Question from Anon:
Why are the left so afraid of climate change? What is they want to preserve exactly? The whole concept doesn’t pass the simplest credibility check. They want to preserve the world for future generations they often say. But the world they want to preserve doesn’t include them themselves (they will be dead) nor their children (they don’t have children) nor their past (they believe preserving a cultural or historical past is racist), nor their language (again, racist) art (racist), music poetry ideals myths stories ethics (all racist). Why would say a Briton want to fight so hard as to make his one life on this Earth unbearable, intolerable, just to leave Britain a sort of temperate version of say a Dakka or Karachi suburb?
I don’t get it. They say they want narwhals and lemurs and platypuses around but they aren’t even prepared to take forceful action to preserve a hedge (which is the closest in terms of biodiversity and species richness they will ever get to Amazonia).
There is no one answer, but a distribution of them. We speak here of the untutored, non-Experts who react violently over “climate change”. By “untutored”, I mean those who cannot, or not do, or will not understand any of the fundamental physics and other massive complexities and uncertainties involved in three dimensional fluid flow over a rough differentially heated sphere. I mean regular people who have learned the minimum they need to support their beliefs.
For this set of people, particularly young people, there is one predominate answer:
Incessant propaganda.
Maybe you recall that New Jersey school that from Kindergarten through high school teaches “climate change” in every single class; yes, including gym. The level of science of these classes has to be on the order of a Bill Nye fever dream.
NPR—surprise!—recently did a follow up on this school.
Lansing and her classmates had spent weeks researching the impacts of human-caused climate change on their communities and their own lives. Their bas-relief tiles and the three-dimensional images sculpted onto them represented something each of them learned.
Lansing’s tile featured a blueberry branch – a nod to the rich agricultural heritage of New Jersey, which has earned it the nickname “the garden state.”
“A lot of those things that we are used to seeing aren’t going to be able to be grown here with the continuing climate change,” said Lansing, who comes from a family that grows their own food.
NPR claims “climate change education has been empowering.” Empowering. A favorite woke word. It can’t here mean educated, because none of these kids learned any physics. It can instead only mean a false earnestness glued to a quasi-religious morality. One which gives purpose and meaning to life, especially now that Christianity is fading so rapidly.
A junior in high school said, “As a little kid, I was really scared of the changes in the extreme weather that was going on around me and missing school because of hurricanes.”
This is New Jersey, remember, where the weather is as tumultuous as Methodist church service. There is therefore no justification for her fear. Not in Reality. Not from observation. That fear can only have been inculcated by a relentless barrage of propaganda—a barrage that can be resisted only by a few.
This kid continues: “[My teacher] telling me why these were happening made me feel like I could do something about it even though I was like 11.” (By “like 11” did she mean 10? Or 12?)
This kid’s mind was first addled by ignorant or unscrupulous teachers who falsely taught her there was reason to panic, and then those teachers comforted the very panic they induced by given that kid a false sense of “empowerment”. Error compounding error. Madness.
It is no wonder the young are ejected from “educational” factories with the mindsets of Mrs. Jellyby, who you will recall from Dickens’s Bleak House, a woman who “cared” so deeply about the miseries in Africa that she entirely forgot her own family. These kids come out wanting to save “the world”, but know nothing of their own neighborhoods.
For confirmation, here is a report from the Experts at the American Psychological Association. Which one source summarizes: “Climate change can play a major role in affecting young people’s mental health.”
Now it is impossible—it is not possible—that a few tenths of a degree change in some artificial index could affect anybody’s “mental health”. Unless they first have been severely propagandized and had their minds addled by Experts. Which is precisely what is happening.
One of these Experts, unable to help herself about the addling, nevertheless sees its harms, vaguely:
[Expert] is also concerned about how climate change could influence young adults who are making decisions about their career and relationships. The report identified that the consequences of extreme weather and climate anxiety affected decision-making, impaired cognition and lower levels of self-control.
Impaired cognition!
I challenge you to find a better two-word summary of our predicament.
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Dopamine addiction? What I mean by that is that Climate Alarmism propagandists use a method that I call 'Doesn't it feel good to stop hitting yourself with a hammer?' They take these young children and inspire these feelings of catastrophe and guilt in them, that's the hitting yourself with a hammer part. Then they have them perform some silly recycling ritual or what have you and absolve them of their responsibility. The brain doesn't consider the source of the pain and parse out the real reasons behind the experience. It remembers the release of endorphins when the Climate Priest forgave their sins. Repeat the cycle until the child salivates at the sound of a dinner bell, I mean engages in Leftist activism whenever they feel sad, lonely, etc. If you listen they are sometimes explicit about this mechanism.
Anon's question assumes that death cultists hold logic, reason and consistency in esteem.
It's the ritual - the opportunity to signal your virtue and tribal membership - that is esteemed.