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14 tweets,
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Her statement should be heard as having scare quotes around the key point:
"We're, like, 'the world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change' and your biggest issue...? is ... how we're going to pay for it?"
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"We're, like, 'the world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change' and your biggest issue...? is ... how we're going to pay for it?"
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This is *shorthand* representing the *feeling* of young people that their lives are being directly threatened by climate change and that it's outrageous that boomers et al are unwilling to pay to save them.
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This feeling gets to the TRUTH of our political situation. Full stop. Every politician should speak this way.
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Some scientists' willingness to team up with deniers to attack @AOC for what she said in this interview speaks to a broader problem with the relationship between the language of science and the politics of climate change.
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Due to both disciplinary acculturation & coordinated attacks on their credibility, climate scientists reflexively defend discourse about climate change from infection by literary & political forms of language like metaphor, hyperbole, personification, intensification, etc.
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This defensiveness is not something all kinds of scientists share.
Could you imagine an epidemiologist getting all up in someone's face because they said that "smoking will kill you"? Of course you can't! Such a performance would be absurd.
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Could you imagine an epidemiologist getting all up in someone's face because they said that "smoking will kill you"? Of course you can't! Such a performance would be absurd.
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But the sentence "smoking will kill you" is as inaccurate probabilistically, and as "distorted" by personification and hyperbole, as the phrase "we have 12 years to solve climate change or else the world will end."
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Again, for seats in the back, if we don't draw down emissions by half in 12 years, being thereby well on our way to transform our energy system, our only home will heat up and break down in ways that will thoroughly undermine the conditions of our current civilization.
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This is not controversial. Unless you're a denier.
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In other words, the world as we know it will end.
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Politicians need to be able to talk about their constituents' feelings about climate change--to articulate the threat as we experience it--without being discredited by the very climate scientists who claim to communicate in order to help people.
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Remember: the deniers will call you alarmist no matter what you say and jump on your mistakes no matter what you do. It doesn't matter.
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The only thing that will change our situation is for millions of people to recognize climate change as the danger it is, get organized, and force the transition of our energy system via politics. Which means we need to talk about climate change politically. That is all.
/fin
/fin
