🎓 Doc Freemo 🇳🇱 @freemo@qoto.org

@FreePietje

Basically was going on during the siberian fires last year. So everyone demanded forest fire coverage in outrage. This year they got it.

@stevenroose

@FreePietje

Thats really surpising it was a huge trend on facebook for months, flooded my whole stream before the amazon fires. Attached are some examples.

@stevenroose

@FreePietje

Yea he did. But thats not money's problem. Only reason money works to convince people of climate change denial is because people arent educated enough to do the research themselves so they rely on media to convince them what to think int he first place.

In a well educated society Koch's money would be a vain attempt lost into the ether and the only result would be him having less money with no effect on climate activism.

So while koch was an asshole I wouldnt say he is the root of the problem, only the symptom.

@stevenroose

@FreePietje

I will check this out. But please be aware I am not and have never been a koch fan. So any article about ock to discredit him will mostly be lost on me since i largely just dont care about kock or his opinions much.

@stevenroose

@FreePietje

I see a very different sequence of things that mde it a big deal. #1 happens every year, last year canada was covered in smoke fromt he siberian fires as well. Even philly smelled the smoke.

#2 is closer to true but its not just the politicians.

Here is how it really went down..

1) notre dame burned and news media made a fortune off the coverage. Then everyone complained that everyone was watching Notre Dame burn and no one cared about the forests that were burning (partly because burning forests arent really a big eco issue right now)

2) for some months memes circulated reiterating the idea of notre dame and the forests burning.

3) media, ever looking to make money and draw attention to nonsense saw this trend. So now that its dry season again they focused their coverage ont he forest fires just as everyone cried over, even though it was a non issue they did what they did best and made it sound like the world was ending all to get people hyped and watching more news.. it worked.

Meanwhile the REAL global climate issues continue to be ignored...

@stevenroose

@FreePietje

Also check out this post were i go a bit deeper into the data. You can see the 80% increase over last year int eh data but it is also evident that we had an unusual low number of fires the last year and a few years before. As can be seen this years number of fires is still below the average for last decade.

https://qoto.org/@freemo/102678852721648878

@stevenroose

@FreePietje

The only reason social media and news is to blame, as you yourself said, is because people arent educated enough to understand the nuance. If they were then the news would not be particularly effective at lying.

@stevenroose

@FreePietje If they arent selling oil then they dont need pipelines. The fact that they want to sell oil in a way that costs them less money by not wasting more oil than they need to in the act of transporting oil is hardly something we should be mad at them for. They only sell the oil we buy. So the only people to blame is us for buying it. But no one ever wants to blame the people for their collective bad moves.

With that said lets take what you said at face value and ignore my objection. The response should be to push for a pipeline tax that ensures the cost of building a pipeline is high enough that it offsets any damage it does as best we can. This negates the argument of a financial advantage that can be used to harvest more oil.

@FreePietje

I am a Data scientist, thats NOT how we measure if something is statistically unusual. I mean just think about it, how do you know if the 80% increase from last year is due to last year being unusually low in fires rather than this year being unusually high?

Obviously if people were more educatede they would know the second they hear something like "80% increase from last year" that such claims are BS and every red flag should go off, thats not how scienstists measure things.

What we would do is use a distribution, compare the last few DECADES, and try to see what distribution describes the event we are describing. At that point we see where this year falls compared to the previous years.

What you find is that this year is in no way special. It is statistically insignificant. You just so happen to have a year with an unusually low number of fires preceding a year with a more normal number of fires. In fact with forrest forest that is exactly how it works. The more years you go without a fire the bigger the fire is once you have one. So in fact with any rigorous analysis we quickly see that the trend is fewer fires, not more, despite the twisting of data in the way you just suggested.

@stevenroose

@FreePietje

Those are valid concerns for sure. My point is if we had a society filled with critical thinkers then Oil companies wouldnt have gotten away with the lie in the first place.

Even now the people who oppose the oil companies are so uneducated they make emotional pleas and protests that seem like a positive act ont he surface but tend to be self destructive of their own causes. This in turn fuels the climate change deniers because when those whoa re pro-climate make absurd claims and are easily debunked it causes them to use this as a way of discrediting the whole moment, sadly.

A few examples. The amazon fires. All the scientists on the issue are well aware that the trend in forest fires are generally on the decline inteh amazon. This year the total number of fires is not unusual for the dry season in anyway compared to previous decades and rolling averages. Yet the left makes it sound like 80% of the forest is on fire (the actual number is 0.0054% as of last week). So while deforestation is a very real and critical problem by being too uneducated and focusing on the forest fires instead ultimately hurt their cause.

Another example are the trend of protests on oil pipelines, when people should be protesting gasoline consumption (which would require them to look at themselves as well). Pipelines themselves reduce oil consumption since they replace transportation along boat and trust with pipes. Pipelines consume far far less fossil fuels in transport and do far less harm to the environment than an equivalent number of trucks transporting the same fuel. As such it is self-destructive to protest the pipelines when they should be protesting the consumers.

These patterns of uneducated group-think result in the whole climate change movement to be discredited, which is unfair because the core scientists are still right even if the people are uneducated and absurd.

If we had a more educated public then those who are pro-eco would behave in ways that would be more respectable and thus would like drive fewer people to oppose the movement and discount it. Never mind the fact that there are plenty of uneducated right wingers too who deny it just due to their own lack of education as well, rather than as an effect of a discredited left.

@stevenroose

@FreePietje

Im not sure intelligence is the right word. Intelligence speaks of potential not application. It seems to be a lack of critical thinking skills and a lack of understanding logical fallacies and objective scientific methods for arriving at truth.

Schools, if done right, teach rigerous science and how to distinguish between truth and fact. They teach formal logic, logical fallacies, and Data analysis, all of which give you the tools needed to reach more objective truths.

Sadly with education seen as such a low priority and with kids not even going to school (and not being taught well even if they did go to school) I feel that leads far more to climate change deniers than just "intelligence" would.

@stevenroose