Chris Gloninger wove the reality of global heating into his forecasts in the conservative heartland of Iowa. Not everyone was receptive.
How pathetic do you have to be up make death threats against a fucking weather man?
As a non American it is always wild to hear such strangely internatilised concepts of how people see the world. This guy received emails saying it was a “liberal conspiracy theory on the weather”, calling climate change a “Biden hoax”. Does someone like that have no concept that this is an issue for the rest of us outside the USA? (Aka the majority of the world). And that it existed for prior administrations too!
Uneducated people glean comfort from tribalism, not logic
Yep. An authoritarian upbringing leads to a hierarchical belief system. Changing that requires addressing trauma that they avoided their entire lives, recreating their entire world view, and admitting they were wrong. Such a giant ask for these types of people unfortunately.
Republicans have been actively attacking and undermining American schools for decades. These depleted schools have produced legions of people who can’t discern truth from falsity and have absolutely no curiosity about the rest of the world. Facebook and the television tell them liberals are bad and the cause of all their problems. They don’t question it.
People like this have basically no concept of the rest of the world at all. I have talked to many people who don’t understand there is a difference between China and Japan, and think Africa is a country. And they don’t care.
Most likely this person also never thinks about states in the US more than one state away from theirs. When I moved to New England as a kid I had teachers think I was from a foreign country because I moved from New Mexico… I’d have to explain “it’s the state between Arizona and Texas”, and then people would just look confused.
So, no news from the rest of the world filters into their brain at all.
I don’t think people that spout death threats on climate change do much thinking at all.
A well formed thought would kill these people as assuredly as an aneurism.
They probably destroy all surrounding thought as well.
Not destroy, but I think this would apply:
“In a vacuum, nobody can hear you think”
The vaccum is between their ears, they can’t even hear themselves think.
I want to know the mushbrain that gave you the downvote.
Why did you do it? What part of that comment did you not agree with, how is it wrong?
These are the same people who called COVID a hoax perpetrated by Democrats even though it started in China and ravaged the entire planet. They’re insane and deluded from consuming too much propaganda.
And called the vaccines a big farma thing even though they were free in most countries. Including in the US…
The simple answer is no. To them other countries may as well be a conspiracy; or alternatively they just don’t think beyond their own sphere of influence. Basically if they can’t see it it’s not real.
for many Americans, there’s America and not-America, and that’s basically it. many of us are very insular - they may be aware of China, Russia, etc but don’t really think about them on a daily basis. much is the same for climate science, etc
Imagine having a belief that is 100% the opposite of science, a belief which is ONLY beneficial to mega corporations, and threatening someone’s life based upon that belief. Sounds like a cult.
Thank god American media is free and not totally a giant propaganda mill like all those evil nations that aren’t America and not as special as America is.
The real crime is intentional sabotage of the educational systems so the voting population has no critical thinking skills. When I was a kid we did an experiment in the 5th grade showing increased Co2 in a glass bottle increases the temperature in the bottle. Now here we are debating the 5G chips in the Covid vaccine and arguing about which media/politician/company is more corrupt or biased. The universe would be better off if a benevolent alien life form exterminated humans and let evolution start over.
Literal wankpanzers, the whole lot of “conservatives”.
We’ll say it again, for the people in the back: it doesn’t matter whether you believe in potentially lethal threats or not.
They’ll still kill you. And if you ignore them and pretend they don’t exist, they’ll usually kill you much, much faster than if you were actively trying to mitigate them.
These same morons chose to mass die of Covid. They will again in the next pandemic. And they will of climate change. Unless we organize and start electing people who pass climate laws pretty quickly.
Listen, and understand. Those climate change denying NPCs are out there. They can’t be bargained with. They can’t be reasoned with. They don’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And they will absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.
Nazgul, Ring Wraiths, neither living nor dead
Have you seen this boy?
Sweet Child O’Mine intensifies
Ignorance is bliss until reality punches your face in.
