by Chris McGinty
I don’t want to be too much of an asshole here, but I’m going to be, because I’m a little miffed. Around three or four months ago, I wrote a blog post about why we’re having trouble getting people to understand climate change. I don’t really have a readership, so I didn’t expect anyone coming to my rescue and giving me some good information. It was the sentiment of the matter though, because my basic take was, and I’m summarizing, “I bet there’s a simple way of explaining things, and rather than simply explaining that simple way of explaining things we’re being told, ‘Hey dummies, why don’t you just trust the scientific community?’ And my answer is that we get those smart atheists every day telling us how dumb we are for having ‘faith,’ because faith is belief without evidence.”
Watch this video. Pay specific attention to the part at around 2:30 where he explains that we know it’s caused by humans because of the type of carbon that is increasing.
In the last blog post, my whole thing was there has to be a nice bite sized science thing that we can explain the problem simply to others. Here it is.
The extraction and burning of fossil fuels, such as gasoline, increases the C12 isotope in a way that doesn’t occur naturally. The primary increase in CO2s is the C12 isotope.
That’s what you should be leading with, morons. I’ve intermittently been going back to the well of information on climate change for years now, mostly because I think Al Gore is an asshole (politically, I’m sure he’s a good human being) and I had to just accidentally stumble on this information. This should be in every video on climate change ever. Tone down the part of, “We scientists are smart, so you should blindly believe us,” and increase the part about, “This information will allow you to believe us with evidence.”
Now, I’m going to feel like a complete asshole if it turns out that I walked away from “An Everconfusing Truth,” – or whatever it was called – and right after I stopped watching Al Gore explained this very information, but everything else he was saying was so dumb. I couldn’t handle it anymore.
I’m frustrated, because as I said in the last posts, I’ve been an environmentalist all my life. I want to colonize Mars and explore space and all that stuff, but I don’t want to do it because we destroyed Earth and it’s no longer habitable. The problem is that this shit’s been going on for decades now, and I’ve never been able to simply explain it to people; not even people who believe climate change. Instead, every argument I’ve ever heard about this subject has been stupid and uninformed on both sides of the climate changed coin.
Every time you are asked about climate change this is your response, and you keep saying this no matter how they try to spin the questions, “Burning fossil fuels increases a certain type of CO2, and that’s measurably what’s causing the problem. That’s how we know it’s a human existence problem.” Once you convince people of that, you can get into all of the doomsday, end of times bullshit that is making everybody believe
that you’re charlatans.
Chris McGinty is a blogger who wants to apologize for this rant to all of the scientists from who he truly enjoys learning. The beginning of my apologies is Neil Degrasse Tyson. The middle of my apologies is Pamela Gay. The end is Nye.
The end is Nye! Love it!