Thursday, May 16, 2019

In Sync with Happify

My new favorite person on Twitter, @happifydesign, has been thinking challenging thoughts lately (and maybe has all along... I'm only a recent follower). Here's a short thread:

I watched Bill Nye and felt his frustration viscerally. For those actually and honestly and openly engaging with climate breakdown (or anything, really), I have infinite patience. For those who are playing the white man game of trying to trap me in some internal argument failure? I'm done playing.
The evidence is beyond what we need to act and my personal current point of interest is rapid culture/societal shift to protect all life on earth and reduce the magnitude of human suffering.

I don't want to argue minutiae -- I want to be an agent of change.

If you want to "be right" inasmuch as I'm not a walking encyclopedia of citations of the past two decades of research leading me to this point? I get that. It's f***ing hard to face this reality and somehow you feel safe if you can "prove" the messengers wrong on a technicality.

It's a bizarre literalism, like some sort of biblical fundamentalist game.
In case you missed it, here's the Bill Nye video Happify referred to.

Here's one thing to remember for those moments when someone tries to trap you, as Happify describes, in your inability to produce two decades of research on climate change. From Tom Randall of Bloomberg News:
This ExxonMobile chart from 1982 predicted that in 2019 our atmospheric CO2 level would reach about 415 parts per million, raising the global temperature roughly 0.9 degrees C.  The world crossed the 415 ppm threshold this week and broke 0.9 degrees C in 207.

I'd say that's a pretty accurate prediction for a hypothesis that's not based on anything.

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