… Covid-19 has entered the chat…
The fact that whoever sent the death threats only got a small fine is 100% insane
Can someone explain to me why the average republican/right wing/religious nut are all against climate shit? Aside from being the dumbest people on the planet I’m lost finding another reason
If the Democrats express support for a concept, Republicans MUST be against it. Their entire identity is based around taking the most extreme version of the polar opposite thing the Democrats express.
Some ultra conservative nut posted on Nextdoor, a hyper local Facebook if you never heard of it, about some crazy claims some state ballot initiative will bring
Crazy shit, like parents will have their kids taken to perfo gender reassignment against their will. The vote is about our state constitution % needed to change, but facts never got in the way of conservative dreams
Someone replied “you would vote to put all conservatives in jail if a single liberal were against it” and yeah, I bet she would
I’d guess that leaded gas played a role.
Also, the truth has progressed much further than what many are willing to swallow at once. Not only is our way of life currently potentially leading to an extinction level destabilization of the climate and life cycles that we depend on (which also implies we’re not as important as some religions would lead us to believe), but the Euro-American way of life has been fucking things up for centuries or even millennia in the past. The only way to avoid accepting that our past is full of normalized evil is to bury your head in the sand and say everything is fine.
And add in some racism where they want to blame entire groups for actions of individuals and that line of reasoning says that you must also be to blame for the actions of your ancestors.
And then there’s the human tendency to double down when challenged, which makes it even harder to later change your position, because that doubling down can involve saying or doing things that does directly implicate you in some of that evilness. Or making ridiculous claims to “express certainty” like “if x is true, I’ll do y” where y is something no one would want to do or would even expect someone to do as part of a debate. When you behave like an idiot, changing your mind requires you to accept how much of an idiot you behaved like.
And there’s also group momentum. When the group sees dissenters as deserving hate and violence, it makes it harder to change the group’s direction. Especially if there’s members that don’t really care about the philosophy but are just looking for a “good excuse” to be violent or hateful. It’s not rare to see people treat former allies even worse when they turn compared to those who were never on their side. “Traitor” is one of those labels that can entice a negative reaction like “murderer” or “rapist”, even though it boils down to “person who changed their mind about something they once supported with others”.
So we might, collectively, have too much baggage to stop this train headed for the cliff before we can tell if the track curves to follow the cliff or just goes straight off. And if we do go off that cliff, don’t doubt that, on the way down, those fucking idiots will be loudly complaining that there was no way they could have known and that we should have told them.
Not to get overly philosophical or anything, but who you are as a person and what your ideas are come down to your experiences. For me, I spend time fixing/causing programming problems at work, talking with people, doomscrolling lemmy/mastodon, playing video games and watching shows.
For a portion of the population, they are sitting and watching fox news for hours upon hours a day. Even if you are resistant to a view point, your brain is not capable of 100% rejecting a message that is being sledgehammered in to you over and over again. If Fox news or other shit media is your experience, it would be hard to think of the world in a way that doesn’t conform to what they tell you. It will be incremental at first, you’ll reject 95% of a message that doesn’t conform to your previous ideas, but maybe concerned face newscaster has a point about the border. “We can’t let everyone in” you might reason. All to make your more malleable to the next crock of shit they serve up.
The more I think about it the grosser it is. Just a mass of blond ladies telling you minorities and people who care about the environment are out to change your way of life. You way of life - which is sitting on a couch watching blond ladies spouting lies to you. I’m sure there’s some sick mental illness issues floating around here.
I used to work at a bank that had fox news on all day and it was horrible, but I’m positive some of my viewpoints from then were shaped by that experience, despite me knowing it was a shit entertainment channel.
True religious nuts (in other words, 10-15% of the population) believe that nothing at all matters because Special Jesus is coming back any day now. So, the more fucked up things get, not only does it not matter since it’s “THE END TIMES!!”, but also things being worse just proves Jesus is coming back soon.
Your average angry conservative is pissed off about it for a couple reasons. One, “think tanks”, Fox, Limbaugh and other propaganda organizations have been paid by the fossil fuel industry to spread disinformation about it and explicitly tell them it’s a “hoax” for decades. Then, being “conservative” literally means resisting change, so replacing a gas-guzzling truck that smells like complete shit and emits tons of pollution is upsetting to them just because it’s different. Also, many conservatives are super sensitive and get very upset if someone says they should do something different because they feel like they’re being chastised or “someone thinks they’re better than me”. Same reason they hate stuff like being vegan or eating gluten free.
