This may be kind of obvious, but I haven't noticed too many people saying it: the problem in a social sense with both COVID 19 and climate change is that both problems work in ways which are very real and very disrupting, but leave a significant proportion of the population being able to claim no personal and immediate effect, despite what scientists and other experts tell them.
This enables the intense politicisation of the response, and a lack of social cohesion.
I mean, if you get a big enough problem - your country at risk of invasion during a war as a perfect example - people will put up with enormous privation and social disruption for years at a time. Not only that, but some people find the social cohesion from a massive joint response can make the whole thing almost a positive experience. (I think the ageing scientist James Lovelock says that about his World War 2 years. By the way, he's 101 now. Can't be with us much longer.)
The social difficulty you get is when a problem is real and bad, but not quite bad or immediate enough to shut up the politically and ideologically motivated contrarians from engaging in arguments with cherry picked "evidence" and large slabs of denial of expert evidence.
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Not only that, but some people find the social cohesion from a massive joint response can make the whole thing almost a positive experience.
That was then. We've just gone through nearly 40 years of conservative politicians arguing that individual wealth accumulation is the pre-eminent personal philosophy and any form of collectivist welfare is one step removed from serfdom.
"This may be kind of obvious, but I haven't noticed too many people saying it: the problem in a social sense with both COVID 19 and climate change is that both problems work in ways which are very real and very disrupting, but leave a significant proportion of the population being able to claim no personal and immediate effect, despite what scientists and other experts tell them."
One of these is what I call a hybrid event. Whereas the other is just fake news. So with Covid its a terrorist attack posing as an attack of pure nonsense. Interestingly enough it appears to AMERICAN CONSERVATIVES SPECIFICALLY as pure nonsense. But when an Aussie thinks there is no serious virus behind the psychological operation, I know their opinion leaders are all American.
But these conservatives who imagine that it really is pure nonsense, they have a tendency to get really sick or even die. Because they cannot go so far as to admit that this is biowarfare. They are tapped out at jumping over the first labour of bullshit, and there is another waiter for their table. So they are too confident that they will be okay. Well they WON'T be okay. If they won't prepare for the virus they are going to get hurt.
But global warming is the worst case of enforced wrong-way Corriganism ever. The new solar forecast is out. And the Global Solar Minimum will go from 2020 until 2053.
This is NEW-NEWS people so listen carefully. Jason will back me up on this. In about 2005 I came out on Catallaxy telling everyone that the 2030's will be brutally cold and dry. So much so that we ought to be investing in North Queensland, if not moving to North Queensland. Joseph Cambria will remember this. And its verifiable from my defunk blog. I only had enough evidence to predict for sure the brutal nature of the 2030's . But now we can do an update.
The update is that the 2030's and 40's will be absolutely catastrophically cold and dry. And we cannot return to warm 20th century conditions until AT LEAST the 2080's. Thats how bad this is going to be. Its not going to be fun. When I came out with this stuff Jason Soon told me to wear a Jersey. But the catastrophe will be far worse then even I was saying back then.
So Steve. You've got just straight misinformation like the global warming nonsense. Then you've got the hybrid event where there is both misinformation, but a real and sickening biowarfare attack on the planet, to give the psychological operation the full level of street cred.
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