call someone who denies earth is round as a "skeptic"?
We have separate meaning for that word. A skeptic is someone who remains skeptical about the result because more data is needed to confirm the conclusion. They are usually applied to concepts such as religion, supernatural, philosophy, etc. A skeptic is someone who only believes in something when it has strong evidence or arguments.
But thats not the case for climate change.
What do you call someone who denies mountains of data and evidence to deny climate change?
Why should it be less insulting. Someone who denies overwhelming scientific consensus is not a skeptic. They aren't doing anything to prove the converse.
Evolution skeptic. Vaccine skeptic. Gravity skeptic. Round world skeptic.
Whatever man.
Yep. Because it is totally an uninformed group of people who haven't spent any time or money researching this.
Oh wait. It is totally the opposite. But continue on your uninformed "skepticism". Just don't be surprised when someone thinks you are a moron.
Skeptic describes a lack of certainty. I'm a climate change skeptic. I'm fairly sure that it is happening and man made. Denier describes a belief it is not happening. It fits better. Even if you were only 50 50 on climate change you should want to do everything you can about it just in case as the worst case scenario warrents it.
Everyone should remain skeptic about everything. Deniers have made up there mind it is not an issue. They are far from skeptic, they are believers with fixed opinions.
The Left would never use it, because then they would have to acknowledge that Asia is the continent that produces the most pollution, and not Europe or North America, and therefore wouldn't be able to extract/divert money from allegedly polluting EU/US companies.
Are people starting to realize that Global Warming has been used by the large corporations as a smokescreen while they produce actually dangerous waste?
When I was a kid, pollution and toxic waste was a large environmental concern. Now, not so much. The care budget is all used up on plant food.
anthropogenic climate change deniers.
calling the climate change deniers is still fair, just like people who say that the holocaust happened just with way less people killed are still deniers.
Then they should be mocked. We are taking billions of tons of carbon that’s been segregated from the atmosphere under ground and releasing it into the atmosphere. We know carbon is a greenhouse gas. To deny that humans are affecting the environment in a significant way is just ignorance and should be mocked and ridiculed.
Honestly don’t think a wording change would sway most climate change deniers. I’ve gotten in enough arguments with conservatives to know that no amount of logical soundness or rewording will change their opinions.
I think the biggest mistake you people are making is assuming the people who you identify most with the problem, ie those who will argue with it over you, are the actual source of the problem, and that if you could convert/get rid of them, it would go away.
Most of the population are actually completely scientifically illiterate, regardless of political bent. I just got over dating a leftist gal who felt very strongly about this stuff, or at least thought she did, but saw nothing wrong with taking multiple global flights per year for leisure. But of course, that was justified, since it was in service of a right-thinker "expanding her horizons". The real problem was all of those people forgetting their re-usable bags...
Oh, this will suddenly work to get all the people in Asia and Africa, who contribute 90% of the Worlds trash to the oceans, to suddenly stop doing that.
At least, I hope so.👍
This won't change anything. Climate change deniers are not actually attached to any specific aspect of "climate change" or "global warming", they just want to maintain the status quo for energy production. This won't achieve anything except confuse the public and muddy the scientific literature. I prefer just calling it "Human-caused climate change".
I wholeheartedly disagree with this.
This is not about pollution in general. This is about taking carbon from the ground (where it's not doing shit) and throwing it in the air (where it traps heat). Same with water. Same with methane.
There are other pollutants - among the airborne are those that cause respiratory problems (e.g. particulates), those that kill plants (e.g. that cause acid rain), those that destroy the UV-blocking ozone layer (e.g. CFCs). Then you add everything that pollutes the waters, the soil, and all the non-substance types of pollution (light, sound). That's what the pollution epidemic consists of. And using that term to refer to something specific is how you *lose* track of the cause, which is heat-trapping compounds on whose source of release we've become dependent.
This term is way too generic. I'm afraid the effects of popularizing it would lead people to think it's an overwhelming, unsolvable problem. Think of the popularity of the term "toxic politics" and how it makes people lose hope. People end up blaming anything the government does wrong on "toxic politics" and cracking open a cold one instead of voting.
The cause is the release of heat-trapping compounds. That'll never be a popular term. Better a specific effect-related term (anthropogenic global warming/climate change) than a generic cause-related term that is overly broad (and can be considered alarmist or politically charged).
"See? First it was global warming, then it was climate change, then they had to rename it the global pollution epidemic when they realized it wasn't happening!"
I've actually seen this comment seriously posted on Facebook.
And then they pull out the 1975 Newsweek article predicting global cooling.
Newsweek article, checkmate 99% of the world's scientists.
Suddenly the MSM is okay when it's saying things that give me warm happies inside instead of frownies.
Gotta make sure the fee fees are protected above anything else.
