Chris Gloninger wove the reality of global heating into his forecasts in the conservative heartland of Iowa. Not everyone was receptive.

  • DecentM@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    The fact that whoever sent the death threats only got a small fine is 100% insane

  • SeaJ@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    How pathetic do you have to be up make death threats against a fucking weather man?

  • Trollmittens@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    As a non American it is always wild to hear such strangely internatilised concepts of how people see the world. This guy received emails saying it was a “liberal conspiracy theory on the weather”, calling climate change a “Biden hoax”. Does someone like that have no concept that this is an issue for the rest of us outside the USA? (Aka the majority of the world). And that it existed for prior administrations too!

    • Nobody@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Republicans have been actively attacking and undermining American schools for decades. These depleted schools have produced legions of people who can’t discern truth from falsity and have absolutely no curiosity about the rest of the world. Facebook and the television tell them liberals are bad and the cause of all their problems. They don’t question it.

    • zeppo@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      People like this have basically no concept of the rest of the world at all. I have talked to many people who don’t understand there is a difference between China and Japan, and think Africa is a country. And they don’t care.

      Most likely this person also never thinks about states in the US more than one state away from theirs. When I moved to New England as a kid I had teachers think I was from a foreign country because I moved from New Mexico… I’d have to explain “it’s the state between Arizona and Texas”, and then people would just look confused.

      So, no news from the rest of the world filters into their brain at all.

    • CmdrShepard@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      These are the same people who called COVID a hoax perpetrated by Democrats even though it started in China and ravaged the entire planet. They’re insane and deluded from consuming too much propaganda.

    • tallwookie@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      for many Americans, there’s America and not-America, and that’s basically it. many of us are very insular - they may be aware of China, Russia, etc but don’t really think about them on a daily basis. much is the same for climate science, etc

  • rusticus1773@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Imagine having a belief that is 100% the opposite of science, a belief which is ONLY beneficial to mega corporations, and threatening someone’s life based upon that belief. Sounds like a cult.

  • morgan423@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    We’ll say it again, for the people in the back: it doesn’t matter whether you believe in potentially lethal threats or not.

    They’ll still kill you. And if you ignore them and pretend they don’t exist, they’ll usually kill you much, much faster than if you were actively trying to mitigate them.

  • wathek@discuss.online
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    1 year ago

    How long do you figure until smalltalk about the weather is an attack on someone’s political beliefsystem?

  • Saneless@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Can someone explain to me why the average republican/right wing/religious nut are all against climate shit? Aside from being the dumbest people on the planet I’m lost finding another reason

    • TheDubz87@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      They’re brainwashed zealots and Republicans in office are preaching that it doesn’t exist because they’re paid by corporations that would be hurt by green energy.

    • zeppo@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      True religious nuts (in other words, 10-15% of the population) believe that nothing at all matters because Special Jesus is coming back any day now. So, the more fucked up things get, not only does it not matter since it’s “THE END TIMES!!”, but also things being worse just proves Jesus is coming back soon.

      Your average angry conservative is pissed off about it for a couple reasons. One, “think tanks”, Fox, Limbaugh and other propaganda organizations have been paid by the fossil fuel industry to spread disinformation about it and explicitly tell them it’s a “hoax” for decades. Then, being “conservative” literally means resisting change, so replacing a gas-guzzling truck that smells like complete shit and emits tons of pollution is upsetting to them just because it’s different. Also, many conservatives are super sensitive and get very upset if someone says they should do something different because they feel like they’re being chastised or “someone thinks they’re better than me”. Same reason they hate stuff like being vegan or eating gluten free.

    • MelonTheMan@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Not to get overly philosophical or anything, but who you are as a person and what your ideas are come down to your experiences. For me, I spend time fixing/causing programming problems at work, talking with people, doomscrolling lemmy/mastodon, playing video games and watching shows.

