I spent years doubting the science of climate change and spending time with people who didn’t believe in the science either.
When I realised I was wrong, I felt really embarrassed.
To move away from those people meant leaving behind an entire community at a time when I didn’t have many friends.
I went through a really difficult time. But the truth matters.
I’m the granddaughter of coal miners in Pennsylvania and my family moved to Florida when I was young.
We have a Polish Catholic background and we attended church regularly, but at the same time we were very connected to science because my mum was a nurse and my dad sold microscopes and other scientific equipment.
While it’s wonderful she finally started questioning things, she deserves to feel way more than embarrassed for all the time she wasted and all the lies she repeated while believing it was a hoax.
Especially considering she was a science teacher before she finally changed her mind. Think of how many years she spent teaching misinformation. Is an “I’m sorry” and being embarrassed enough to make up for that, really?
It took her until well after “Climategate” to begin questioning it, and it seems like she listened to Rush Limbaugh religiously.
I’m glad she changed her mind, but this story is not inspiring to me. It’s anger-inducing that we have to fucking free these people from the mental fucking cages they built for themselves. Her being an absolute fucking disgrace to science education who woke up and was like “Oh shit, I don’t want to be an absolute fucking disgrace anymore” isn’t fucking newsworthy or inspiring. It’s bare minimum expectations of a decent fucking human being.
No amount of apologies will be enough from people who spread this religiously-backed bullshit misinformation. It has held back human society for fucking hundreds of years now.
People should have woken the fuck up when Galileo was punished by the church for promoting Heliocentrism. The Inquisition basically threatened him with death for telling the truth. Why the fuck people still follow this religious horseshit is a mystery to me other than people like this chucklefuck parrot it half her life.
granddaughter of coal miners
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
–Upton Sinclair
When someone is indoctrinated for generations it’s hard to pull away. Hopefully she makes up for it but at least she now realizes that she was wrong.
From that point, it’s like I’ve started a new life. I learned about a non-partisan group called Citizens’ Climate Lobby, which advocates for climate solutions. I led their North Georgia chapter for a while, and I still volunteer and lobby with them.
I’m also part of the National Center for Science Education, using physical science concepts to teach climate change to my teenage students.
Always worth reading the article before writing a comment.
To move away from those people meant leaving behind an entire community at a time when I didn’t have many friends.
I agree we should just be mean to these people. They clearly are using logic to reach their conclusions and not just going with it because they feel the need to belong in a community . And knowing that they will 100% be mocked for life for changing definitely doesn’t make leaving harder.
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Well said.
For as much as some of us want to emphasize the logic and practicality of their position on the issue, it sure is strange when they want more people to see things their way, yet also want to reject them when they do.
On one hand I agree but on the other if we’re jerks about people coming to our side it will make those considering it hesitant. Still not an excuse, but it will keep some on the wrong side longer
I agree, but I don’t think we have to be jerks to them to make them understand that saying sorry and trying to change isn’t enough to counteract what they’ve already done, and they owe society a lot more than that. That’s not being jerks, that’s being real.
If they can’t handle that measured critique, it’s because they refuse to take any kind of self-responsibility, which speaks to them still being on the wrong side of history.
but I don’t think we have to be jerks to them to make them understand that saying sorry and trying to change isn’t enough to counteract what they’ve already done
Who gets to decide what’s enough? You? Me? Never mind the fact that the article says what she’s done.
How about we let those people who turn their beliefs around decide what’s enough instead.
The important thing has to be the fact that they’ve realised their mistake. The rest of it is just fluff.
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Yes. There is no excuse for someone with the science training to believe these things. She was either a very weak person or the program she studied in wasn’t very strong. Either way, although it’s good to model perspective change, this isn’t the example we need.
TBF there are a lot of unintuitive things going on with the science of climate change, such as the precise role of greenhouse gas absorption/emission spectra in trapping heat, that even with a strong general science background it’s not immediately obvious what the driving factors are.
Add to that the (deliberate) but plausible sounding misinformation and you have a deadly cocktail of not quite correct pseudoscience to drown in.
I understand being a climate skeptic, up until a certain point in time. There were still a lot of things that were unclear and the reporting was muddled and there was lots of conflicting information floating and even in supposedly well informed publications. But there really is no excuse after 2004 or so.
There really isn’t to disbelieve even as far back as the 70s. The models weren’t as good back then but the conclusions remain essentially unchanged.
Also, we are talking about brainwashing. Aum Shinrikyo successfully turned medical doctors from the best university in Japan into cult religion leaders to join the leadership that killed, injured and disabled subway passengers with sarin, among others murdered in different ways.
there are a lot of unintuitive things going on with the science of climate change
But science isn’t intuition-based. It often comes to conclusions that are far from intuitive.
Fairly written.
It’s so hard to celebrate this, and yet we really should .
There are so many people in these comments calling her stupid for believing in the ideas in the first place. You have to keep in mind that these ideas are what she would have grown up around all her life and would have been told to her by those around her. You should be happy for people who escape these ideals, not critical that they held them in the first place. It does no one any good
Exactly. She should be praised for taking the scientific approach and reconsidering her views based on evidence instead of blindly accepting what was being said
“I’ve been rowing the opposite way for years, now I finally stopped.” Cool, here’s a cookie, Sharon. Also we’re all gonna die. Thx.
To move away from those people meant leaving behind an entire community at a time when I didn’t have many friends.
maybe you didn’t have many friends because of the way you acted?
My husband didn’t get home from work until late, so I would have four or five hours at home by myself every day, always with the kitchen radio on, tuned to conservative stations.
We listened to Rush Limbaugh, a radio host known for his controversial opinions on topics such as race, LGBT rights and women, and I would hear him every day for two hours.
He would talk about how climate change was just a hoax.
Up to that point, I had been exposed to a lot of misinformation about evolution in my church groups, but I had studied the theory of evolution at university, so I was equipped to spot it.
But I didn’t have that same skill set for climate change.
My conviction that climate change was a hoax solidified when I heard Limbaugh talk about Climategate. It was a controversy involving research from the University of East Anglia. Only much later did I learn that the material was twisted and taken out of context.
…
I craved intellectual stimulation, so I kept the radio on while I was cooking dinner or while driving in my car. But there were only a few hours of Rush Limbaugh each day.
That’s when the big turning point came.
I tuned into NPR, a US non-profit broadcaster. I don’t remember which show it was, or the specific news story, but I remember how they described the issue in a completely different way from what I had heard on my usual stations. And it sounded so reasonable.
I realised how much my social network had changed since I had stopped teaching. At school, I was around people from all over the world, gay or straight, conservative and liberals.
Without that school environment, all I had in my social circle was my church group.
“Intellectual stimulation” being “Rush Limbaugh” says everything, doesn’t it.
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So this boils down to, “I stopped listening to opinion and started listening to news.” What a revelation.
I’m glad she broke free, but man, it’s hard to be sympathetic to someone who willingly poisoned her mind.
I was doubtful it was mostly man made, but listened to the experts when they told us what was what. Regardless, WTF wouldn’t we support conservation and not polluting regardless? We have reversed rivers literally being on fire with all the oil in them. Without enforced regulation, we get where we are now.
