Stop Telling Kids Climate Change Will Destroy the World

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

We don't know if it will or not. It'd definitely going to be bad. I'm not a fan of sugar coating or hiding things.

We do know in a general sense that literal human extinction is not on the table, although Kelsey Piper's "it's not even going to make our standard of living worse" Enlightenment Now shtick is BS as well and exactly what you'd expect from someone who had the worst influence on the Tolkien fandom of any one individual in history before she even turned twenty.

Never heard of this person until now. Pls elaborate.

So, in the early 2010s, there was a very active Tolkien fandom on Tumblr--centered more on the Silmarillion than on The Lord of the Rings, interestingly enough--in which Piper, at the time an undergraduate at Stanford, participated extensively under a pseudonym. She became very popular and very influential very quickly and very young because she had a more-than-usually-literate-for-early-2010s-Tumblr-fandom writing style and approach to the source material, but what she used this style and approach to argue was uniformly terrible. For example, she held the view, which became dominant in the fandom for several years, that the sons of Feanor are justified in almost everything they do in the storyline of the Silmarillion, because the Silmarils are their property that's being withheld from them. (If you're not familiar with the Silmarillion, the problem with this argument is that the Feanorians tend to respond to this issue by committing genocide.) She had similar revisionist takes on issues like the Downfall of Numenor and, of all things, the doom pronounced on Huan, the dog who accompanies Beren and Luthien. The running themes in her revisionist takes were hostility to anything that seemed informed by Tolkien's well-known religious faith, billionaire-simp deference towards the attitudes and motivations of any character who's represented in the text as intellectually dominant over his or her peers (Feanor especially), and, most relevantly to this thread, a very un-Tolkien-like bloomerism about technology and humanity's dominance over the natural world. All of this was fortified and then spread throughout the fandom by a combination of dogged insistence, cultivating the right friendships, and a gazellelike habit of claiming that any pushback she received was personally traumatizing to her. To this day it's almost impossible in the Silmarillion fandom to discuss her pet issues productively because people's positions on them are still informed by their positions on her as a person and on this stage in the fandom's history. (Our own Al, in a PM exchange a while back, observed that it's--paraphrasing him here--"hard to imagine a more severe or more suspect" set of misreadings of Tolkien's tone and themes.)

I qualified "any one individual" because there have been groups or movements within the Tolkien fandom--like his parafascist following in countries like Italy and parts of Eastern Europe--that have done and are continuing to do way worse damage, but the sheer protagonism involved in "Lintamande's" sway over the fandom in her heyday was, appropriately enough given Piper's worldview, genuinely without parallel as far as I can tell.

[Leo]

We don't know if it will or not. It'd definitely going to be bad. I'm not a fan of sugar coating or hiding things.

Kurzgesagt makes this argument by highlighting global progress made in 1) reductions in renewable energy costs and 2) decoupling of economic growth from increased CO2 emissions in the last decade, which have happened in spite of entrenched fossil fuel interests and a general lack of political willpower for meaningful government action. They argue that progress in these fields has averted the worst case warming scenario (RCP 8.5?) by 2100, and has bought humanity more time to transition, prepare, and adapt for the coming ecological S019-storm.

Already been thoroughly debunked.  I'll save people some time and brain cells...

[Absentee Voting Ghost of Ruin]

Climate change might not mean the literally end of human (or Earth-based) life (then again, it's at least possible that it might), but that doesn't mean it won't destroy the world we know now. Weather, animals and plants, farming and ranching, construction, transportation, demographics, lifestyle, nations and cultures are all going to grossly disrupted by the current future pathway of climate change.

The article strikes me as one more example of something I see a lot of these days: people reacting to a problem that ought to send them screaming in sheer terror at the scope and magnitude of the threat (climate change, Republican fascism, crap pandemic response in most nations) and instead they minimize it. They don't utterly dismiss it, but rather than trying to come to grips with it, they treat it as a much smaller problem than it really is.

I get that it's hard to come to terms with existential threats with no good solutions. (A killer asteroid would be simple by comparison.) But by collectively refusing to acknowledge the danger, we're just making it worse for our descendants and future selves.

[Hermit For Peace]

I would just like to interject something here. What if "climate change" was simply Mother Nature's way of balancing herself out? What if there really is nothing to worry about, that it's just a natural cycle doing its thing?

I could tell my kid that with good conscience, and it is more likely than not, true.

It’s like the CRT vs lost cause/replacement theory binary choice. It’s a false one but somethings still to consider.

Are you saying that nature going through cycles and balancing itself out is a false premise?

