This won’t be much of a diary — more a small rant.
A recent BBC article that showed up on Facebook was about a coastal town in Wales that is slated to be ‘decommissioned’ because they expect it to be impractical to keep living in it. The estimate is that within 35 years rising seas and increased flooding risks will render it uninhabitable. The residents are understandably upset if I read the story correctly, because they are not seeing any meaningful government assistance in relocating, and many of them do not want to give up their homes in any case.
I offered up a comment that there was a lot of climate denial in the comments, that one bad storm would change minds, and that it was better to be pro-active in dealing with this.
I got a number of responses that kept repeating variations on the same brain-dead talking points (as well as the predictable insults and CT.)
“The climate has always been changing.”
“There have always been storms.”
This completely ignores a few things like: the rate at which climate is now changing, that the cause is human activity, that bad storms are becoming bigger and more frequent, and so on.
So let’s try this — the same kind of ‘reasoning’ but in a different context.
People have always been dying. It’s a natural event. It’s been happening since forever and there’s no point in worrying about it or doing anything about it. It just is.
So, if people are now dying in things like car crashes or mass shootings, that’s no big deal and there is nothing we can do about it — because people have always been dying, right? There’s no point in getting hysterical about it or fear-mongering.
I also got one of those “God has a plan” responses.
Well…
God may have a plan but you don’t know what’s in it and you might not like it if you did. The last time God had a plan, if you didn’t have a boarding pass for Noah’s Ark, you were screwed.
I don’t know if this kind of rhetoric will make people reconsider what they are saying, but if it makes them think just a little, it would be a start.