I’ve been saying this a lot lately, but we really, really shouldn’t be listening to a death cult whose goal is to die so they can be happy.
In all seriousness, they just get mad when people enjoy things they don’t understand. They feel out of the loop and the butt of the joke or deep down know they are missing out and their life choices are stupid, and being severely insecure as it is, this really bothers them even more
They’re brainwashed zealots and Republicans in office are preaching that it doesn’t exist because they’re paid by corporations that would be hurt by green energy.
The oil lobby has paid copious amounts of money to propagandize the population, and to bribe republican politicians to continue their policy of laissez-faire.
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Republicans in the same way they do for everyone else. They live in a bubble where they are right and everyone else is wrong. No exceptions.
You could say the same for many Americans, not just republicans in my experience. Its like a stew of immaturity and ignorance.
The false equivalence is so tiring. There is one side that has consistently been against the scientific consensus on everything from vaccines to climate change to gender/sex/orientation etc. The faux open-mindedness of the “but both sides are bad” is just lazy cowardice not wanting to admit it. One side can be wrong on a given issue, and people can still be ignorant. It’s not mutually exclusive.
The false equivalence is so tiring.
…which is exactly why they do it, of course. People arguing on the side of science have to make sound arguments in order to persuade, but all the reactionaries have to do is to frustrate their opponent into giving up on the discussion and they win by default. It’s fundamentally dishonest and toxic.
Yes, one side is pretty much full evil, but how many politicians in congress on both sides come to a halt on progress when their pocket liners are threatened. This is a game to all of them. Corporations run this country using every politician in our 2 party system as their puppets. How much insider trading goes on, who’s being paid by who? Our entire system needs to be burnt down and rebuilt for anything to function as it should.
That’s not gonna end well without a viable and executable alternative. Usually you’ll end up with a lot of chaos, some party promising to ease it, followed by that party turning out to be a dictatorship.
Frankly, it’s amazing we have something close to a democracy at all.
Except climate change IS real, and if you say its fake, you are wrong. Lol. Its not an opinion. What you’re positing here has nothing to do with the reality.
And a right wing person can take that sentence and turn it around. They have a whole lore to back up the claim too.
When you dig deep enough into the claims, it becomes clear which is fact. Most people don’t have the time to do that so they stick to what’s in their beliefsystem or fits within it.
They think people who believe in climate change are brainwashed zombies, in an ironic backward twist. This also seems to be the case with many things and it’s probably intentionally done by the propagandists.
The whole country seems to be polarized left/right, red/blue. Their side is right about everything and the other side is wrong about everything. That’s where American politics has led us. Culture war to keep us from starting a class war.
Climate change is real. Doesn’t matter how political or non political you are. If one side is using politics to try and say its not real, that’s not a “both sides” issue. That’s an issue with the side that’s denying reality.
I never said it wasn’t real. And they don’t need to say it’s not real, they vote where the money is. Several Dems have stood in the way of green deals passing in the past. The infighting within the democratic party will be the death of it, while the bat shit crazy Republicans will just continue boosting their moronic fan base. This is the reality of our government. It needs to be torn down and rebuilt.
The only politician I’ve even remotely resonated with is Sanders, and the DNC made for damn sure he didn’t make it in there.
All of your whataboutism is pointless. The Republican party’s position is that climate change isn’t real. There’s no two sides - nothing Democrats do is causing Republicants to say climate change is a hoax. Republicans are saying reality is fake all on their own. They are wrong. And they are threatening to kill people for saying reality is real. They are wrong about climate change.
Have you paid any attention to what the sides actually say?
More a question of what they do than what they say. They can say everything in the world I want to hear, but to follow through? That comes to a stop when their corporate pocket liners threaten to remove their funding.
Well, one side is promising to take away a bunch of people’s rights, and they’re certainly following through on their promises.