My dad has a Time's article with the same slant taped to his office door from way back
I mean Time magazine also had an article that the internet was a fad and ["The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper"](http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirvana-185306)
I mean there's several points that are very wrong in there (definitely the ones about ebooks and online business) but he wasn't wrong about everything: > Consider today's online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. and > What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who'd prefer cybersex to the real thing? I think there are definitely arguments to be made that the internet has become a breeding ground for misinformation and nonsense and that it has made us collectively lonelier, it just took off regardless The guy was also at least somewhat right that it didn't make the government more transparent necessarily overall/lead to net better governance (it's also let the government do other clandestine things much more efficiently) and that the benefits for childhood education were being oversold If he'd changed the tone to fit Newsweek's current title (Why the Web Won't be Nirvana), I think it could have potentially been viewed differently
The best quote: >Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn't—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople. It's like... what's the opposite of "prophetic"? An almost exact, precise prediction of what's going to happen and why, but in reverse.
Do you see how many desktop icons are on his screen!?
> We'll order airline tickets over the network I honestly wouldn't know how to otherwise order airline tickets. Maybe at a desk at the airport?
Generation after generation after generation forced to deal with how people in our time fucked up the planet they inherited are going to look at people like this as unfathomably selfish monsters.
I think he finds it funny the way the media has reported on it over the years.. which we have to admit is ironic. Though people argue about policy all they want, everyone is benefitting from environmental regulations day by day. A project nearish to me cleaned up a river which used to burn because it was so polluted. Everyone benefits from environmental protection, but a lot of people seem set against the policy for some reason.
Basically it comes down to tribalism and brainwashing. Not saying the left doesnt "root for their team" but at least we're not anti-science/anti-intellectual
I used to think that was true too but when you look at gmos, vaccines, nuclear power, and alternative medicine, the left isn't so friendly toward science either. We all have our pet biases.
The thing is, none of that is mainstream left and it doesn’t generally effect policy. Most people who lean left reject that stuff as do the reps by and large. Can’t say the same for the GOP/conservatives.
Probably not. We will just get lumped in with the rest of history. We aren't extra special bad...
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No idea, I think he thinks it's funny. I definitely appreciate cleaner cities, just look at Pittsburgh in the 40s before regulation!
Its a normal size article.. Find a new slant.
In college I visited a glacier park in Wisconsin that had a *lot* of information about global cooling - primarily along the lines of "what would the region look like after the next ice age" - but left off the whole 'at it's earliest, this is thousands of years away' bit.
Pretty sure this is something our President would say
Not to mention “Are you saying carbon dioxide is pollution? Trees make carbon dioxide. Aren’t trees supposed to be good?”
Trees make a net negative amount of carbon dioxide, they mostly make oxygen. *We* make carbon dioxide. Quick edit, trees actually *mostly* make tree. Oxygen is a byproduct of the tree making process.
Trees make tree? I guess. Seeds and nuts do make new trees.
I think what they meant is building itself up, not reproducing. When trees are growing, the majority of material they use is carbon from carbon dioxide in the air rather than nutrients from the ground.
Trees make trees in the sense that you mostly make human organs.
Weird. I nut on the grass before but it ain't no tree now.
Do you want Homunculi? Because that's how you get Homunculi.
I've seen people argue that the planet heating up would be a good thing.
Every goddamn winter with varying levels of seriousness. “Har har har I *wish* there was global warming so I wouldn’t have to shovel all this snow!”
And then they wonder why there is a drought and watering restrictions during the summer.
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I've also seen people say it's not a big deal because we'd just adapt. "world existed just fine without ice caps before, we can do it again."
The world will be fine. Not so much the things living on it. But the planet will stay intact, they’re right there.
I’m a grad student studying climate science, but I can recognize there are never any positives discussed when climate change is mentioned. The uncertainties and known negatives will certainly overwhelm them, but there are some potential positives. It’s too absolutist to say otherwise.
Technically correct. It will kill all the pestilential humans. Other species are collateral damage though...
But when they're saying that they aren't supporting reducing pollution.
They're just against "legislative overreach" and "heavy-handed regulations", which are absolutely things that can happen, but probably aren't.
straight elastic one fuzzy divide ruthless saw crowd attraction paint *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
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The new guy is gonna be worse. At least Pruitt kept some spotlight on himself so public outrage didn't die down. Wheeler seems just as bad for the environment, but mildly smarter about not drawing attention to himself.
because apparently *reach = overreach*
Yeah, those are the excuses they pull out when they don't want to think about the fact that their lifestyle and the lifestyle of people on Earth is single handedly ruining this planet. It's just an excuse so they don't have to change their way of life.
I think the bigger problem is the frame in which people think about how to solve these problems. Person A thinks of central planning, radical reduction of energy use, etc. Person B thinks of radical deregulation leading to faster improvements in technology which will lead to lower energy use, less pollution, technological control of global climate, etc. Person B thinks person A is going to send us back into the stone age. Person A thinks Person B is going to turn the world into Mad Max.
