TFW the person who dismisses the importance of language and "messaging" to the climate movement dunks on the messaging of the most effective communicator the climate movement has ever had.
I think that feeling is: "aaargggghhhh!!!"
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I think that feeling is: "aaargggghhhh!!!"
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Greta Thunberg brilliant contextualizes her call to "listen to the science" in a profoundly value-laden understanding that the world is failing its children so that the few can continue to make "unimaginable amounts of money."
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Further, her call to "listen to the science" is *in itself* an expression of her values: her optimism and her belief that people are GOOD and will wake up to the climate emergency once they understand what the @IPCC_CH is telling us (because, guess what, they still don't).
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Further, her call to "listen to the science" legitimates her saying that our "world is on fire" and her calling for people to act according to their moral responsibilities.
Without being grounded in the science the phrase "climate emergency" would sound like mere alarmism.
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Without being grounded in the science the phrase "climate emergency" would sound like mere alarmism.
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Further, to say *only* "listen to the science" to those in Congress who claim to understand the science but are preventing the systemic change we so urgently need is to expose their claim as the political coverup that it really is.
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nytimes.com/video/climate/…
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nytimes.com/video/climate/…
If they understand the science, then their inaction is all the more horrific.
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I defy anyone to listen to this song and say that Greta Thunberg is not speaking in "the noosphere."
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Nobody is claiming that climate science tells us what to do. But it does tell us what will likely happen if we do nothing.
Thus for functioning societies it silently and urgently implies what we must do.
And we will never do what is necessary without it.
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Thus for functioning societies it silently and urgently implies what we must do.
And we will never do what is necessary without it.
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Would the world really ever give up fossil fuels if they weren't dangerous? If they weren't deadly?
I doubt it.
And it's climate science, still and for as long as it's not too late, which best proves how fossil fuels will kill us.
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I doubt it.
And it's climate science, still and for as long as it's not too late, which best proves how fossil fuels will kill us.
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Nobody is claiming that the discourse of climate science in itself will produce action. Or that facts produce action. Heaven forfend.
But we will not produce action without it. It is our link to the truth.
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But we will not produce action without it. It is our link to the truth.
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We bemoan our "post-truth" politics and our "tribal epistemologies." But then we too argue that persuasion and group values are all that matters to politics.
I mean, I guess it sometimes seems that way.
But the belief that truth doesn't matter is false -- and dangerous.
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I mean, I guess it sometimes seems that way.
But the belief that truth doesn't matter is false -- and dangerous.
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The truth, the hard-won fact that means the difference between life and death, is an INCREDIBLY powerful weapon of powerless people.
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If we abandon our claim to speak the truth, we will have already lost to the powerful monsters, who have the financial and institutional means to lie beyond our wildest imaginations.
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But with the truth, the science (in all its social context), we become allies with the material world, with the reality that people are beginning to see around them, and our message begins to resonate in people's bones.
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Does that mean that I think giving people information, showing them charts and explaining probabilities, will get them to change their behavior, mobilize them politically, save the world? Of course not!
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Most people think through stories.
Most people need emotional processing to cope with climate breakdown.
Elite signaling and new norms produce social change, not information.
We need to create *desire* for the new world.
And on and on.
BUT....
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Most people need emotional processing to cope with climate breakdown.
Elite signaling and new norms produce social change, not information.
We need to create *desire* for the new world.
And on and on.
BUT....
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The fundamental reason to do all this work is what climate science tells us.
It's real.
It's us.
It will be very very bad if we don't stop burning fossil fuels (etc) basically now.
It's never too late to change.
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It's real.
It's us.
It will be very very bad if we don't stop burning fossil fuels (etc) basically now.
It's never too late to change.
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Without the facts, the truths of climate science, the climate emergency becomes just another social issue, not, what it really is, a planetary emergency.
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The authority of climate science is the sine qua non.
That is why the deniers attacked the science first.
And that is why we must not downplay the science and do their work for them.
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That is why the deniers attacked the science first.
And that is why we must not downplay the science and do their work for them.
/fin
