Maui wants answers.
Such vast death. Why no alarms?
They would have acted.
We boiling frogs feel for Them,
Shush, Climate! We want to hear.

#tanka (5-7-5-7-7 extended #haiku / #senryu) #poem
#climate #ClimateEmergency #ClimateSilence #Maui #Lahaina #ClimateMessaging

@norakroeger

I very much agree with your various points here, which are nicely articulated.

My feeling is that just as we are asked to look past individual bits of weather and consider climate as an aggregate over the globe and over time to have a peoper gestalt to assess, likewise we must look past individual conversations to aggregate public opinion over time.

Doing so immediately clarifies that, notwithstanding some talk that gets pejoratively labeled doomerism, the public (or at least media representation of it) is way too optimistic and oblivious. I take part of your point to be that different conversations are needed by different individuals in order to move the needle in the aggregate.

And, as well, people sometimes have that Schroedinger way of carrying incompatible thoughts of doom and hope as they assess the actual truth.

So let's leave them to their respective ways of discussing and persuading and absorbing and make sure there is a rich repository of truth available in each of these more subjective modalities.

And let's respect that climate science is not the only science needed. It establishes some bounds on timetables. It's better at telling us "at least this bad" than it is at saying "at most this bad", fir example, as recent surprises in heat and melt have shown. But psychology is a different credential, so beware the Peter Principle and the desire sometimes to speak beyond one's area of expertise.

Public policy, too, if done right, is its own credential, though prone to corruption that complicates that. So that's a messy area. But this is a big topic and such things will get messy if one wants public particioation at scale.

I guess I'll close by agreeing further with your implicit plea that people who are mostly politically aligned don't bleed away energy bickering about micro approaches. Assume good faith on the part of others and spend energy moving forward instead where that's feasible.

#Climate #ClimateMessaging #hope #doom #doomerism