[ملكة كرينجيتوك]

We don't know if it will or not. It'd definitely going to be bad. I'm not a fan of sugar coating or hiding things.

Kurzgesagt makes this argument by highlighting global progress made in 1) reductions in renewable energy costs and 2) decoupling of economic growth from increased CO2 emissions in the last decade, which have happened in spite of entrenched fossil fuel interests and a general lack of political willpower for meaningful government action. They argue that progress in these fields has averted the worst case warming scenario (RCP 8.5?) by 2100, and has bought humanity more time to transition, prepare, and adapt for the coming ecological S019-storm.

Already been thoroughly debunked.  I'll save people some time and brain cells...

Kurzgesagt isn’t actually saying we can stop catastrophic climate change from occuring. They’re just saying things have happened to make us less f’ed over than we would’ve been in a 2010-ish “business as usual” timeline. Which buys us a little more time to transition towards renewable energy, prepare for climate migrant waves, etc. than we otherwise would’ve had.

Haven’t watched your video yet but I can already see it’s 4 times longer than the Kurzgesagt one

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

We don't know if it will or not. It'd definitely going to be bad. I'm not a fan of sugar coating or hiding things.

We do know in a general sense that literal human extinction is not on the table, although Kelsey Piper's "it's not even going to make our standard of living worse" Enlightenment Now shtick is BS as well and exactly what you'd expect from someone who had the worst influence on the Tolkien fandom of any one individual in history before she even turned twenty.

Never heard of this person until now. Pls elaborate.

So, in the early 2010s, there was a very active Tolkien fandom on Tumblr--centered more on the Silmarillion than on The Lord of the Rings, interestingly enough--in which Piper, at the time an undergraduate at Stanford, participated extensively under a pseudonym. She became very popular and very influential very quickly and very young because she had a more-than-usually-literate-for-early-2010s-Tumblr-fandom writing style and approach to the source material, but what she used this style and approach to argue was uniformly terrible. For example, she held the view, which became dominant in the fandom for several years, that the sons of Feanor are justified in almost everything they do in the storyline of the Silmarillion, because the Silmarils are their property that's being withheld from them. (If you're not familiar with the Silmarillion, the problem with this argument is that the Feanorians tend to respond to this issue by committing genocide.) She had similar revisionist takes on issues like the Downfall of Numenor and, of all things, the doom pronounced on Huan, the dog who accompanies Beren and Luthien. The running themes in her revisionist takes were hostility to anything that seemed informed by Tolkien's well-known religious faith, billionaire-simp deference towards the attitudes and motivations of any character who's represented in the text as intellectually dominant over his or her peers (Feanor especially), and, most relevantly to this thread, a very un-Tolkien-like bloomerism about technology and humanity's dominance over the natural world. All of this was fortified and then spread throughout the fandom by a combination of dogged insistence, cultivating the right friendships, and a gazellelike habit of claiming that any pushback she received was personally traumatizing to her. To this day it's almost impossible in the Silmarillion fandom to discuss her pet issues productively because people's positions on them are still informed by their positions on her as a person and on this stage in the fandom's history. (Our own Al, in a PM exchange a while back, observed that it's--paraphrasing him here--"hard to imagine a more severe or more suspect" set of misreadings of Tolkien's tone and themes.)

I qualified "any one individual" because there have been groups or movements within the Tolkien fandom--like his parafascist following in countries like Italy and parts of Eastern Europe--that have done and are continuing to do way worse damage, but the sheer protagonism involved in "Lintamande's" sway over the fandom in her heyday was, appropriately enough given Piper's worldview, genuinely without parallel as far as I can tell.

lmao, man, the Internet was a mistake.

[Pres Mike]

Destroy the world? No

Change the world as we know it? Yes, very much so.

I live in Tennessee. I’m 23 (born in 1999).

I remember playing outside with my siblings during summer vacation. My mother told us it was too hot to play during the day. When we ignored her, we learned the hard way.

But it was always pleasant after 6pm. We would play in the backyard while my dad, coming home from work, sat on the porch and called his family overseas (he’s a middle eastern immigrant).

That’s not possible anymore. Right now we are in the worst heatwave in a decade. 110 heat index from 6am-10pm every day for the next 15 days.

Even in recent years, the humidity from May to august made me not go outside even at night!


I feel like it’s the end of summer. We will be trapped in our AC cooled houses because outside will be too hot for human use.

Here’s anything thing. As a kid, I remember getting 4 distinct seasons. I remember leaves changing colors. I remember spring.

Last few years, not really. It’s hot or cold. If we’re lucky, we might get a week of nice weather in March and a week of nice weather in October. Yikes

I’m genuinely afraid my future children (and I do plan to have kids) won’t be able to enjoy things like summer vacation or cool autumn weather.