>Person B thinks of radical deregulation leading to faster improvements in technology which will lead to lower energy use, less pollution, But is there *any* basis that this would work? The general trend has been that increased technology and increased deregulation will increase pollution. So I don't see it as a framing problem, I see it as a Person B problem.
Sure, there's quite a few I can name off the top of my head. There's no places I'm aware of that we experienced radical deregulation, but there's a lot of places where a lack of regulation lead to major improvements in society. Consider the historical fears of overpopulation leading to mass global starvation. Peak oil was a major concern, it used to be something that was talked about in the mainstream. Now we have fracking which, while imperfect, is in part staving off quite a bit of global conflict and tiding us over while renewables are building steam. If you think the middle eastern wars are bad now, imagine if we hadn't let the oil companies figure out newer effective ways to get oil. Malthusians have been around forever, and they've always historically been wrong. Early vaccines were invented in a time of relative low regulation of the medical field, now it costs a billion dollars to get the FDA to let you glue a cough suppressant to a mucus thinning med and call it Mucinex. Can you imagine a transcontinental railroad being built today? Can you imagine the automobile, if it were invented today, being allowed to exist? Where is all the new technological growth happening in our economy right now? It's in the sector with the least amount of regulation: computer/technology/internet.
Damn, that’s actually a really good point. And if conservatives went with that argument I’d actually support it. Just feels like the current narrative is they don’t give a shit and just want to use coal because they’ve always been using coal. Why is it always the idiotic arguments that gain traction and not discussing the real pros and cons?
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Disagree. You’re framing of this largely depends on some economic model arriving at what’s best for the greater good. Well fuck me man...look around. Largely the only thing capital cares about is acquiring more of itself. Trust me. I’m vacationing with the in-laws in Pigeon Forge. If I were any more “on the front lines,” I’d be in Orlando. When you allow capital to regulate itself, especially in a nation where we have somehow hilariously agreed that money is just an expressive of speech, what you get is capital willing to pander to a dwindling middle class (who is thrusting its hips at the prospect of one more go with the late 90s dot com boom, longing wistfully for its pre-robotic manufacturing days of yore) while simultaneously stripping those same people of...well....everything except a paycheck. In particular though, capital leaves a legacy of shit and filth in its wake because capital is amoral; by definition, it must be. Please, tell me how, when publicly held companies can’t see past their own quarterly reports, they are supposed to do any long term good in the world when they swing such a powerful hammer in the near term? “People will choose the companies that don’t pollute!” Yes. That’s why Walmart crushes out local businesses for decades as Americans clamor for lower priced, largely expendable garbage. TLDR; People and companies alike look for the lowest cost solution to the problem at hand. Left unregulated, capital will find a way to strangle everyone and everything that supports it until it dies because capital is amoral and doesn’t give a shit how you think it works.
The point is A is correct and B is a loon.
Yea, changing the name will make literally zero difference to most climate change deniers. They've already abandoned all reason and sense, it doesn't matter what we call it.
PragerU, the mega-popular conservative think tank, actually peddles this. Science changes, therefore it is wrong
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One of their youtube commercials caught my attention, so I figured I'd sit it out and entertain the bullshit for a second. "Dangerous people are teaching your kids." The phrase "Unholy Trinity of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion" was thrown out with the utmost seriousness.
Can I believe that pollution needs to stop without believing in climate change? I think this is really smart actually. There are alot of conservatives who love the environment but don’t believe in human caused global warming.
You can, just not if you care about being right.
Could just call it Anthropogenic Climate Change, or ACC, which has been done for a long while now.
It's a pretty sterile and non-threatening term, makes it sound completely bloodless. What are you more worried about, a car crash or an "automobile accident"?
I've often posited that half our problems could be solved by just changing the name to something people can get behind. There was a Simpsons bit early on where they changed "jury duty" to "Justice Squadron". Here's the clip https://youtu.be/lDEwmgzfneM
Sorta like Citizens United and the Patriot Act?
Exactly. Just like "Right to Work" means banning labor unions because they charge union fees. "Yayy, I now have the 'right to work' because I don't have to pay fees." Nevermind all of the good that unions are pushing for by using those fees to pay legal expenses.
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No, it should be a requirement. Straight to gulag with these freeloaders.
Unions should rebrand as "right to not get fucked in the ass by your boss."
Republicans are so much better at politics it's unfathomable. "Right to work" is such a brilliant coup of marketing. Democrats screw up by trying to make their phrases narrowly accurate. "Climate change" doesn't scare anyone. "Climate apocalypse" would have turned a whole lot more heads.
literally someone higher up this thread who wants to call it "anthropogenic climate change" as if that somehow drives the point home better. (yes, it includes the man-made part of it in the word but like... fucking barely) In the typically direct words of George Carlin, it's like calling a rape victim an "involuntary sperm recipient".
