As we continue to cover the aftermath of Hurricane Milton, we speak with Manuel Ivan Guerrero, a freshman at the University of Central Florida and an organizer with the Sunrise Movement, who says young people are extremely worried about the impact of the climate crisis on their communities. “This just has me more scared for what the future’s going to look like in Florida,” he says. “We’re having these thousand-year storms every three, four years now.” We also speak with David Wallace-Wells, a writer for The New York Times opinion section and a columnist for The New York Times Magazine, where he frequently writes about climate. He says the popularity of conspiracy theories during extreme weather events shows that many people are retreating “into little cocoons of disinformation and paranoia, and that scares me in some ways even more than the weather itself.”

AMY GOODMAN: Hurricane Milton comes just two weeks after Hurricane Helene battered Florida and other southeastern states, killing at least 230 people. A new analysis by the group World Weather Attribution finds the burning of fossil fuels has made highly destructive storms like Helene more than twice as likely. Florida climate activists have declared Republican Governor Ron DeSantis unfit to lead the state since his policies promote fossil fuels, reject sustainable energy options and ignore or deny the climate crisis.

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DAVID WALLACE-WELLS: Yeah, I think the story is much bigger than Ron DeSantis. I mean, we’re talking about, you know, Donald Trump campaigning in part on Project ’25’s promises to defund FEMA and cut emergency services and disaster response. We are seeing all of this disinformation surrounding Hurricane Helene with people posting on social media about FEMA helicopters shooting down disaster relief, people circulating conspiracy theories about land being seized by the federal government, not to mention, as you highlighted earlier, Marjorie Taylor Greene’s suggestion that the weather itself is man-made and controlled by the government. There’s a kind of grim irony in those who deny that human activity can be driving the climate crisis but who believe that government actors can control the weather to this scale.

  • Allonzee@lemmy.world
    71·
    11 hours ago

    “crisis” is such a misnomer.

    A crisis infers something that will eventually come to resolution.

    Our self-inflicted climate crisis isn’t intensifying, our self-inflicted climate doom is.

    For all intents and purposes, this climate doom is permanent. It will take the Earth millions of years to recover from what we’re actively doing, which is nothing to the living Earth and it’s 3.8 billion year tapestry of life, but to our Lil monkey brains might as well be treated as eternity, and absolutely will endure for many multiple times longer than humans will exist.

    We struggle to keep human societies and civilization together on the tutorial paradise mode we were handed. Anyone paying attention knows how quickly we will fall back to scattered tribes, subsisting and scraping for survivial like we just crawled back out of our first cave when our only habitat is no longer the sunshine lollipop land we’re dead set on ending ASAP.

    I don’t think we’ll go extinct for another few hundred years, we’ll be like cockroaches relying on and clinging to the remnant hardened structures and tech of the tutorial days to keep pockets alive, but almost no one will be thanking their lucky stars for such a life.

    And if anyone thinks our salvation is somehow thriving on worlds we didn’t evolve on, where one stupid/greedy human action can very well mean “boom, literally everybody instantly dead, womp womp, try again,” when we can’t even make it work here where the air, water, and waste self-recycle automatically and all we had to do was not actively, belligerently fuck it up despite all its natural redundancies and cartoonishly massive load tolerances, then lol.