      For a portion of the population, they are sitting and watching fox news for hours upon hours a day. Even if you are resistant to a view point, your brain is not capable of 100% rejecting a message that is being sledgehammered in to you over and over again. If Fox news or other shit media is your experience, it would be hard to think of the world in a way that doesn’t conform to what they tell you. It will be incremental at first, you’ll reject 95% of a message that doesn’t conform to your previous ideas, but maybe concerned face newscaster has a point about the border. “We can’t let everyone in” you might reason. All to make your more malleable to the next crock of shit they serve up.

      The more I think about it the grosser it is. Just a mass of blond ladies telling you minorities and people who care about the environment are out to change your way of life. You way of life - which is sitting on a couch watching blond ladies spouting lies to you. I’m sure there’s some sick mental illness issues floating around here.

      I used to work at a bank that had fox news on all day and it was horrible, but I’m positive some of my viewpoints from then were shaped by that experience, despite me knowing it was a shit entertainment channel.

    • S_Roman@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The oil lobby has paid copious amounts of money to propagandize the population, and to bribe republican politicians to continue their policy of laissez-faire.

    • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’d guess that leaded gas played a role.

      Also, the truth has progressed much further than what many are willing to swallow at once. Not only is our way of life currently potentially leading to an extinction level destabilization of the climate and life cycles that we depend on (which also implies we’re not as important as some religions would lead us to believe), but the Euro-American way of life has been fucking things up for centuries or even millennia in the past. The only way to avoid accepting that our past is full of normalized evil is to bury your head in the sand and say everything is fine.

      And add in some racism where they want to blame entire groups for actions of individuals and that line of reasoning says that you must also be to blame for the actions of your ancestors.

      And then there’s the human tendency to double down when challenged, which makes it even harder to later change your position, because that doubling down can involve saying or doing things that does directly implicate you in some of that evilness. Or making ridiculous claims to “express certainty” like “if x is true, I’ll do y” where y is something no one would want to do or would even expect someone to do as part of a debate. When you behave like an idiot, changing your mind requires you to accept how much of an idiot you behaved like.

      And there’s also group momentum. When the group sees dissenters as deserving hate and violence, it makes it harder to change the group’s direction. Especially if there’s members that don’t really care about the philosophy but are just looking for a “good excuse” to be violent or hateful. It’s not rare to see people treat former allies even worse when they turn compared to those who were never on their side. “Traitor” is one of those labels that can entice a negative reaction like “murderer” or “rapist”, even though it boils down to “person who changed their mind about something they once supported with others”.

      So we might, collectively, have too much baggage to stop this train headed for the cliff before we can tell if the track curves to follow the cliff or just goes straight off. And if we do go off that cliff, don’t doubt that, on the way down, those fucking idiots will be loudly complaining that there was no way they could have known and that we should have told them.

    • solarzones@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Republicans in the same way they do for everyone else. They live in a bubble where they are right and everyone else is wrong. No exceptions.

      You could say the same for many Americans, not just republicans in my experience. Its like a stew of immaturity and ignorance.

        • grue@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          The false equivalence is so tiring.

          …which is exactly why they do it, of course. People arguing on the side of science have to make sound arguments in order to persuade, but all the reactionaries have to do is to frustrate their opponent into giving up on the discussion and they win by default. It’s fundamentally dishonest and toxic.

        • TheDubz87@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Yes, one side is pretty much full evil, but how many politicians in congress on both sides come to a halt on progress when their pocket liners are threatened. This is a game to all of them. Corporations run this country using every politician in our 2 party system as their puppets. How much insider trading goes on, who’s being paid by who? Our entire system needs to be burnt down and rebuilt for anything to function as it should.

          • wathek@discuss.online
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            1 year ago

            That’s not gonna end well without a viable and executable alternative. Usually you’ll end up with a lot of chaos, some party promising to ease it, followed by that party turning out to be a dictatorship.
            Frankly, it’s amazing we have something close to a democracy at all.

      • reversebananimals@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Except climate change IS real, and if you say its fake, you are wrong. Lol. Its not an opinion. What you’re positing here has nothing to do with the reality.