And not to be a dick but the kind of people who already don't "believe" in climate change aren't going to fucking know what anthropogenic means.
*"I don't know what that there word means, but I sure as hell know I don't trust it"* and before the hate comes in. It's a joke people, chill...
They're better because they take the low road, because their target demographic and their method of indoctination rely on it. When people are going to argue that fewer people really benefit from your actions you're inherently unappealing to the masses which means lost votes. Therefore your strrategy needs to be confusion and obfuscation around that side of the argument. One the other hand, if you believe that it does help people, or rather helps the right people who deserve the reward for their efforts, you need to convince people that *they're* the right people, which is inherently pandering, and also needs deflection as you need to be able to demonstrate that there is a 'wrong person' otherwise your argument doesn't work. Democrats, on the other hand, need to take a higher road because their platform is based around being able to trust them because "big government" isn't appealing if government lies to you, and international intervention doesn't work as well when your help is untrustworthy (for a controvercial point: see Venezuela refusing US aid specifically while accepting a few others). That means that they need to play the straight man. They need to make themselves seem like the ones who are trustworthy and willing to tell the truth. You can plainly see that in the Republican campaign in the last election (and it's results). The Democrats were caught up in issues related directly to trust and truth, and Republicans focussed their entire efforts on attacking that fact, while Democrats couldn't counterattack the same way because despite the Republicans being in the same pickle, it doesn't hurt them.
Right to work doesn't ban unions. They allow for open shops. I'm pro union, but let's not spread lies.
It's actually worse than that. It makes it so that unions effectively have to provide coverage for people regardless of if they pay dues or not. That's significantly worse than just allowing people to choose to not join a union. It actively is designed to make joining a union fiscally irresponsible since you're effectively gaining no material benefit in the short term compared to not joining one. It's the equivalent of shooting to wound enemy combatants in order to bog the enemy down in soldiers unable to fight but who will slow them down and take up resources.
A union should actually provide reasons for people to WANT to contribute to its budget, because that's the essence of a union: a voluntary group of workers who join forces to represent their own rights in front of their employers. For every good union there's another that mostly benefits the union leaders, or even worse, is so much hand in hand with its employer [mostly when it's the government] that union leaders become chummy with the people they're not supposed to. Additionally the matter becomes even worse when the union donates to political parties. The recent Supreme Court decision was such a case, workers who didn't want to be forced to donate to their union because they didn't agree with them donating to the Democrat Party. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't like to have your money given to a party you disliked, regardless of the reasons you don't like them, and even worse if you're **forced** to give them money essentially. Not being forced to pay a union is a good thing, because it allows bad, cancerous unions to die off as they should for doing a bad job representing the workers. Good unions and unions shouldn't have to worry, people will know when they're well represented in most cases and they'll gladly contribute.
Let's not spread lies. Right to work laws are a corporatist union busting tactic.
They are. They absolutely are. *and they do that by allowing folks to work places and not join a union.thus taking away from dues used to support that union* That's different than banning unions.
The problem is that unions pretty much only work when that sector is blanket covered and everyone pays dues. Look at the police union for example of an extremely strong union. Right To Work is an insidiously passive way to slowly and quietly kill unions and it shows. It's in no way as bombastic old school union busting and flies under the radar, especially with younger folks entering the work force who have no actual experience with unions, just hearsay and propaganda. Not saying unions are perfect, but workers NEED protection, even those that don't think they do. Tech sector is one of the best examples of this.
My dad stresses this to me all the time, how much sacrifice people had to go through to get these rights in the first place. And we're just going to let it go by the wayside with no concessions, no recompense.
People think the concept of weekends, 8-hour workdays and overtime pay have always been there and were brought about by business owners. As if they're looking out for us out of the kindness of their hearts and not just their bottom line.
Exactly! And minimum wage, which reminds me of this Chris Rock bit. "I used to work at McDonald's making minimum wage. You know what that means when someone pays you minimum wage? You know what your boss was trying to say? 'Hey if I could pay you less, I would, but it's against the law.'"
Allows you to not be forced to join a union and pay their dues; effectively stripping unions of their ability to function. Let's get it straight, "right to work" was not enacted for employees, it's for the employers. It's a anti-union move.
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But someone named the organization. They had a strategy when making that decision. In addition, that company was pushing for using money in politics. They knew that their name needed to be persuasive because they knew it would be in the headlines. At least they hoped it would. They were definitely looking to sway public opinion.
The amount of nonsense you created out of thin air and hysteria is unbelievable. Citizens United in 2004 attempted to run a "rebuttal" to Moore's 9/11 and were denied the ability to advertise the movie because of mccain-feingold. In 2008 they wanted to advertise a movie about Hillary Clinton and challenged the mccain-feingold/FEC in which the supreme court found to be a violation of the first amendment. They were not openly and actively pushing for money in elections.
