Pirate's Cove

Yeah, they’re about 10 years too late

Stop telling kids that climate change will destroy their world
Some “climate anxiety” is the product of telling kids — falsely — that they have no future.

My 5-year-old daughter is now old enough to read a lot of books and magazines aimed at children, and it’s given me a whole new perspective on the discourse wars over how we talk about climate change, conservation, and the future of the planet.

As I’ve written about before, climate change is going to be bad, and it will hold back humanity from thriving as much as we should this century. It will likely cause mass migration and displacement and extinctions of many species.

That’s exactly the kind of discourse that makes kids mental messes

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.

“I unequivocally reject, scientifically and personally, the notion that children are somehow doomed to an unhappy life,” Kate Marvel, a climate scientist at Columbia, told Ezra Klein in his column this week about overcoming climate despair.

Writing aimed at adults doesn’t always do the best job of striking a balance, though not everyone agrees on precisely what that balance is. Books like The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, to my mind, do a reasonable job of describing some extreme scenarios that really are worth contemplating, but they still don’t add up to an uninhabitable Earth, or even one that’d be an awful place to live.

The good ship Rationality left the dock long ago, and it won’t be coming back into port anytime soon, because it is staffed by way too many wackjobs. And, really, even if Warmists are not telling kids that the planet is doomed to be uninhabitable, they are giving plenty of other fables that screw with the kids’ minds. How many times have they been told that the coral reefs will all die out, and that we’re in the middle of a mass extinction? That the coastal cities will SOON! be under several feet of water?

As a parent, I think it’s essential to empower kids and pass along the message that the world will be in their hands, that they will have the power to solve its most pressing problems, and that there are lots of people already working on those problems who are eager for kids to learn, grow, and join us. Fighting climate change is part of that, and it’s important and worthwhile, but not because there will be no world for children to live in when they grow up.

Unfortunately, the latter message is the dominant one in Our House Is on Fire: Greta Thunberg’s Call to Save the Planet, a beautifully illustrated picture book aimed at ages 3-8.

Vox writer Kelsey Pipper is living in a fantasy world if she thinks that messages of Doom are not the norm, and they’ll continue to be the norm. There are some Warmists, like Michael Mann, who want nuclear power. And their voices are drowned out by the majority who don’t.

That pessimistic message seems to be sinking in for the young. A 2021 study funded by the campaign and research group Avaaz polled 10,000 people between 16 and 25, and found that over half thought that humanity was “doomed” because of climate change.

It won’t stop. And the message of Doom is baked into the cult of climastrology at this point. Look at any Extinction Rebellion protest and…well, just consider their name, right?