QC

In line with this tweet, mostly arguments about climate change are not about climate change, they're about fighting the culture wars, which bottoms out into something like identity / tribe / belonging feeling under threat:https://twitter.com/QiaochuYuan/status/1116428073757396992 …

One of the traditional tactics, of trying to get people outraged about the environment, has stopped working because the outrage market has been saturated by the culture wars. Everyone has more than enough stuff to be outraged about now. Need something else.

At the epistemic level, science as a cultural process has been showing serious cracks for awhile (reproducibility crisis, p-hacking, etc). There's a genuine question of how trustworthy it is, and that question is genuinely scary in the aftermath of the death of God.

Because if we can't trust science or God to tell us what's true, then what can we trust? One of the big questions we need to hold globally. No easy answers, and lots of people are clinging onto or grasping for easy answers.

At a different narrative level, climate change tells a horrifying story, about a really awful thing that's going to happen and that it doesn't obviously seem like we can do anything about. You need proper "bedside manner" to give people diagnoses like this.

(This would predict that belief in climate change is correlated with techno-optimism and -utopianism; easier to accept climate change narratively / emotionally if you're also optimistic about technology dealing with it.)