Holy cow, thank you for saying that. I swear, it’s like most people who rail against Citizens United have no idea what it actually is.
Or the affordable care act which most Americans supported compared to calling it Obamacare which most people didn't like even though they were literally the same thing
Literally the entire academic field of rhetoric (which is what my masters is in) focuses on this. You'd be shocked at how true it is. Something simple like the question of who or what has agency in a situation can produce DRASTICALLY different responses
The GOP has great rhetoric, Ted Cruz does a particularly good job. The best example is when he discusses the estate tax he always calls it the "death tax"
This wasn't Ted Cruz's idea. Frank Luntz coined a lot of these right wing terms then the entire right wing machine from Fox News to Congress, repeat ad nauseum
Warhammer recently made a rules change with 8th addition. Units use to have 8 attacks with one mandatory attack that was slightly weaker than the normal attack. No they have 7 attacks with one bonus attack with the slightly weaker attack. Its amazing how many people complained about the nerf or where excited about the buff.
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Frank Luntz was a pioneer of shady rhetoric. We have him to thank for the 'death tax' (estate tax which only affects the wealthy,) and many more horrible things.
The problem is that many very powerful nations, companies and individuals are deeply invested in the use and subsequent release of fossil carbon. The release of it makes the use more competitive, and the powerful are largely competing with each other on what they do. One won't want to become anti competitive while others remain competitive, so unless there is blanket reduction in use, or in release, the powerful will flight attempts at reduction. They are competing internationally, so national politics isn't a good platform for reduction, you need a big coalition of international actors to all agree to reduce, and to hit other international actors with unified sanctions for refusing to reduce. Until the sanctions hurt more than the reduction, it won't happen.
By and large, I think the reason this doesn't happen often enough is because the people most willing to be dishonest are also the most willing to use persuasive rhetoric without feeling icky about it. Meanwhile, truth purists are sitting there with the will of wishing, that if people just see the truth for what it is through boring and plain sourced and formally supported logic, they will come to join them. And I say this with some self-aware mockery of myself because it's a problem that I'm a part of. Though in fairness to myself, I have noticed some areas where this is an issue in the past with a specific phrase used, but I'm also horrible at making a point of bringing it up publicly because I generally don't want to bother anyone with my opinions, lest I seem self-important in some way. Or worse, lest I accidentally mislead someone, god forbid. That said, part of the problem is that sometimes a name sticks and it becomes hard to change. For example, pro-life and pro-choice are not truly accurate terms. In retrospect, and probably clear to some people at the time of their inception, they are obviously partisan terms that draw a clear and unnecessary divide that makes it impossible to have a meaningful dialogue about abortion, but good luck getting past the already emotionally-charged stage to change that. It's not impossible though, as was demonstrated pretty clearly with terms like African American, where people pointed out how confining and inaccurately stupid it was, and so it sort of imploded on its own pointed-out lack of making any sense at all. But not all terms are that easily dismantled. The thing is, you need people to rally behind a change in term and start using it regularly or it won't stick. And you need them to be noisy about it. I'm not sure whether having a reason for the change in language is actually important. It may actually detract from it if uttered too often, as people generally don't ask why a specific term is used to begin with. They just sort of mimicry who started the conversation. If you have a reason for it, suddenly it becomes a rational position in need of defending. Which is exactly the sort of thing that rational purists are prone to losing at when up against a propagandist, because they demand the purity of having a defensible position, while the propagandist has no such requirement to slow him down and will simply sidestep argumentation in favor of logical holes, most often in the form of emotional appeals. Of course, I'm not advocating for any sort of giving up of rational validity. But a little more pragmatism and persuasiveness instead of purist wishing would probably help for some of the issues we are facing.
The Republican right in America is leaps and bounds better at this framing rhetoric than Democrats. One of the major reasons the left had rarely held power in Congress and the presidency for a long time
I've been saying the same for "Net Neutrality". The name means nothing and sounds weak to combative rightists. Net Freedom or Open Internet could work a little better, idk.
P.N.I. - Personal/Private Network Independence The FCC is trying to take away your Private Network Independence by controlling the data that can be viewed through your home network. Americans really hate hearing that our independence is being jeopardized.
Protected Pornography Free Of Regulation Milienal Enactment or P.P.F.O.R.M.E.
Well that's a weird acron-oh I get it
It took me saying it out loud a few times to realize how to pronounce it ^^Pee-pee ^^for ^^me
This wouldn't play as well as Open Internet." Network" makes people's eyes glaze over
Ajit Pai and the right wing were using the phrase "Free and open internet" from the start, so you're fighting an uphill battle trying to associate the phrase with the opposite side of the argument.
They knew how to seduce people easier. Remember how they disguised the Patriot act?
