I spent years doubting the science of climate change and spending time with people who didn’t believe in the science either.
When I realised I was wrong, I felt really embarrassed.
To move away from those people meant leaving behind an entire community at a time when I didn’t have many friends.
I went through a really difficult time. But the truth matters.
I’m the granddaughter of coal miners in Pennsylvania and my family moved to Florida when I was young.
We have a Polish Catholic background and we attended church regularly, but at the same time we were very connected to science because my mum was a nurse and my dad sold microscopes and other scientific equipment.
There are so many people in these comments calling her stupid for believing in the ideas in the first place. You have to keep in mind that these ideas are what she would have grown up around all her life and would have been told to her by those around her. You should be happy for people who escape these ideals, not critical that they held them in the first place. It does no one any good
I’ve lived in the South. There is immense social pressure to not even consider climate change as real alongside all the outright lies and rationalizations about climate change being pushed constantly that you don’t even want to open your mouth to publicly question denialism. You don’t want to deal with the shit you might get for speaking up. It’s like being an atheist. You learn to dodge the issue if you don’t want to deal with either the ignorance or the grief.
I never bothered to look into it but I’m sure it’s a hoax. I heard it somewhere so it must be true
goddamn brainless morons everywhere and they all fucking vote. She *should * feel embarrassed.
She’ll burn like the rest of us on this fiery hellscape we’re creating.
I was doubtful it was mostly man made, but listened to the experts when they told us what was what. Regardless, WTF wouldn’t we support conservation and not polluting regardless? We have reversed rivers literally being on fire with all the oil in them. Without enforced regulation, we get where we are now.
There’s a huge chunk of religious people who believe the earth is theirs to exploit for the maximum possible enrichment.
I’m glad she found her way out of the right wing disinformation sphere. A lot of folks have relatives that still haven’t made it out, and would be happy with them coming to their senses now, even if it’s later than it could have been.
My husband didn’t get home from work until late, so I would have four or five hours at home by myself every day, always with the kitchen radio on, tuned to conservative stations.
We listened to Rush Limbaugh, a radio host known for his controversial opinions on topics such as race, LGBT rights and women, and I would hear him every day for two hours.
He would talk about how climate change was just a hoax.
Up to that point, I had been exposed to a lot of misinformation about evolution in my church groups, but I had studied the theory of evolution at university, so I was equipped to spot it.
But I didn’t have that same skill set for climate change.
My conviction that climate change was a hoax solidified when I heard Limbaugh talk about Climategate. It was a controversy involving research from the University of East Anglia. Only much later did I learn that the material was twisted and taken out of context.
…
I craved intellectual stimulation, so I kept the radio on while I was cooking dinner or while driving in my car. But there were only a few hours of Rush Limbaugh each day.
That’s when the big turning point came.
I tuned into NPR, a US non-profit broadcaster. I don’t remember which show it was, or the specific news story, but I remember how they described the issue in a completely different way from what I had heard on my usual stations. And it sounded so reasonable.
I realised how much my social network had changed since I had stopped teaching. At school, I was around people from all over the world, gay or straight, conservative and liberals.
Without that school environment, all I had in my social circle was my church group.
So this boils down to, “I stopped listening to opinion and started listening to news.” What a revelation.
I’m glad she broke free, but man, it’s hard to be sympathetic to someone who willingly poisoned her mind.
Had a degree in zoology and taught science.
I studied social science and law. I see the evidence of climate change everywhere I look.
I can see the insects and bacteria that aren’t supposed to be anywhere near me killing off the native species. When n was a kid you would drive for twenty minutes on a summer night and have to wash your windows from all the splattered bugs. You can see there are no more bugs on the window any more.
She has no excuse other than she is a gullible fool. As far as I’m concerned, someone who was fooled so badly has no business with a platform. If she can be tricked as to something so readily apparent and obvious, nothing she says has any credibility. How does she not completely implode upon realizing she could be wrong about literally everything she thinks she knows?