[MiddleRoad]

Destroy the world? No

Change the world as we know it? Yes, very much so.

I live in Tennessee. I’m 23 (born in 1999).

I remember playing outside with my siblings during summer vacation. My mother told us it was too hot to play during the day. When we ignored her, we learned the hard way.

But it was always pleasant after 6pm. We would play in the backyard while my dad, coming home from work, sat on the porch and called his family overseas (he’s a middle eastern immigrant).

That’s not possible anymore. Right now we are in the worst heatwave in a decade. 110 heat index from 6am-10pm every day for the next 15 days.

Even in recent years, the humidity from May to august made me not go outside even at night!


I feel like it’s the end of summer. We will be trapped in our AC cooled houses because outside will be too hot for human use.

Here’s anything thing. As a kid, I remember getting 4 distinct seasons. I remember leaves changing colors. I remember spring.

Last few years, not really. It’s hot or cold. If we’re lucky, we might get a week of nice weather in March and a week of nice weather in October. Yikes

I’m genuinely afraid my future children (and I do plan to have kids) won’t be able to enjoy things like summer vacation or cool autumn weather.

It’s already happened. And it is already too late.

[Absentee Voting Ghost of Ruin]

Destroy the world? No

Change the world as we know it? Yes, very much so.

I live in Tennessee. I’m 23 (born in 1999).

I remember playing outside with my siblings during summer vacation. My mother told us it was too hot to play during the day. When we ignored her, we learned the hard way.

But it was always pleasant after 6pm. We would play in the backyard while my dad, coming home from work, sat on the porch and called his family overseas (he’s a middle eastern immigrant).

That’s not possible anymore. Right now we are in the worst heatwave in a decade. 110 heat index from 6am-10pm every day for the next 15 days.

Even in recent years, the humidity from May to august made me not go outside even at night!


I feel like it’s the end of summer. We will be trapped in our AC cooled houses because outside will be too hot for human use.

Here’s anything thing. As a kid, I remember getting 4 distinct seasons. I remember leaves changing colors. I remember spring.

Last few years, not really. It’s hot or cold. If we’re lucky, we might get a week of nice weather in March and a week of nice weather in October. Yikes

I’m genuinely afraid my future children (and I do plan to have kids) won’t be able to enjoy things like summer vacation or cool autumn weather.

It’s already happened. And it is already too late.

This is just the latest stage of denialism.

    1) It's not happening!
    2) It's not caused by humans!
    3) It's not dangerous!
    4) It's not important!
    5) It's beneficial!
    6) It's too late!

[soundchaser]

most relevantly to this thread, a very un-Tolkien-like bloomerism about technology and humanity's dominance over the natural world.

I generally find Tolkien an overrated writer and the LOtR fandom pretty obnoxious, but even I know he absolutely loathed what industrialization was doing to the world. How bad a reader do you have to be to insist on exactly the opposite?

[Shaula🏳️‍⚧️]

Teachers make basically every lesson about climate change and stuff during school. Honestly it's boring by now, who cares.

[Ferguson97]

Teachers make basically every lesson about climate change and stuff during school. Honestly it's boring by now, who cares.

You should care, because you are just 17-years-old and will live to see the effects of climate change within your lifetime.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I think the biggest issue with this sort of teaching is the "cry wolf" effect. It's why it's important to not overstate things even when they're bad.

For example take drug education. In the 80s and 90s it was pure fear mongering about how any drugs including marijuana would absolutely ruin you. Then kids saw that actually no, marijuana wasn't really that big of a deal and they just rejected all drug education outright. This meant that kids exposed to DARE programs were more likely to use drugs than kids who weren't. Is using drugs a bad thing? Obviously. Is using even marijuana something that can have notable negative effects on a teenager? Of course. But that doesn't mean that the dishonest overblown scare campaign worked.

You can see similar effects with abstinence-only sex education, especially the ones pushed by conservative groups that were dishonest about the failure rate of condoms or overstated risks in general, or for a recent example the sort of Eric Feigl-Ding types who claimed lifting mask mandates or any type of reopening even with vaccine mandates would result in hospitals overflowing and people dying in the streets. That's probably part of what led to nonchalance about COVID in general and why even voluntary mask wearing plummeted. Climate change is very serious and it's important to communicate that, but it also should be communicated honestly.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

The World is gonna end anyways sooner or later that's we must develop Time travel and a flying saucer not a rocket to go to other planet everyone knows that we can be destroyed tomorrow by a meteorite, a Blk hole thousand yrs from from now or climate change and they said another Ice Age is on the way all contribute to Greenhouse effect and global warming we may not be here but this World will come to an end anyways


Climate change destroyed the Dinosaur, it is true that Climate change can destroy the world it may not happen immediately but eventually, a meteorite may hit us at anytime it hasn't happened yet but eventually.