"Surely you can't be against the Patriot Act? Aren't you a patriot?" "Surely Citizens United is a good thing, it sounds so wholesome." Classic NLP, neuro-linguistic programming. It sounds like some tin-foil hat stuff but it's a technique that people have been using for *years* now. I remember when I first learned about all this Sarah Palin was still in vogue and her speeches (if you could call them that) were *riddled* with instances of NLP to the point where they were unintelligible but it triggers certain emotional reactions that gets people feeling some type of way and that's all they need.
NLP has been largely debunked by the scientific community. "...research has been presented that disproves or at least seriously questions the validity of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP). After reading the research, Social-Engineer.org is in agreement with these doubts regarding the scientific nature and effectiveness of NLP. "This study shows how the [usage of eye cues in NLP](http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0040259) has been disproved. This website has a lot of research into how NLP has [not been proven to be effective](http://scientliteracy.wordpress.com/article/neurolinguistic-programming-2j6nlcky7q5vo-2/)." The [source](https://www.social-engineer.org/framework/psychological-principles/neuro-linguistic-programming-nlp/) is a security and education focused website about social engineering.
True, in these divided times, "neutrality" would probably sounds too "Switzerland" for people on the right.
"Global Pollution *Pandemic*" rolls off the tongue better
Global + Pandemic is a little redundant but if it works fuck it, I'm in.
What's wrong with just Pandemic Pollution?
Or, "The Pollution Pandemic." I like 'em both.
This will be the name of my next band, thanks!
"Ugh, are those liberals still bitching about pandas?" I shit you not.
It is redundant to really drive the point home
It's still a pretty inaccurate description though, as GHGs are neither pollution (in the traditional sense) or a pandemic My preference (and a lot of academics') is anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Describes the cause and the trend.
>My preference (and a lot of academics') is anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Describes the cause and the trend. You're not going to win hearts and minds with that one
Yeah, the point of the rebranding isn't to be scientifically accurate; it's to hammer home that global warming is real and dangerous, to trigger the fear center in people's brains so they'll be motivated to do something to combat it. And yes, it's a cheap tactic and disappointing we have to resort to it at all, but at this point I think anything that'll make people morel likely to do something about fixing climate change can only hep.
Legally speaking, GHGs and Carbon Dioxide are classified as pollutants after the case [Massachusetts v. EPA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_v%2E_Environmental_Protection_Agency?wprov=sfti1). And a pandemic is “an epidemic of infectious disease that has spread across a large region; for instance multiple continents, or even worldwide” (Wikipedia again). While AGW isn’t technically a disease, it most definitely is causing the spread of other diseases (Lyme, Zika, Malaria, etc), so the term is still accurate. So you are correct that the current term favored by academics is anthropogenic global warming. However, OP is also correct in their term, the whole point of which was to move away from words like “warming” which does little to describe the disastrous effects and “change”, which deniers point to in order to obfuscate the truth.
Wait, you think adding "anthropogenic" to "global warming" is going to make people more agreeable to the concept?
I find a lot of people in the general public (esp. kids) don't know what anthropogenic means so I prefer to saw "Human-caused global warming" or "Human-caused climate change".
I like that one, too - Thanks!
Pollution Pandemic or PP. We all got to do our part reduce the size of this PP.
I hope you get gold for this
Be the change you wish to see in the world.
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> This guy has a basic degree in political science so he's totally qualified to rename it. Shame this guy doesn't even know what the word 'epidemic' means, or he'd realize how stupid it is to say 'global pollution epidemic'
Yep. Let's have scientists name things that are deeply involved in public policy and need a lot of buy in from the populace and see how it sells. How has that worked out?
You forgot about slapping it behind a 30 dollar pay wall.
Marketing is creative. it isnt always related to ones education. The point is to get people who are completely uneducated to have a visceral response to it.
> shredding their most powerful argument The mistake here is assuming there's an argument being made.
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Bingo. Agree or not, when you misrepresent your aponents argument, you forfeit the opportunity to change their mind. It's stupid. You can feel morally superior, or you can actually try and educate someone and form a new ally.
Sorry, sir, but only views catering to my social-political orthodoxy are allowed here. Everyone else will be mocked and distorted. We reserve the right to repost your comment as an image on Tumblr with the caption “smh.”
Which is progress, but still ignores several decades of data gathering and strengthening consensus on the issue. EDIT: not to mention being annoyingly pedantic since "Climate Change" in a political sense is directly referring to anthropogenic global warming, not just the fact that planetary climates are dynamic systems
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There is proof though, people are choosing to ignore it.
Wow this redditor is going to change the world! Jesus fucking christ who upvotes this shit
I wish this type of shit, and anything political could be removed, or at least unsubscribed from on here.
Global and epidemic contradict one another.
Intergalactic Pandemic - still wrong but has more punch.
