Comment by FussyZeus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FussyZeus | Hacker News Reader

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A good amount of the uncertainties involved in climate science, though, can be laid directly at the feet of the Right, and how they've undermined and obstructed science for decades to enable their corporate donors to continue polluting the planet. Perfect example is when global warming was rebranded to climate change, largely by the Right, after which right-leaning politicians have spent every moment saying "See they had to change it from warming to change! They clearly don't know what they're talking about." Or that they've defunded departments showing the ample data on Climate Change, or instructed various departments to not use the language. Anything they can do to shut it down and make sure their corporate donors don't have to lose a minor bit of their bottom line to, oh I don't know, perpetuate the SPECIES a little longer.

IMHO such flagrant and destructive distortion of truth, especially with such an existential threat as Climate Change is, deserves some criminal charge on the order of Crimes Against Humanity. I've been watching this charade play out from inside Republican ranks for decades and whole thing makes me sick to my stomach.

I don't think it's true to say that the rebranding to "climate change" came from the right.

It came from academics who realized that saying "global warming" was confusing to people when the climate swung wildly from unusually hot to unusually cold. It takes some time and a willing listener to explain that "warming" means increased energy in the climate system, and therefore more dramatic swings between hot and cold weather.

Saying "global warming" also does nothing to communicate things like change in precipitation patterns.

Using the phrase "climate change" does a much better job of encompassing these phenomenon.

Framing this as a partisan issue has the causation reversed. The people funding anti-climate change propaganda are the oil and coal companies. They're only "the right" because the places with oil and coal under them happen to be red states, which allows those companies to control those politicians more easily because they have more constituents who would lose their jobs to meaningful reductions in fossil fuel usage. It only becomes partisan once the representatives of those districts push it into the party platform.

You can't defeat that in the long-term by voting the other party in because the nature of the two party system is that each party is in power half the time. The only way to fix it is to reform the Republican platform so that it's one of the issues both parties agree on rather than every administration just undoing whatever the previous one did.

> Perfect example is when global warming was rebranded to climate change, largely by the Right, after which right-leaning politicians have spent every moment saying "See they had to change it from warming to change! They clearly don't know what they're talking about."

Propaganda is propaganda. When it was called global warming they would claim that some places were getting cooler rather than warmer (due to changes in ocean and wind patterns etc.), which was true but not actually any better. If some places get drier and some places get wetter, well, droughts and floods are both bad. More to the point, the ecosystem in each place is calibrated for the previous climate and rapid changes start causing things to go extinct regardless of the direction of the local changes.

But that takes longer to explain than a talking point about how some places are getting cooler and not warmer or any of the other irrelevant nonsense about how temperatures decline every year during the period between summer and winter. Calling it climate change was an attempt to defend against that nonsense, so naturally the industry now spends all day claiming that rhetorical defeat as a victory because that's what propagandists do.

Pitting both sides against each other is how corporations get what they want. The enemy is Exxon, not the people of the state of Nebraska.

I'm not really contradicting you here, but I'll point out how thoughts "rhyme".

That is, "They" and "Their" base instincts, ignorance, greed, and lies are also to blame when other belief systems are unpopular or misunderstood.

If the goal is to rile up believers, jeremiads tend to work well enough. But building a case to prosecute does not create repentance.

To describe uncertainties involved in climate science without an equally weighted consideration of the political bias in scientific research in academia, self-evidently through biases in research funding, is frankly speaking petulant, and why someone like myself takes your "existentialism" as histrionic.

>> especially with such an existential threat as Climate Change is

But it isn't, at least not for these people. The core of the right doesn't contemplate a world beyond their own lifespans. They, trump especially, are surprised when they travel to see other world leaders talking about things decades in the future. Monarchs of ages past thought about securing their kingdoms for their future descendants. Our monarchs don't think beyond the next election cycle. The longest span of time contemplated in US right-wing politics is how long a supreme court justice might live. Everything beyond that is totally irrelevant.

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