They say when we run out of burial for desceased we can just burn them or send them to the sun your body will turn to ash anyways

Why do we have climate change FRACKING AND OIL DRILLING MELTS THE ICEBERGS

[certified hummus supporter 🇵🇸🤝🇺🇸🤝🇺🇦]

Teachers make basically every lesson about climate change and stuff during school. Honestly it's boring by now, who cares.

"Oh no! My lesson happens to be a bit boring! Therefore climate change doesn't somehow matter now because... reasons!..." - you RN

[Devout Centrist]

Teachers make basically every lesson about climate change and stuff during school. Honestly it's boring by now, who cares.

You should care quite a bit. You are an Australian.

[Vosem]

We don't know if it will or not. It'd definitely going to be bad. I'm not a fan of sugar coating or hiding things.

We do know in a general sense that literal human extinction is not on the table, although Kelsey Piper's "it's not even going to make our standard of living worse" Enlightenment Now shtick is BS as well and exactly what you'd expect from someone who had the worst influence on the Tolkien fandom of any one individual in history before she even turned twenty.

Never heard of this person until now. Pls elaborate.

So, in the early 2010s, there was a very active Tolkien fandom on Tumblr--centered more on the Silmarillion than on The Lord of the Rings, interestingly enough--in which Piper, at the time an undergraduate at Stanford, participated extensively under a pseudonym. She became very popular and very influential very quickly and very young because she had a more-than-usually-literate-for-early-2010s-Tumblr-fandom writing style and approach to the source material, but what she used this style and approach to argue was uniformly terrible. For example, she held the view, which became dominant in the fandom for several years, that the sons of Feanor are justified in almost everything they do in the storyline of the Silmarillion, because the Silmarils are their property that's being withheld from them. (If you're not familiar with the Silmarillion, the problem with this argument is that the Feanorians tend to respond to this issue by committing genocide.) She had similar revisionist takes on issues like the Downfall of Numenor and, of all things, the doom pronounced on Huan, the dog who accompanies Beren and Luthien. The running themes in her revisionist takes were hostility to anything that seemed informed by Tolkien's well-known religious faith, billionaire-simp deference towards the attitudes and motivations of any character who's represented in the text as intellectually dominant over his or her peers (Feanor especially), and, most relevantly to this thread, a very un-Tolkien-like bloomerism about technology and humanity's dominance over the natural world. All of this was fortified and then spread throughout the fandom by a combination of dogged insistence, cultivating the right friendships, and a gazellelike habit of claiming that any pushback she received was personally traumatizing to her. To this day it's almost impossible in the Silmarillion fandom to discuss her pet issues productively because people's positions on them are still informed by their positions on her as a person and on this stage in the fandom's history. (Our own Al, in a PM exchange a while back, observed that it's--paraphrasing him here--"hard to imagine a more severe or more suspect" set of misreadings of Tolkien's tone and themes.)

I qualified "any one individual" because there have been groups or movements within the Tolkien fandom--like his parafascist following in countries like Italy and parts of Eastern Europe--that have done and are continuing to do way worse damage, but the sheer protagonism involved in "Lintamande's" sway over the fandom in her heyday was, appropriately enough given Piper's worldview, genuinely without parallel as far as I can tell.

I want to note as a follow-up to this that I've always found the voice of the person blogging at theunitofcaring.tumblr.com to be probably the most soothing I have ever encountered on the Internet, and probably -- though I'd have to think about this -- the most soothing I've ever encountered outside material aimed at children.

(My observation about Kelsey Piper from following her on Twitter is that she is in the odd position of clearly believing that she is a woke leftist while actually being a fairly ordinary LessWrongian. Of course I find the latter very sympathetic and the former not so, but your mileage may vary. I did not know about her influence on the world of Tolkien fandom, but it sounds like it came from a place of assuming that LessWrong-ism is basically normative, which checks with Piper's personality generally.)

[Hermit For Peace]

Teachers make basically every lesson about climate change and stuff during school. Honestly it's boring by now, who cares.

See, this is what I'm saying though nobody wants to listen to me. Your teachers should be teaching about Mother Nature's cycles. Delve into deep history, as deep as you can go to get a larger view of the cooling and heating trends nature goes through. She knows how to balance herself out, without any help from us.