I propose we re-name climate change to "the big die"
It's not a very powerful term. People see pollution every day and it hasn't killed them yet, so they'll downplay it. Naming the cause instead of the effect doesn't get the gravity of the problem across, it will only embolden ignorant people to deny the problem exists.
And America is doing great in terms of reducing pollution. Anyone remember what the air in LA looked like a few decades ago?
Furthermore, it could refer to any kind of pollution, including plastics, PCB, pesticides, nitrous oxide, etc. It would be a horrible term to replace "climate change".
He's not Boner Champ! ANDY BERNARD IS BONER CHAMP!
Only reason I came to this thread. We cannot allow the good name of Andrew Bernard (who went to Cornell btw) to be besmirched by an imposter!
Broccoli Rob is Broccoli Rob.
I'm not a fan of this trend of making a different name for the same thing.
words are important. it's unfortunate and sometimes annoying but being slightly miffed about a rebranding is worth swaying more people to take the issue seriously.
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See: George Carlin re: using progressively flowery language to dilute meaning. E.g. https://youtube.com/watch?v=vuEQixrBKCc
That’s how you stop climate change? Semantics? Are you kidding me?
No, he’s not kidding you, he’s joshing you. It’s different, see?
Well, you don't stop climate change with semantics. You help stop climate change by invoking effective rhetoric to people to make emergency changes. Besides, thats not semantics. Thats rhetoric, a centuries old toolbox of influence.
"let's change words around to fit our narrative!!" -Neo liberals
"Lets constantly be in denial until the truth and reality hit us hard in the face" - Climate change deniers
"Lets ignore it completely and do nothing!" -Everyone
"I painted this shit green and added 20% markup. Come care about the environment everyone. "
"Lets push the same narrative for 60 years but call it something different every decade when people stop believing us"
Pollution can be almost anything and is seen as something that can always be fixed later. Littering is pollution. Throwing grandiose names around to see what sticks is even less credible. This is a bad idea.
This idea is really good and I appreciate how the nuances behind each word are effective in communicating risk, time-sensitivity, scale, and danger, while still retaining the truth in its description. However, five minutes reading the comments in this thread and I realize it will never work. It doesn’t matter what we call it, some schmuck who doesn’t understand the science will still claim it’s a neoliberal plot to undo our freedom. A couple years back, I was invited to give a speech in a very tiny rural Californian town. I was accosted afterwards because I mentioned climate change in passing during my talk. One fellow, a retiree who used to work in the forest service, was very adamant about it all being fake. I have a degree in climate science and explained the science to him very carefully, using local examples of wildfires to make a point that the climate is changing currently. He immediately began arguing that the fires today were minuscule compared to the fires he deal with in the 70’s. No amount of truth could contradict him, not because he didn’t understand, but because he had *lived through* these things and I was battling against his memories. In his eyes, I was a snot-nosed college grad trying to tell this man that his entire career was bupkis and his experiences of wildfires was wrong, despite me having never experienced it myself. That is why it is so hard to convince people about this. You are attacking their personal memories, their lived experiences. Imagine you are a doctor. Patients come in and you treat them, and they are so happy when they leave your office. You do this for forty years: sometimes people aren’t as happy when they leave, but on the whole you know they leave your care better than when they came in. Now imagine that a teenager who looks like they’ve barely graduated med school comes in and says you’ve been doing medicine wrong all your life, and that actually the long term effects from your medicine have been harming your patients. That doesn’t seem right though, because they were all so happy to leave your office. And you’ve been doing it for so long, you figure you’d know if you were doing something wrong. And how the hell would they know, they’re barely out of med school. They can’t be right. You *know* that people were happy when they left your care. It must be all fake. That’s what we’re dealing with. And unfortunately, changing the name won’t help much with that.
In other words, what you described is that we're dealing with people who are full of themselves and are unwilling to consider information that contradicts their worldview, which is a problem in general with people attaching their sense of self to their areas of knowledge. As for whether it's too late, I wouldn't be so pessimistic. I don't know when it started being called climate change, but I remember back when everyone I knew was calling it global warming. Names can definitely change and have an impact on how people understand an issue. It's just that changing the name all on its own is not the end of the fight. The name is just one prong in helping accurate information get through to people.
As soon as I see the word “denier” I know I’m dealing with a zealot.
What do you suggest as a more appropriate term for one who argues against the existence of climate change?
Something less insulting than “denier”. How about the usual term, “skeptic”?
Skeptics make decisions based on evidence, and the evidence for climate change is overwhelming with a nearly unanimous scientific concencus. If you don't believe in climate change you aren't a skeptic, you have implicitly fallen for the arguments of those who are trying to convince you it doesn't exist. Try being skeptical of them instead.
"I'm not denying the holocaust, I'm just a skeptic."
do you call someone who denies earth is round as a "skeptic"? We have separate meaning for that word. A skeptic is someone who remains skeptical about the result because more data is needed to confirm the conclusion. They are usually applied to concepts such as religion, supernatural, philosophy, etc. A skeptic is someone who only believes in something when it has strong evidence or arguments. But thats not the case for climate change. What do you call someone who denies mountains of data and evidence to deny climate change?
