I'd rather have a cold hard doctor that fixes my cancer, than feel good about dying.
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/should_we_trai... https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/wps.20146 https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnbeh.2014.0045... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21300514 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21248604
Otherwise, I will argue that emotions are directly linked to our personal health, but not the climate. It's an entirely different system that has no emotions.
You're not going to fix anything without convincing people do act, and its more likely that you can convince people to act if you can connect with with on an emotional level, rather than just tell them the facts and saying what needs to be done.
We've been telling people the facts for years and it's not done shit.
All a politician has to do is present a real solution, and you will have lots of support. That hasn't happened yet. It wasn't hard to get people to stop littering, because the leaders did something about it, and the followers followed.
It's a leadership issue, not a follower issue. So stop blaming the followers, and blame the leaders.
Can a warm fuzzy doctor cure cancer with science? Yes.
Can a warm fuzzy doctor cure cancer with emotions and no science? No.
So, this is not a false dichotomy. The climate can not be changed by feeling different about it.
Is there a solution to climate change that does not involve science? I would argue no.
What they're talking about is how important emotions are when dealing with humans, and you need to deal with humans to solve this problem.
It's a childish ploy to play with emotions, and you will end up with a childish solution playing this game.
Science has won over millions of people with the truth time and time again. To pretend like this issue can only be solved by emotions is a giant lie. We have history to demonstrate this.
If the government made all CO2 emissions illegal tomorrow people wouldn't be able to go to work or feed their families, you'd have massive riots and the government would either change their minds or be thrown out.
> To pretend like this issue can only be solved by emotions is a giant lie.
Yet again, absolutely nobody is saying this.
How would people feel about saving the entire human race? Maybe that's the problem, it's "feelings", not real solutions.
> Yet again, absolutely nobody is saying this.
They actually are, it's just subtle so maybe you aren't noticing it. There's an attempted shift in the discussion away from very, very real solutions to emotional manipulation.
However, there's no solution to climate science that doesn't involve engaging with humans either. Pathos is a fundamental part of engaging with humans.
The author talks about cancer diagnoses. This is an apt analogy, and there is a huge body of science for helping individuals cope with personal tragedy. Global warming is a global and personal tragedy. People will have their livelihoods ruined, and people will die. People already have, but (since this is a anglophile community) this forum is mostly insulated from developments in North Africa, the Middle East, Central America... how it impacts us is in the nationalistic/xenophobic movements around the resulting human migrations. Acknowledging this will prevent conflict and harm those that cynically try to take advantage of groups of people in vulnerable states through demagoguing.
The science should be cold an unemotional. The policy dictated by the science should be sensitive to the mental health of everyone as they absorb the magnitude of this disaster.