Democrats suck when it comes to simping for the rich, but when it comes to civil rights, the rule of law, and respect for democracy, the parties could not be more starkly different
Well yeah they’re regressive religious zealots. As I said in another comment somewhere else in this thread. Civil rights and respect for democracy I will agree with. Rule of law applies to none of our government. 97 members of Congress last year reported trades in companies influenced by their commitees. They were not all Republicans. This is a conflict of interest and they should be removed.
I’m not railing on one side or the other, I have liberal viewpoints and I have conservative viewpoints. I’m railing on the government as a whole. It needs to be rebuilt. My initial point was that everyone is super polarized and that is a problem that needs to be fixed before anything else gets fixed.
Case in point, this thread. I make a comment criticizing Republicans = +20. I make a comment criticizing Democrats = I don’t even know, like -45 at this point?
People here are obviously polarized to the left. Granted, yes Republicans in office are bat shit crazy anymore, there is zero tolerance for any criticism towards the other side. And that just blinds anyone from paying attention to real matters. Half the people I know just treat it like a sports team they support. And this is why I generally stay away from discussing politics and have learned my lesson about posting anything political here.
Rule of law applies to none of our government.
Again, you’re overlooking a huge difference. Yes, both sides benefit from a legal loophole that let’s them engage in insider trading. But one party tried to literally overthrow the government because they lost an election and then seamlessly pivoted to lying constantly about the results of the election. One party’s leading candidate for president is literally promising institute party political purges of civil servants if he’s elected. One party has a bunch of heavily armed rednecks swearing personal loyalty to its leader. Do you think insider trading is even worth talking about when that other shit is happening right out in the open?
It’s crazy to talk to folks with only a couple of grams of brain matter. They say that the weather is changing, but they think magic sky man do it.
Magic sky man scary me no like. Bad man make planet hot because we be naughty.
I used to listen and try to understand when I lived in rural counties in the US. Now all I hear is…
Durrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
I used to listen and try to understand when I lived in rural counties in the US. Now all I hear is…
Durrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
This patronizing attitude is part of the reason politicians like Trump has become popular. He talks to these people who the “civilized” part of the country is totally ignoring. You care about climate change, and so do I. But what if you live near a coal mine that has slowly been phased out? You see your town which your grandfather lived in slowly rots away. You see America as a failing country - you see stores closing. You see people moving away. People dying from opiate overdose. Unemployment and depression
These people have real and legitimate grievances. Their government has failed them - which is why anti-establishment figures like Trump is such a lightning rod for their energy. Then we go and tell them that we need to make sacrifices for the climate. What are they supposed to think? What more do they have to give?
Ignoring these people and pretending like they don’t matter or are totally irrational is going to help lead to fascism in this country. Any real revolutionary movement will have to incorporate the whole of America. We need these people on our side.
Cry me a river. Clinton had a plan to retrain and retool these coal towns your describing into productive green energy leaders and they rejected it because she eats babies and wind farms kill birds, or whatever. They are totally irrational and I’m not going to keep pretending otherwise. The real government failure is lack of education spending and critical thinking skills (thanks GOP) that is going to take generations to correct.
Edit: I’ll add there are sparks of “hope” in rural america now that farmers are seeing the impacts of climate change effecting their yields, I think they are starting to come around. Probably too late, but it’s something…
So how do we prevent the rise of fascism this generation? There’s already serious and increasing calls to violent action, since of which have been acted on, with little to no consequences.
That’s a cherry picked example. Most of these people have jobs outside of the coal industry. That isn’t why they are like this
Why do so many conservatives resort to intimidation, “death threats”, and violence to reinforce their beliefs? The current Conservative movement seems to be based as much on fear and retribution as anything else. Meanwhile, they get their panties in a bunch when someone calls them “deplorable”…
I’ve been told that a lot of irrational anger has its roots in control, including lack of control.
If that’s true, then I think those that quickly resort to violence in defense of their ideology, do so since they fear losing control of how they hold that ideology in high esteem.
It’s really weird how in the rest of the world, climate change is an accepted scientific fact. We ain’t doing much about it, that’s true but at least we aren’t straight up denying it like some Americans… what is it with the US always having the dumbest of the dumb? Or maybe they are just super loud?
