Source: Can We Plow Through the Blizzard of Nonsense?
When you’ve spent your life working on the climate crisis, good news is hard to come by. So perhaps I’m jumping the gun—but I find myself feeling just the tiniest bit optimistic in recent days about the bottom line general health of our society.
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It began with the election. Though it was much too close, Americans managed to reject most of the truly depraved candidates—the Oz/Lake/Walker/Masters people who had sold their souls in particularly public fashion. We’ve had to take such people seriously since the night that Trump claimed the presidency in 2016; clearly the old norms were gone, and the price of citizenship was going to be constant vigilance. But those forces have lost the next three elections, this one despite high inflation and low approval ratings for the president. It felt like democracy had lived to fight another day, and we’d get a bit of a breather before the 2024 follies began again.
That good feeling was quickly doused in the following days as Elon Musk stepped up his assault on his own employees, Twitter users, and any kind of decency. He was not just re-admitting insurrectionists, anti-vaxxers and antisemites to his kingdom, he was celebrating them. It’s been ugly as can be, and it is steadily getting worse.
Yesterday Musk explained that Twitter would “follow the science,” which “necessarily includes reasoned questioning of the science.” One of the things this means in practice is that every climate denialist is emboldened, and all over Twitter. E&E News reported
Earlier this week, a search for “climate” on Twitter resulted in “#ClimateScam” as the top term on the platform. Tweets using that hashtag were a miasma of climate disinformation, cherry-picked statistics and conspiracy theories. On another day, the top result was “climate lockdown,” a reference to the Great Reset conspiracy theory that claims a group of global elites is planning to shut down economic activity around the world to cut carbon emissions
The planet’s most gracious climate scientist, Katherine Hayhoe, being an empiricist, demonstrated with an elegant little experiment that the number of trolls has increased by between 15 and 30 times. That meant that when she tweeted out that “Climate change is real, it’s human-caused, its impacts are serious and there are solutions if we act now” it got 3,000 respondents mostly saying things like “other than the grant you received how much are they paying you to spread disinformation?” or “All climate changes are caused by Soros. Paid by Soros.”
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