When I was a boy, my family didn’t have a TV. (Which I now make up for by watching a lot of TV.) The strangeness of this was made clear one day at school. It was second grade. The teacher wanted to talk about something on TV. “Who doesn’t have a TV?” she asked the class. I raised my hand and a girl raised her hand. She didn’t have a TV because it was being fixed.
So I was especially disturbed by this video in which a few schoolchildren who differ from the rest of their class are blown up. Their fatal mistake is not cutting carbon emissions. The organization that made it took it down and issued a lukewarm apology (“live and learn”) that said nothing about ridiculing minorities. If I were teaching 10-year-olds, I think I’d show them the video, tell them how disturbing I found it, and ask them about times in their lives that they felt different from everyone else. It is a curiously teachable moment.
They would not recognize it as discrimination. We never seem to outgrow our tendency towards discrimination; we merely recognize old forms of discrimination as outdated. Thus we move on to discriminating against new types of minorities, while congratulating ourselves for being so much more open minded than our fathers.
This video marks a turning point in the global warming debate. The fascists have let the mask slip.
Seth, I watched that video preparing to tell you you’re overreacting but I didn’t expect it to be so blatantly judgmental and coercive. I was expecting a metaphor that we will be ‘blown up’ by climate-change if we don’t act, not summary capital punishment for unbelievers.
The campaign makes it seem like there is no such thing as a good skeptic – they’re all just selfish and apathetic. But I am a skeptic (as in, undecided) and I consider the ecological effects of my everyday actions out of a genuine sense of moral duty. And my main – and anytime I have an audience, loudly prosecuted – objection to consumerism, even above its shallowness, is that it is unsustainable. But because I don’t believe in this particular theory I am just a slack-jawed zombie unworthy of tolerance and life!? I don’t want to go to Hell – save me, Jeeesus! Give me a sign, haha.
I agree with John S. – when they can put this ad out without picking up on the Holcaust-style brutal extremism, that’s a watershed moment. Richard Curtis is a big-name director (whose work I happen to despise; ‘Love, Actually’ is like being force-fed one’s bodyweight in aspartame). If he is promoting this Final Solution mentality it reflects the general mindset in some powerful circles.
G, that ad wasn’t about belief, it was about compliance.
Nancy, you’re right – the ads make no attempt to persuade nor do they clearly define the anatgonists as skeptics. I assumed that they were targetted against skeptics but they probably do have multiple targets in mind; I think they were deliberately painting with broad strokes. Watching the ads I just saw myself, the well-meaning skeptic, and not the uncritically indifferent whom they were also condemning.
I too agree with Nancy. It is about compliance. Even blind compliance, since how are schoolchildren supposed to seriously consider both sides? It makes the brainwashing described in 1984 look crude.
It might have shown the Bangladeshi and Pacific Islanders being flooded out of their homes by the rising sea. Of course, that will happen regardless of what children do, because we would have had to start acting on what we knew ten years ago. It might have shown one animal after another that will be extinct in thirty years because we aren’t acting on it now. Or it might have shown some of the millions of people who will starve as the monsoons fail.
Ten years ago one could still honestly object that the data didn’t conclusively demonstrate that we were heading for disaster. Not any more.
Nathan, even the IPCC models project that agricultural productivity and forest growth will increase on net for the next 50 years or so due to climate change. Some places will need to shift from growing crops to growing trees, but other places will have a longer growing season. The short-to-medium-term effect is that food is going to be cheaper in the world; fewer people will starve than might otherwise had we “started acting on what we knew ten years ago” and that’s not even including the cost of raising taxes or whatever you would have had us do. The simple cost of *not warming so much* would have been: more people die of hunger.
According to satellite analysis, Bangladesh has been gaining land for the last few decades, about 20 square km/year. The anecdotes about islands disappearing weren’t really islands at all, they were sandbars. People who live in floodplains and marshes will still (always) have problems, but helping them is a relatively straightforward engineering problem; in the areas that *have* lost land they’ve lost it as much due to erosion and subsidence as sea level changes. The country is already building dams and other engineering projects designed to do what the Dutch do about having chosen to live near or below sea level.
The data *still* doesn’t conclusively demonstrate that we are heading for disaster. A significant subset of the data says even if warming continues, the next few degrees of warming (IPCC says 1-3 degrees; I’m rounding up) is on-net good for human life and plant life and tree life and more warming is better than less for much of the foreseeable future. 50 years of things getting better is a heck of a long time for us to improve the models, figure out whether it really is a problem at all, improve our mitigation tech, and eventually start doing something about whatever problems actually crop up in practice when and as we so choose.