Vox hypocritically lectures readers on scaring children about climate change
June 9, 2022
In a new piece, Vox reports that we should stop scaring our children with the idea that climate change is going to kill everyone by next Tuesday afternoon.
Especially since such a prediction is not actually true. The pity is that it’s the progressive press that has been pushing that untruth, leading to the problems the kids are having.
“Stop telling kids that climate change will destroy their world,” the Vox piece says. “The reason we should stop telling them this is that it’s not true.
“What it won’t do, however, is make the Earth unlivable, or even mean that our children live in a world poorer than the one we grew up in. As many climate scientists have been telling us, the world is a better place to live in — especially for people in lower-income countries — than it has ever been, and climate change isn’t going to make it as bad as it was even in 1950.”
All of that’s true. Even reading the IPCC reports, the official science on the subject, the outcome is that the future world won’t be as good as it could be in the absence of climate change. It’s entirely possible to wonder whether that science is right, or is even “science”. Every single actual scientific or even official prediction is that even with climate change the future is going to be better than the past was. The question is only how much better?
So, it’s nice that Vox is now saying this. About time even. The doom-mongers are simply wrong.
The interesting thing is that Vox doesn’t seem to have thought this way for very long. August 2021: “What can one person possibly do to save a world literally on fire?” February 2022: “Climate change is already making parts of the world unlivable.” A podcast: “Whether the threat of climate change requires solutions that break the boundaries of conventional politics.” May 2022: “So despite the advances, the pace of deployment of clean energy is still far too slow to keep more dangerous levels of warming in check.” May 2022: “Climate change is already rendering parts of the world unlivable, “May 2022: ”make it painfully obvious that climate change isn’t a far-off threat — it’s already killing people.”
The thing is, even if we believe those scientific reports, then climate change is a chronic problem that we might want to do something about. It’s not the end of civilization – in absolutely every model anyone uses at all the future is 5 to 11 times richer than today.
So, Vox is right here, we should stop telling children that they’re all about to die and so anything must be done to stop climate change. On the grounds that it’s not true. But it would have helped if Vox hadn’t spent the past however long telling us that it was about to be a civilization-ending event, no?
The thing is, this newfound realization that even if we accept that climate change is a problem it’s not a disaster – where has this knowledge been all this time? Why this turn on a dime? Explaining the news would, we would think, mean having pointed this out all along.