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.
While it’s wonderful she finally started questioning things, she deserves to feel way more than embarrassed for all the time she wasted and all the lies she repeated while believing it was a hoax.
Especially considering she was a science teacher before she finally changed her mind. Think of how many years she spent teaching misinformation. Is an “I’m sorry” and being embarrassed enough to make up for that, really?
It took her until well after “Climategate” to begin questioning it, and it seems like she listened to Rush Limbaugh religiously.
I’m glad she changed her mind, but this story is not inspiring to me. It’s anger-inducing that we have to fucking free these people from the mental fucking cages they built for themselves. Her being an absolute fucking disgrace to science education who woke up and was like “Oh shit, I don’t want to be an absolute fucking disgrace anymore” isn’t fucking newsworthy or inspiring. It’s bare minimum expectations of a decent fucking human being.
No amount of apologies will be enough from people who spread this religiously-backed bullshit misinformation. It has held back human society for fucking hundreds of years now.
People should have woken the fuck up when Galileo was punished by the church for promoting Heliocentrism. The Inquisition basically threatened him with death for telling the truth. Why the fuck people still follow this religious horseshit is a mystery to me other than people like this chucklefuck parrot it half her life.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
–Upton Sinclair
When someone is indoctrinated for generations it’s hard to pull away. Hopefully she makes up for it but at least she now realizes that she was wrong.
Why is this an excuse? I don’t even know what my grandparents did for a living. Just because they may have been tailors doesn’t mean I would have any special knowledge passion or feeling on fashion or the clothing industry.
I mean, if it was your great grandparents that’s different, but your grandparents?
Honestly that’s a little bit sad that you don’t even know that much about them.
Also, you not knowing or caring doesn’t mean that’s the case for everyone…though it does shed light on why you may not understand the significance of coal mining on the coal region of the US.
It was more than simply an occupation.
lol, no. Continuing to not support actual science because of some bullshit reason like my grandparents had a job like 70 years ago is ignorant plain and simple. There is no amount of culture or tradition that can justify that.
On one hand I agree but on the other if we’re jerks about people coming to our side it will make those considering it hesitant. Still not an excuse, but it will keep some on the wrong side longer
I agree, but I don’t think we have to be jerks to them to make them understand that saying sorry and trying to change isn’t enough to counteract what they’ve already done, and they owe society a lot more than that. That’s not being jerks, that’s being real.
If they can’t handle that measured critique, it’s because they refuse to take any kind of self-responsibility, which speaks to them still being on the wrong side of history.
Who gets to decide what’s enough? You? Me? Never mind the fact that the article says what she’s done.
How about we let those people who turn their beliefs around decide what’s enough instead.
The important thing has to be the fact that they’ve realised their mistake. The rest of it is just fluff.
Precisely put, thank you. She cannot change the past, she cannot get the years of her own misplaced belief back, and for all the betrayal we feel in this minute reading about her actions, the betrayal she feels daily about the actions of her close friends and family (and Rush fucking Limbaugh!) is magnitudes greater.
She saw the light, she changed her ways, and she’s helping others change theirs.
In reality, that’s the very best we can expect.
Anything more – like changing the past, or holding her personally accountable for the beliefs of tens of millions of deluded American pseudo-christians – is just as much fantasy on our part as denial of climate change once was on her own part.
We need to stop expecting more morality from a stranger than we would ever expect of ourselves.
EDITED for clarity
What do you want from her, exactly? For her to live the rest of her life in shame? Kill herself? Feel bad about it until she gets tired of feeling that way and looks for some way to lash out at those insisting she needs to feel bad forever?
Don’t make picking the right choice another bad option.
While true, the fact is that we’re in immediate danger from the effects of climate change, and if we push away those willing to change by shaming their past rather than celebrating their willingness to change we’re probably just hurting our cause.
Well said.
For as much as some of us want to emphasize the logic and practicality of their position on the issue, it sure is strange when they want more people to see things their way, yet also want to reject them when they do.
Fairly written.
It’s so hard to celebrate this, and yet we really should .
I have changed my mind about it. Ask me about 2003 I would have said I am not convinced. When I saw more evidence I changed my views.
I agree we should just be mean to these people. They clearly are using logic to reach their conclusions and not just going with it because they feel the need to belong in a community . And knowing that they will 100% be mocked for life for changing definitely doesn’t make leaving harder.
Always worth reading the article before writing a comment.
Yes. There is no excuse for someone with the science training to believe these things. She was either a very weak person or the program she studied in wasn’t very strong. Either way, although it’s good to model perspective change, this isn’t the example we need.
TBF there are a lot of unintuitive things going on with the science of climate change, such as the precise role of greenhouse gas absorption/emission spectra in trapping heat, that even with a strong general science background it’s not immediately obvious what the driving factors are.
Add to that the (deliberate) but plausible sounding misinformation and you have a deadly cocktail of not quite correct pseudoscience to drown in.
I understand being a climate skeptic, up until a certain point in time. There were still a lot of things that were unclear and the reporting was muddled and there was lots of conflicting information floating and even in supposedly well informed publications. But there really is no excuse after 2004 or so.
There really isn’t to disbelieve even as far back as the 70s. The models weren’t as good back then but the conclusions remain essentially unchanged.
I agree with you. In fact we had important data about this going back to the early 1900s.
But convincing people of it back then was tough going. Even scientists. It only really started being obviously undeniable (which is a higher bar than merely very likely) in the early 1990s. And we didn’t always do a very good job selling it to be honest.
They were publishing and discussing these things in the 70’s. Not big oil secret memos - published articles, tv shows, magazines, all that media could carry had it consistently represented over fifty years ago all the way through to today.
Tree huggers. Disgusting hippies. Loonies. That’s all the thanks these people could muster. Yeah, some people are not going to accept a “whoopsie. Gosh i was wrong” and just forget it. With good reason.
Reckoning: a settling of accounts.
Also, we are talking about brainwashing. Aum Shinrikyo successfully turned medical doctors from the best university in Japan into cult religion leaders to join the leadership that killed, injured and disabled subway passengers with sarin, among others murdered in different ways.
But science isn’t intuition-based. It often comes to conclusions that are far from intuitive.
Yeah this is what gets me about the young turks guy that wants to run for office. Its like its great you came to the light in the last decade or so but you spend a goodly amount of time shilling for the other side. Its fine for you to shill for us but that is as far as I trust your judgement.
Cenk used to be a conservative? TIL
not just conservative but ultraconservative libertarian with aweful views on women. He did not go straight to ultra liberal. He went indenpendent for awhile and then eventually way left. I more jaded person than I might suppose he saw no future for a person of his background on the right but saw lots of opportunity on the left.