        • wathek@discuss.online
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          1 year ago

          And a right wing person can take that sentence and turn it around. They have a whole lore to back up the claim too.
          When you dig deep enough into the claims, it becomes clear which is fact. Most people don’t have the time to do that so they stick to what’s in their beliefsystem or fits within it.
          They think people who believe in climate change are brainwashed zombies, in an ironic backward twist. This also seems to be the case with many things and it’s probably intentionally done by the propagandists.

      • TheDubz87@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        The whole country seems to be polarized left/right, red/blue. Their side is right about everything and the other side is wrong about everything. That’s where American politics has led us. Culture war to keep us from starting a class war.

        • reversebananimals@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Climate change is real. Doesn’t matter how political or non political you are. If one side is using politics to try and say its not real, that’s not a “both sides” issue. That’s an issue with the side that’s denying reality.

  • TIEPilot@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    We’ve had an ice age.

    What doesn’t say the orbit of the planet or its angle to the Sun can’t make the pendulum swing the other way?

    I fine w/ going green, I wish we had more light rail in the US. It was nice when I worked in DC and got to read a book on the way into work. I was a hell of a lot more physically active.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The orbit of the planet or the angle of the sun have nothing to do with it. The billions of tons of carbon dioxide and methane we pump into the atmosphere does.

      Or do you think that has no effect? If so, I’d love you to explain to me about the chemical neutrality of CO2 and methane.

      • TIEPilot@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        But we came out of an ice age w/o as you say “billions of tons of carbon dioxide and methane we pump into the atmosphere does.”

        Something changed.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Temperature was going up gradually until the industrial revolution. Now it’s going up drastically. What changed is the amount of CO2 and methane we’re putting into the atmosphere.

          Again, if you don’t agree, please explain how they are chemically neutral.

          • TIEPilot@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            So you admit that there outside factors that determine the temperature of the planet. Ok we are getting somewhere, and again I will reiterate I would like us to knock off pollution if we can do it sanely.

            But what if the changes (outside man made) are exponential? As the the orbit changes or the tilt changes it goes up in orders of magnitude. Is this not possible? I work w/ spacecraft and orbits aren’t a constant. All matter/mass/celestial bodies in the solar system have gravitational influence and changes orbits.

            • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              I’m waiting for you to explain how CO2 and methane are chemically neutral. Please do so. Otherwise they have an effect on the atmosphere.

              • TIEPilot@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                Methane and CO2 are naturally formed compounds and like any compound in the atmosphere they have an effect. I was talking out other outside forces that could be accelerating these changes.

                • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  If they have an effect and we’re pumping tons of it into the atmosphere in a NOT natural way, then it sounds like that effect would be magnified greatly.

                  What effect do you think CO2 and methane have on our atmosphere?

    • tallwookie@lemmy.world
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      technically, we’ve been in an ice age for the last 2.5 million years or so. it just gets slightly warmer or colder every few 10000 years

  • theyresocool@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It’s crazy to talk to folks with only a couple of grams of brain matter. They say that the weather is changing, but they think magic sky man do it.

    Magic sky man scary me no like. Bad man make planet hot because we be naughty.

    I used to listen and try to understand when I lived in rural counties in the US. Now all I hear is…

    Durrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

    • tikitaki@kbin.social
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      I used to listen and try to understand when I lived in rural counties in the US. Now all I hear is…

      Durrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

      This patronizing attitude is part of the reason politicians like Trump has become popular. He talks to these people who the “civilized” part of the country is totally ignoring. You care about climate change, and so do I. But what if you live near a coal mine that has slowly been phased out? You see your town which your grandfather lived in slowly rots away. You see America as a failing country - you see stores closing. You see people moving away. People dying from opiate overdose. Unemployment and depression

      These people have real and legitimate grievances. Their government has failed them - which is why anti-establishment figures like Trump is such a lightning rod for their energy. Then we go and tell them that we need to make sacrifices for the climate. What are they supposed to think? What more do they have to give?

      Ignoring these people and pretending like they don’t matter or are totally irrational is going to help lead to fascism in this country. Any real revolutionary movement will have to incorporate the whole of America. We need these people on our side.