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https://mobile.twitter.com/nytimesworld/status/1203092272285392898?ref_src=twsrc^tfw|twcamp^tweetembed|twterm^1203092272285392898&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.news.com.au%2Ftechnology%2Fenvironment%2Fclimate-change%2Fhow-the-world-has-reacted-to-sydney-smoke-haze%2Fnews-story%2Fc6782de9b2782287740099cb42ac0176 Dude, I don’t need to download an app to tell me where the fires are. I can SEE them. Having an app to tell me where the fires are won’t help me to breathe. I’ll tell you what will help: stop denying climate change so that your oil and coal buddies don’t get their feelings hurt. Actually it might not help - it might already be too late.

Hey Everyone, I saw that the American Family Association (AFA) was covered here at FJ in 2016. Today a person on FB shared an anti-environmental stance from them. This lovely article discusses how God controls the the sun and environmentalists should shut up: Just wondering if anyone else had heard of them or other right-wing Christian groups spreading this kind of nonsense. Mods, please let me know if this should be moved somewhere else (do we have any climate change threads?)

So, in the Brexit thread I expressed infuriation with the fact that, at least in my country, people often treat the idea of protecting our environment as a joke. I have some ideas as to why this is. Obviously, the overwhelming resistance from the people currently in power who massively benefit from the fossil fuel and motor industries as well as lax anti-pollution laws. It's like every time there is a step forwards the media will rush to portray the scientists and activists as pessimists or doom-sayers. It's annoying that people won't look at the evidence on their own and think beyond "it's annoying to have to separate my household waste" and see that we have to take this all the way to the very top to even begin to make a difference. People feel powerless and just give up when it's pretty bloody imperative to not give up in the face of mass extinction events and environmental collapse. I also wonder if it's down to science, nature and other connected topics being portrayed as "geeky" and "uncool". I think my generation suffered from a very aggressive kind of anti-intellectualism where we were taught that it was only "cool" to know just enough to get yourself into uni/a good job. This was especially true among girls in my age group. My father always valued education just for the sake of learning something so I was in a pretty small minority in my town (but then again, it had a large number of oil workers) in that I enjoyed learning about the world and how it all fits together. I remember being laughed at by a group of girls in my school because I asked for a recycling bin to put our bottles and cans in. Apparently, it's not cool to care. I think it's great that we now have young women like Greta Thunberg standing up and talking about all this in a very eloquent and well-informed way but they also come in for a horrific amount of abuse as a result. Some of this is possibly down to sexism and the idea that teenage girls should somehow be only interested in boys and other "acceptable" interests. I have also experienced first hand the reaction adults have to being questioned by young people when I was her age, equal parts horror and a sort of rage that you would even dare. I love the fact that young people, in general, seem to be starting to question adults more. Now all we need is to take these young people seriously and encourage them. This might be a very long time coming but I hope that my generation will at least be better at it than my parents'. I think a big part of the issue is fear of change. The fact is that everyone will have to make changes to their lifestyle to make this work. Even when you suggest to people that towns and cities be structured to prioritise public vehicles like buses and trams then you are met with a bunch of people telling you why it will never work. They are unable to imagine the idea that better and more available public transport might make cars obsolete in cities because they have always needed to take a car to get around or have never bothered to use public transport at all. Also, the idea of becoming a less wasteful society seems to make people angry or pessimistic. The biggest elephant in the room seems to be that our entire civilisation is now structured around cheap, replaceable stuff that we often only use once or twice then throw away. Everything from the fashion industry to electronics needs to make us want to just buy more and more stuff just so that their (terrible) business models can remain intact. On one hand, people will usually admit that it is utterly bonkers that Primark will sell you a shirt for £3 that will disintegrate after a few washes but on the other they will just shrug and head right out to buy more shirts that can only be worn a couple of times. Then right at the top, everything seems so impossible to change that people end up just bickering over the minutiae like plastic straws rather than campaigning for things like an end to fossil fuels. It's like how people in cities KNOW that diesel-fuelled engines are contributing to conditions like asthma and lung cancers but they don't see the point in putting pressure on the government to completely ban these vehicles. I once ended up talking to a taxi driver about how he knows the polluted air around city centre taxi ranks is damaging his health but he won't ever swap his diesel car and neither will any other taxi driver because then he will have to get used to a new car. It makes my head spin. I would like to believe that there is hope but it honestly feels like a losing battle. I know that in other European countries the environment is taken a little more seriously. Is this an education thing or is there something more to it?

This thread is for climate change: panic, deniers and efforts to counteract it

Searched for this but couldn't find anything so I decided to start a thread. March 15th strike had about 1.4 million participants in all continents and more than 100 countries, Greta has been nominated for Nobel Peace Prize, and movement is far from over, so we will hear a lot about this in near future.

In case you're still not feeling depressed and hopeless, here's the new climate change report: It may already be too late if we don't do something, like, right now. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45775309 I'm quoting it here but it's worth clicking for the graphics. the comment section of my local paper was really depressing. I didn't really think that climate change denial was a thing over here but the Trump propaganda has made its way over the pond too. Then there were the people who believe it's true but who don't want to do anything so there were lots of people saying whatever we can do doesn't help and SOMEBODY ELSE should do something.