Why are you such an asshole. She got out of her bullshit conservative bubble. Take the win
It’s honestly what makes conservatives hate people on the left. The smugness that leads people to run back to their tribe and never having the ability to reaccess a believe because the second you do you have people like the poster above ready to do a victory lap and not accept someone that was able to get out of a circular thinking loop.
It’s on both sides. I’ve had to look at specific believes that in practice didn’t pan out the way I thought and if mentioned it to my friends group they would call me a far right shill or whatever bullshit term is being used right now.
There is little room for nuance and having a conversation that’s not surface level black and white opens you up for slander at times.
We really don’t know how to deal with repentance and it kinda sucks. Just go look at all those atheist groups. They splinter constantly. Meanwhile the Catholic Church is still a thing 1700 years later.
I don’t know how to fix this.
Just like this lady, some conservatives are beginning to admit that maaaaybe some climate change science is real, but I’m not cheering for any of them. They are still extremely dangerous conservatives and will continue to support deadly politics that oppress or kill the normal people.
I’d expect nothing less, Burn the Right
Nolawns
About 4 years ago I stopped cutting our farm. We still do livestock rescue and all the animals actually look better than ever because they’re not just eating rich sugary grass. Plus we have a few small caves and the bat population has boomed since we stopped. Tons of insects have returned. Insects are the foundation to our existence, when they go, we’re fucked.
If the invasive insects could chill out I’d appreciate it.
Emerald Ash Borer, lanternflies, etc
Unfortunately, I don’t see that happening, and really don’t want someone trying to figure it out by introducing more invasive species lol
I am in infrastructure and even the rapid conservative engineer I work with has come along on it. Areas are flooding that are not supposed to flood and we have historical records proving that they are not supposed to be flooding. Systems are overheating that again didn’t overheat in the past.
In general the government replaces old systems in the same spot. Think about your work, if the copier machine dies they buy a new copier and put it where the old one was. Same thing in government. So when my company gets the contract to replace something we can look at what we are replacing. The evidence is there. The old system wasn’t designed with flooding in mind but it died in a flood. The old system worked fine and then melted. Our new system broke the next summer.
The climate is changing. All these incredible satellite data is awesome to have but I can prove something is up just by showing you my emails after hurricane season and August
Driving on the highway today and looked out at a tidal river. It’s got 100 year old trees all along the bank, every one of them dead within the past several years, rotting out. Roots currently under water, as they are every time I drive by. People used to have picnics under these trees.
C’mon, man, don’t be mean to the morons. They’ll put us in camps and the centrists will just say it was our fault for being too smug about checks notes noticing the weather changing for decades
No fuck that. I’ll go into the chamber reminding these people they are fucking morons.
I think the community thing is a big part of these sort of weird anti-science movements that people don’t always think about. I watched a documentary about Flat Earthers a while ago and that was one of my big takeaways from it, that a lot of people are there just for the sense of community and belonging, and if it means they have to convince themselves the Earth is flat then so be it.
Climate Denial is a slightly different bag because they’ve done actual real damage to the world and everything living on it, but I can see how people fall into it, kind of.
But either way I don’t suppose it much matters at this point, I get the feeling that we’re pretty much fucked anyway.
Behind the curve. This was also what I immediately thought of
“I’ve been rowing the opposite way for years, now I finally stopped.” Cool, here’s a cookie, Sharon. Also we’re all gonna die. Thx.
deleted by creator
To move away from those people meant leaving behind an entire community at a time when I didn’t have many friends.
maybe you didn’t have many friends because of the way you acted?
That seems unnecessarily mean. The author isn’t making any grand claims about herself, she’s explaining how she changed her point if view and admitted to being wrong about a major view. I’m hoping I can learn something from her experience, and maybe help tip more people towards making a similar change. I don’t really care how much or little she apologizes for being wrong before.
So what I think you can learn from her story is that she had to change her view because it was just not true (a lie). This lie she claims was planted by church groups and conservative media. Removing those two things from her life made it possible to spot the lie.
Abolish churches and media that bears false witness and the lie would never have been planted.
I wonder how many of the “holier than thou” commenters in this thread do anything productive about climate change? So easy to throw stones from behind a screen.
