He should get outside right now and ask a few people about the topic. People ignore the truth, don't care or are actively working against it because it is a Chinese hoax.
Maybe deep in their hearts somewhere they don't believe it, but it's so deep that it's impossible to locate.
Some of my family are conspiratorial thinkers, trumpy types. They’re in Texas, where the power grid is continuing to slowly buckle, and they will happily agree it’s hotter than it used to be, even getting too hot. They also agree that pollution is bad.
But they simply don’t connect the two. They don’t think we can possibly be the sole reason for climate change, but why they think that is fluid — it’s gods creation and we can’t mess with that. Or if we can it doesn’t matter because we’re destined for a heavenly kingdom and this planet will pass away. Or they say more “grounded” things like we’re getting closer to the sun or the sun itself is hotter. Or they buy into the idea for a while that it’s just a natural oscillation. We’re actually headed towards an ice age!
My theory is they’re inconsistent because they do accept it, but accepting it means they have to understand consciously that shit is bleak and it makes all the work they’ve done in their lives potentially meaningless. They don’t want to face the reckoning of disillusionment so they close their eyes to it.
Or maybe they just don’t believe it. I don’t know, I’m not in their brains.
"It's a hoax" is a lot more palatable than "It's a serious problem that requires major action to be taken." Denying the problem is much easier and they'll do some substantial mental gymnastics to avoid having to take the hard path.
11% of people believe the US federal government should literally not be doing anything about climate change.
The article I'm getting these numbers from literally uses the word "hoax" several times: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2023/08/09/why-some-amer...
It's far easier to convince people that it's a hoax when the scientists say things that aren't strictly true -- because they they get to debunk your minor exaggeration, which discredits you, and makes people more willing to believe the people who claim you're full of crap about everything.
When you see dishonest people succeeding, the conclusion to draw is that we need to redouble our efforts to fight dishonesty, not that dishonesty is an effective strategy that everyone should adopt.
The latter destroys anyone's ability to even know who is right, and who does that benefit?
Otherwise the reporters who agree with you discredit themselves so no one believes them anymore and the adversarial reporters continue to be adversarial.
How hard is it to give the scientist a draft of the story and have them confirm that you're not making an egregious error before publishing it?
The truth is readily available on demand and large numbers of people still behave like children.
Abstract: There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age. Indeed, the possibility of anthropogenic warming dominated the peer-reviewed literature even then.
Source: https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/11584/1/2008bams2370%252E1...
older people by and large make up the largest proportion of victims to online scams.