Idk it’s weird.
what is it with the US always having the dumbest of the dumb?
I would gently suggest that Reddit-style hot takes might be better suited remaining on Reddit.
As far as the actual data goes, the Pew Research organization did a survey on attitudes toward climate change by country back in 2019. The main takeaways:
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Yep, the US lags behind most of Europe in regards to attitudes around climate change. However the disparity is more of shades of gray rather than the dramatic binary situation you described. There are deniers in every single country listed, and even Germany reported a full 27% of their population not considering climate change a serious threat. Sweden had 30%
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On a longitudinal level, concerns about climate change have increased everywhere, including the US. Between 2013 & 2018, the proportion of US respondents who considered climate change a major threat increased 20%.
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Unsurprisingly, there’s a major partisan gap in the US. 83% of left-leaning respondents considered it a major threat, whereas only 27% of right-leaning ones did.
It’s not far off the UK surprisingly.
From what I gather from online it is very different though. For example our conservative party was the first government in the world to talk publicly about climate change. The view hasn’t really changed (Boris tried to ride the wave of anti global warming for a bit before turning and trying to take credit for renewables). Also our carbon taxes are way higher. In the UK party wise it’s more of a how much are we going to do about climate change.
I like your post but it’s missing nuance I believe. Not that is easily quantifiable.
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Fox News destroyed America.
Supposedly it’s polarized in Australia too.
I always wonder in these cases where idiots lash out denying climate change that deep down they do it as a coping mechanism, because if they accepted it exists it would quickly weigh down on them how fucked up our environment is.
By denying it they don’t have to think about the world about to go to shit. Maybe that’s why people still have kids.
These people are so deranged that if they have a single value overlap with “the libs” they lose their shit. If they can’t be polar opposites they don’t know how to handle it
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You seen behind the curve?
I thought it was going to be a “science” documentary about flat earth. But it actually turned into more of a psychology documentary and is a tiny bit similar to what you are talking about. Why they believe and don’t change their mind.
How long do you figure until smalltalk about the weather is an attack on someone’s political beliefsystem?
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Welcome to the modern dark ages.
We’ve had an ice age.
What doesn’t say the orbit of the planet or its angle to the Sun can’t make the pendulum swing the other way?
I fine w/ going green, I wish we had more light rail in the US. It was nice when I worked in DC and got to read a book on the way into work. I was a hell of a lot more physically active.
The orbit of the planet or the angle of the sun have nothing to do with it. The billions of tons of carbon dioxide and methane we pump into the atmosphere does.
Or do you think that has no effect? If so, I’d love you to explain to me about the chemical neutrality of CO2 and methane.
But we came out of an ice age w/o as you say “billions of tons of carbon dioxide and methane we pump into the atmosphere does.”
Something changed.
Temperature was going up gradually until the industrial revolution. Now it’s going up drastically. What changed is the amount of CO2 and methane we’re putting into the atmosphere.
Again, if you don’t agree, please explain how they are chemically neutral.
So you admit that there outside factors that determine the temperature of the planet. Ok we are getting somewhere, and again I will reiterate I would like us to knock off pollution if we can do it sanely.
But what if the changes (outside man made) are exponential? As the the orbit changes or the tilt changes it goes up in orders of magnitude. Is this not possible? I work w/ spacecraft and orbits aren’t a constant. All matter/mass/celestial bodies in the solar system have gravitational influence and changes orbits.
I’m waiting for you to explain how CO2 and methane are chemically neutral. Please do so. Otherwise they have an effect on the atmosphere.
Methane and CO2 are naturally formed compounds and like any compound in the atmosphere they have an effect. I was talking out other outside forces that could be accelerating these changes.
If they have an effect and we’re pumping tons of it into the atmosphere in a NOT natural way, then it sounds like that effect would be magnified greatly.
What effect do you think CO2 and methane have on our atmosphere?
technically, we’ve been in an ice age for the last 2.5 million years or so. it just gets slightly warmer or colder every few 10000 years
