In reply to Bob Kemp:
Ad-hom seems entirely appropriate if people are cultishly causing a scene for little gain, possibly misguided motives, and showing remarkable hypocrisy. Yes, I find it ludicrous that people living lifestyles of relatively luxurious consumption resort to theatrics in the street, beating their chests about the consumption patterns of others, but apparently failing to adopt themselves the lifestyle changes to reverse that. Hippie outfits, ultra-spirituality, yoga retreats, and eating less meat than your next-door neighbour doesn't mean you've done your bit. Put the money where the mouth is.
But I'll put this to you in another way. We need to act now because if we haven't made x% change in our emissions in 10 years then "its all over". There is no other choice between the life and death of our planet. That is the message. Loud and clear.
So time travel forward ten years, and here we are on UKC, and those reductions haven't been met.
What then?
If the message today is absolute doom, and we then turn out to not achieve what is being demanded today to avert that, then one of two things will have occurred.
Either we're f*cked, and might as well give up (and not have bothered anyway) because we absolutely, 100%, had to make those changes and anything less means complete failure.
Or, we're fine because the changes demanded were never needed anyway.
Unless you think we're going to meet the emissions targets, the result is one of those options above.
The message is f*cked because even it's strongest proponents are nowhere close to achieving it. And because its bound up in a "crusty" anti-capitalist argument that seems to be using the climate movement as a tool to push through their opposition to an economic system, its dooming itself to failure.
Likewise, the swing in the narrative that the science is "decided". If you now question climate science you are a heretic. What researcher these days would go out, with the best of intentions, to question or challenge the science? We should be encouraging that. But instead anyone who does so is automatically derided as a crank. And if today's projections are in need of adjustment, or the message has been skewed by too much fervour, what then?
You think if an asteroid was going to smash into the earth in a decade, Greta's pleading face would be off our screens for a day? Yet we've already mostly moved on to Brexit, or Trump's tweets, or who Boris has slept with. All those people who claim with 100% certainty we need to act now and that its clear what we need to do (and usually, its someone else who has to do it) look to be more caught up in media drama. No surprise that people are calling out a lack of clothes on the emperor and switching off.
The movement has gone from one of reason to that of a cult.