Slap them in the face. If they complain, tell them the pain is real but human activity didn’t contribute to it.
I came to post pretty much the exact same thing 🤣
Just show them that one xkcd about how abrupt the current warming is and how nicely it lines up with industrialization. The comparison between the natural slow shifts in global climate vs. what’s been happening the last century or so is the clearest counter to “but the climate has always been changing”.
The other times that things have changed in comparable timescales, it’s been caused by supervolcanoes or other such calamities.
Edit: Oh yeah one caveat: The xkcd is ten years old and we’re now actually already around +1.5°C.
I was about to find that same xkcd. 😅
It really is a good way to portray that.It also shows quite well that shit is hitting the fan, almost horizontally, in a time period where we have proper temperature measurements from all around the world. Even if humans were not at fault, we need to do something about it.
Yeah, as if “Mass extinctions are a natural occurence!” were an excuse to carry on business as usual :D
You’re not going to convince anyone with a shitty drawing of the “Earth Temperature Timeline” and then start at 20000BC.
You’re a jerk
🤣
Nothing. You can’t logic someone out of a position they didn’t use logic to get to in the first place. There’s way more unmotivated and un-mobilized people out there that believe in human caused climate change that are more worth your time and energy.
If your house is too warm and you’re running 20 electric heaters but for some reason think it’s something else causing the heat, it’d still pay to turn off some of those heaters to compensate for the external cause since you actually have control over the heaters.
If you really think that anything you say will have any impact on them then maybe it doesn’t matter what the cause is as long as you can get them onboard with the solution. The two are inextricably linked so if they’re really adamant about this you’ll probably not be successful in this endeavour but it’s worth a try if you have some faith in them. If they think it’s all long term cyclical solar patterns or some other non anthropogenic cause it might be worth pointing out that it’s still happening and causing consequences. The trouble will be not implying too heavily as I have in my heaters example, that the solution is obviously linked to the cause, even if it is. Otherwise they will not believe you have common ground.
This seems to have worked with my boomer mom: “be that as it may, wouldn’t we all be better off by reducing pollution?”
Maybe show them this:
I told my dad that even if climate change isn’t real, or if it is humans don’t contribute… what’s the harm in doing something about it? What’s the harm in doing something to help your grandkids have a world to grow up in and enjoy?
He installed solar panels a few years ago and now likes to talk about how he heats and cools his home without paying ConEd
So… where’s the extra heat coming from? If you acknowledge it exists where’s it from?
Is it a problem? If it is shouldn’t we prevent or prepare for it?
We have people like this running Egypt. They’re constantly cutting down trees!
Save your breath. It’s honestly not worth it.
Don’t. Nothing you could say is going to change their mind. They’d need to hear it from new sources they trust and their peers and then it still wouldn’t be guaranteed they’d reconsider their position. Confirmation bias and a whole host of other brain stuff makes changing someone’s mind incredibly difficult. Save your breath.
Tell them you’re proud of them, they seem to be a high functioning mentally disabled person and are doing great in life.
Just be like, “Okay, what about the pacific garbage patch? Did human activity cause that? Should we be trying to fix it?” It’s pretty hard to argue that the fish made all the used water bottles themselves.
Do research. Give them that. Walk away and never think or talk about it with them again.
You can’t fix stupid.
Ideally? As little as possible.
