[Erick Estrada]

Originally Posted by REDVAN

And now for my comment:

Climate change is already killing us. It's not because climate change is some devil, it's that we're too stupid to do anything about it.

Instead of focusing on whether it's happening and why, we should focus on educating the masses on getting prepared. The biggest issues are rising sea level, ground instabilities (I wonder what happens when permafrost thaws? And other issues... droughts etc), and freak storms that seem to be happening more frequently.

Let's use some of the industrial and technological ingenuity that got us here and refocus it on life saving solutions, moving people to safer locations, and rotating our farmland/etc to more productive areas following this climate change. Carbon taxes and slowing our emissions won't save your grandchildren's life when the flood wipes out the food supplies or the tornadoes rip them to shreds.

Edit: tl;dr: the past is the past, gov't/media/nutbars should quit shaming us for the choices our grandparents made, and let's solve the issues that will affect our grandchildren.

I'm just going to leave this here;

University of Minnesota neuroscientist Shmuel Lissek, who studies the fear system, believes that at its heart, the concept of doomsday evokes an innate and ancient bias in most mammals. "The initial response to any hint of alarm is fear. This is the architecture with which we’re built," Lissek says. Over evolutionary history, organisms with a better-safe-than-sorry approach survive. This mechanism has had consequences for both the body and brain, where the fast-acting amygdala can activate a fearful stress response before "higher" cortical areas have a chance to assess the situation and respond more rationally.

But why would anyone enjoy kindling this fearful response? Lissek suspects that some apocalyptic believers find the idea that the end is nigh to be validating. Individuals with a history of traumatic experiences, for example, may be fatalistic. For these people, finding a group of like-minded fatalists is reassuring. There may also be comfort in being able to attribute doom to some larger cosmic order—such as an ancient Mayan prophecy. This kind of mythology removes any sense of individual responsibility.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com...he-apocalypse/