This does not mean however, that we humans are living good lives. We need to learn to live in harmony with nature and with our planet. We don't have to dig the hell out of it, suck out all the oil or pollute the air we breathe. We must be mindful of what we are doing and always strive to do better.

I would tell a kid this rather than trying to scare it half to death with tales of gloom and doom. That's no way to treat our impressionable little kiddies. Show them how to work for a better future for themselves.

[GoTfan]

But honestly this pales in comparison to the greatest self-own in the history of self-owns, the Green New Deal.  I don't think Republicans could have wished for a better gift if they'd tried.  Here you've got a ditzy, clueless backbencher who constantly says stupid things and seems primarily focused on destroying her own party.  And she writes a bill that does everything Republicans always promised Democrats wanted to do -- pass a whole bunch of transformative social legislation under the thinnest possible guise of being tangentially related to climate policy, and spend tens of trillions of dollars to do it, all while arguing that "money isn't real."  And she's all over TV telling people that "climate policy is socialism" and "yes my bill is socialism and all the Democrats support it."  And she's slapping her Green New Deal label on literally every climate policy anyone else proposes and being so loud about it that she drowns out all the conversation.  I mean this is a Republican dream come true.  They've completely won the political battle here because they can just keep saying "Green New Deal Green New Deal Green New Deal" every time Democrats want to talk about climate change.  Everyone hates the Green New Deal and AOC, but now she's the face of the climate change movement, and her stupid bill is the only climate change proposal anyone knows about.  Great going guys.  That's us completely f---ed for the next decade.

Okay, now tell us how you REALLY feel about Ocasio-Cortez.

It's pretty clear he hates her more than Donald Trump, given how rarely he actually attacks Trump.

[Mr. Smith]

We can stand to be more honest.

Other things like The Pacific Gyre and Amazon Deforestation are far more immediate causes for concern.

[Badger]

We don't know if it will or not. It'd definitely going to be bad. I'm not a fan of sugar coating or hiding things.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I want to note as a follow-up to this that I've always found the voice of the person blogging at theunitofcaring.tumblr.com to be probably the most soothing I have ever encountered on the Internet, and probably -- though I'd have to think about this -- the most soothing I've ever encountered outside material aimed at children.

(My observation about Kelsey Piper from following her on Twitter is that she is in the odd position of clearly believing that she is a woke leftist while actually being a fairly ordinary LessWrongian. Of course I find the latter very sympathetic and the former not so, but your mileage may vary. I did not know about her influence on the world of Tolkien fandom, but it sounds like it came from a place of assuming that LessWrong-ism is basically normative, which checks with Piper's personality generally.)

I think this is a fair framing, especially since the relevance of this little digression into fandom history was less that stage of Piper's life itself and more what it says in general about her tendency towards (what I'd consider; I know you'd interpret it more charitably) gee-whiz technocratic blueskying about major social problems even when the situation is practically screaming for a different approach. The tendency to resolve issues to a choice between, so to speak, technoutopianism and technodystopianism is one of the most distinctive aspects of the LessWrong/Slate Star Codex worldview in general (and I say this as someone a lot more willing to engage those currents of thought than most people of my own political and religious bent, although I disagree with them on almost everything I consider to be of substance).

[Skill and Chance]

I do think this is a problem.  Between this and COVID (after the first 3 months or so when the age distribution of risks was well established), we have been teaching American kids to live with a level of fear that would be more appropriate if they lived in Ukraine.  This can't be healthy.

[DrScholl]

At some point people will be demanding that anything bad is covered up completely. Serial killer roaming the streets? Don't tell people, you'll only scare them! Another serious pandemic? Don't tell anyone, you'll just cause a panic! A hurricane? Don't dare say anything, people would worry too much!

[Absentee Voting Ghost of Ruin]

Teachers make basically every lesson about climate change and stuff during school. Honestly it's boring by now, who cares.

See, this is what I'm saying though nobody wants to listen to me. Your teachers should be teaching about Mother Nature's cycles. Delve into deep history, as deep as you can go to get a larger view of the cooling and heating trends nature goes through. She knows how to balance herself out, without any help from us.

This does not mean however, that we humans are living good lives. We need to learn to live in harmony with nature and with our planet. We don't have to dig the hell out of it, suck out all the oil or pollute the air we breathe. We must be mindful of what we are doing and always strive to do better.

I would tell a kid this rather than trying to scare it half to death with tales of gloom and doom. That's no way to treat our impressionable little kiddies. Show them how to work for a better future for themselves.

We're doing in a century (or less) what would naturally happen over millions of years.


Talking about natural cycles in the context of climate change is like comparing an apple falling from a tree to an orange being fired from an artillery piece.