Despair — Blog — Jamie Aroosi

The Psychology and Rhetoric of Climate Change

It strikes me that there's something self-defeating about the way that some climate change experts have started talking about emissions goals. For a while, 1.5C was seen as a critical benchmark that would serve to minimize some of the most devastating effects of climate change, even though many catastrophic effects would still have been "baked in" to our future. But over the past little while, I've noticed that the discourse seems to have changed; rather than talking about the importance of hitting the hard benchmark of 1.5C, scientists have softened the narrative, arguing that the closer to 1.5C the better. For instance, I just listened to a radio interview in which a scientist reaffirmed the importance of 1.5C, but then spoke of how even if we don't hit 1.5C, 1.6C is better than 1.7C, and so on. So, from the "hard" benchmark of 1.5C, we are starting to "soften" our goals into more of a gradation.

This change in narrative will no doubt serve to embolden climate change denialists.

Jamie AroosiNovember 15, 2021Climate Change, Climate Change Denial, COP26, Hope, DespairComment

Hope in the time of COVID-19

There is a meme circulating on the interweb within boomer and conservative circles that claims that the "survival rate" of the coronavirus is 98.2% but that you don't see this "good news" anywhere in the mainstream media. In fact, in a New York magazine article with a Waffle House employee who had survived an extreme case of coronavirus that had required hospitalization, he mentioned these same figures as part of his argument that the lock down might be worse than the disease. And this from someone who almost died from coronavirus, but who now just wants to go out to grab a beer.

In the case of the person who shared this meme on my Facebook page, I pointed out that simple math indicates that this death rate translates into 6 million American deaths. (As a comparison, this dwarfs the number of American deaths from all American military conflicts combined, beginning with the Revolutionary War and including all present conflicts).

Jamie AroosiMarch 26, 2020COVID-19, coronavirus, Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto, Hope, Despair, CapitalismComment