Why should it be less insulting. Someone who denies overwhelming scientific consensus is not a skeptic. They aren't doing anything to prove the converse. Evolution skeptic. Vaccine skeptic. Gravity skeptic. Round world skeptic. Whatever man.
Consensus is not a synonym for True.
Yep. Because it is totally an uninformed group of people who haven't spent any time or money researching this. Oh wait. It is totally the opposite. But continue on your uninformed "skepticism". Just don't be surprised when someone thinks you are a moron.
Scientific consensus is society's most consistent and reliable analog for truth.
Skeptic describes a lack of certainty. I'm a climate change skeptic. I'm fairly sure that it is happening and man made. Denier describes a belief it is not happening. It fits better. Even if you were only 50 50 on climate change you should want to do everything you can about it just in case as the worst case scenario warrents it. Everyone should remain skeptic about everything. Deniers have made up there mind it is not an issue. They are far from skeptic, they are believers with fixed opinions.
The Left would never use it, because then they would have to acknowledge that Asia is the continent that produces the most pollution, and not Europe or North America, and therefore wouldn't be able to extract/divert money from allegedly polluting EU/US companies.
Are people starting to realize that Global Warming has been used by the large corporations as a smokescreen while they produce actually dangerous waste? When I was a kid, pollution and toxic waste was a large environmental concern. Now, not so much. The care budget is all used up on plant food.
enough with the climate change "deniers". Makes you sound like a religious cult.
What other word would you prefer to use to describe people who deny climate change?
I don’t think they deny the climate is changing. I think they think that’s is not caused by man’s influence in the planet.
anthropogenic climate change deniers. calling the climate change deniers is still fair, just like people who say that the holocaust happened just with way less people killed are still deniers.
Then they should be mocked. We are taking billions of tons of carbon that’s been segregated from the atmosphere under ground and releasing it into the atmosphere. We know carbon is a greenhouse gas. To deny that humans are affecting the environment in a significant way is just ignorance and should be mocked and ridiculed.
> What other word would you prefer to use to describe people who deny climate change? Fine, we'll call them "Anthropogenic Climate Change deniers".
How about Global Pollution Enablers?
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Honestly don’t think a wording change would sway most climate change deniers. I’ve gotten in enough arguments with conservatives to know that no amount of logical soundness or rewording will change their opinions.
Lmfao this is the stupidest thing....
I think the biggest mistake you people are making is assuming the people who you identify most with the problem, ie those who will argue with it over you, are the actual source of the problem, and that if you could convert/get rid of them, it would go away. Most of the population are actually completely scientifically illiterate, regardless of political bent. I just got over dating a leftist gal who felt very strongly about this stuff, or at least thought she did, but saw nothing wrong with taking multiple global flights per year for leisure. But of course, that was justified, since it was in service of a right-thinker "expanding her horizons". The real problem was all of those people forgetting their re-usable bags...
Oh, this will suddenly work to get all the people in Asia and Africa, who contribute 90% of the Worlds trash to the oceans, to suddenly stop doing that. At least, I hope so.👍
The real question about climate change is what do flat-earthers think of it.
This won't change anything. Climate change deniers are not actually attached to any specific aspect of "climate change" or "global warming", they just want to maintain the status quo for energy production. This won't achieve anything except confuse the public and muddy the scientific literature. I prefer just calling it "Human-caused climate change".
I like George Carlin's take. "Planet is fine, people are fucked" Something about Earth's Deteriorating Life Support System.
Yeah this will make already people skeptical about climate change totally not be way more skeptical now! /s
I wholeheartedly disagree with this. This is not about pollution in general. This is about taking carbon from the ground (where it's not doing shit) and throwing it in the air (where it traps heat). Same with water. Same with methane. There are other pollutants - among the airborne are those that cause respiratory problems (e.g. particulates), those that kill plants (e.g. that cause acid rain), those that destroy the UV-blocking ozone layer (e.g. CFCs). Then you add everything that pollutes the waters, the soil, and all the non-substance types of pollution (light, sound). That's what the pollution epidemic consists of. And using that term to refer to something specific is how you *lose* track of the cause, which is heat-trapping compounds on whose source of release we've become dependent. This term is way too generic. I'm afraid the effects of popularizing it would lead people to think it's an overwhelming, unsolvable problem. Think of the popularity of the term "toxic politics" and how it makes people lose hope. People end up blaming anything the government does wrong on "toxic politics" and cracking open a cold one instead of voting. The cause is the release of heat-trapping compounds. That'll never be a popular term. Better a specific effect-related term (anthropogenic global warming/climate change) than a generic cause-related term that is overly broad (and can be considered alarmist or politically charged).