Pirate's Cove

I’d recommend one that was based on the Scientific Model, ditching the reliance on computer models, and dropping the doomsaying

For 2023 let’s agree. We need a new climate change narrative

If you are around teenagers and you’ve got more than a decade on them, they don’t seem to have much to say to you.

It might seem as if they are doing nothing but texting or playing games on their phones, but they hear and see more than you think, and they’re thinking about what’s happening around them. More than you know.

At News Decoder each year, we ask students in our partner schools to pitch us ideas for news stories. Most want to report on big things happening across the world: police brutality, sex trafficking, transphobia, abortion. They get news off of social media about what’s happening around the world. And they pay attention.

Then we suggest they look closer to home and ask them if they can identify problems in their schools, neighborhoods or cities. It doesn’t take them long: pollution in a nearby river, an overcrowded animal shelter, discrimination against disabled people they know. They pay attention to conversations around them and to what people say to each other on social media.

In the story pitches students submitted to us this past year, they identified again and again two particular problems that worried them — climate change and mental health.

These two problems are connected.

Yes, they are, because the adults are making them have poor mental health with all the “we’re all doomed!!!!” talk.

Let’s focus on solutions and problem solvers.

At News Decoder, we encourage young people to write stories about problems around them. Now we want them to focus on solutions.

This year, we teamed up with the Climate Academy at the European School Brussels II and the nonprofit Global Youth & News Media to launch a global storytelling contest, as part of a larger climate change project called The Writing’s on the Wall. For the competition, we ask teens to find people in their local communities who are working to solve our climate crisis in some way — with projects that take us off fossil fuels, perhaps, or by pressuring governments or corporations to take meaningful systemic actions.

So, stories of trying to force Other People to comply, and ones that perpetuate the coming climate apocalypse (scam)? How does that help?

Teens see the problems around them. That much is clear. But it is making them anxious and frustrated because all they see are adults doing nothing. So now we ask them this: Can you identify the problem solvers around you? Can we tell stories about climate change solutions?

For our New Year’s resolution we are going to try to change the narrative from one of despondency to one of inspiration and motivation. Help us spread the word about our storytelling competition. Encourage teens around you to find a climate change problem solver in your community.

The solution is easy

Read: Climate Cult Decides They Need A New Narrative For 2023 »

I wish I had saved a screenshot of an insane The Atlantic headline from yesterday, as that article was quickly taken down, and this seems very similar. Perhaps they toned down the Doom?

Will Children’s Books Become Catalogs of the Extinct?

The other night, as I began the expansive and continually growing routine of putting my 11-month-old son to bed, we sat together on the rocking chair in his room and read The Tiger Who Came to Tea, by Judith Kerr, and met a tiger who just would not stop eating. My son wasn’t yet ready for sleep and made that clear, so we read Chicken Soup With Rice, by Maurice Sendak. We encountered an elephant and a whale, and traveled through all the months of the year, braving the sliding ice of January and the gusty gales of November. Then we turned, as we always do, to Goodnight Moon, and met more bears, rabbits, a little mouse, a cow, some fresh air, and the stars.

As I slid the books back onto the shelf, they rejoined the long parade of animals around his bedroom: the moose and his muffin, Peter Rabbit, Elmer the patchwork elephant, Lars the polar bear, Lyle the crocodile, stuffed kangaroos and octopi and lions and turtles. Every night, I sing “Baby Beluga” to him as a lullaby: “Goodnight, little whale, goodnight.” (snip)

But lately, I have started to worry that I am populating my son’s imagination with species that could go extinct before he has a chance to understand that they’re real. We read about Physty the same way we do about Custard the dragon. To him, they are equally delightful and fantastical, neither real nor unreal. He sees fossils of dinosaurs, and I tell him that they disappeared millions of years ago. Even if whales or tigers don’t vanish entirely in the next several decades, in our age of accelerated environmental damage—climate change and what some scientists are calling the sixth mass extinction—I’m concerned that many of these books about the incredible, unlikely diversity of animal life on this planet will feel like fairy tales too.

Is it any wonder that kids are emotional wrecks these days, neurotic over the coming climate apocalypse, when people, such as this “climate reporter”, fill their mushy little heads with this doomsday cult crap?

Scientists predict that as many as 1 million plant and animal species are at risk of going extinct, “many within decades,” according to the United Nations. This era of “biological annihilation” is already under way: In ecosystems spanning the globe, the average amount of plant and animal life has fallen by about a fifth—mostly since the beginning of the last century. Climate change is driving these dynamics by limiting or shifting species’ geographical ranges, which alters and removes the food, water, and habitat that they require.

Is this like the prognostications of the Arctic being ice free? Or the Maldives underwater by 2018 and NYC’s west side by 2019? Remember Paul Ehrlich’s population bomb? They’re pretty much never right, but, they’ll keep preaching the doom.

Read: ZOMG: Children’s Books Could Become A Repository Of Extinct Animals Due To Climate Doom? »