A self-fulfilling illogic

I know that there are people who deny the urgency of the climate crisis, but I am still taken aback when stumble upon them.

A Twitter thread crossed my feed the other day: someone retweeted Michael Schade’s videos and photos of the volcano erupting on New Zealand’s White Island. (Thread Reader compiled his short thread, complete with cell phone video and several photographs. It’s worth a look.)

Schade and his family were safely back on the tour boat when the volcano blew, but they had been standing at the edge of the crater half an hour earlier.

Others, sadly, weren’t so fortunate; as I write this, CNN reports that six people have died, and eight more are still missing. In addition, many people received severe burns, to both body and lungs. The boat Schade was on picked up some of the survivors; his mother tended to a woman who was in critical condition.

The replies to his thread are, for the most part, peppered with gratitude that he and his family are safe, or awe at the power of nature, or prayers for the missing, or questions about warnings and liability.

Basic human responses.

And then there are these responses:

(I don’t understand most of this latter tweet, but I suspect that it’s a reference to Australian politics, since Scott Morrison [“ScoMo”] is the Aussie PM.)

Aside from the strange impulse to drop these logical stink bombs into a thread about rescue and loss — triggering the libs, I guess — these tweets don’t even make sense.

Re: the first tweet: Aside from the argumentum ad absurdum — “Oh, now we’re going to tax volcanos?” — it’s just backwards: Carbon taxes are not levied on emissions; they’re levied on the fuel, before it’s been burned. They’re meant to prevent, not respond to, emissions. There’s no connection between government policies dealing with pollution and an event like this.

And the second tweet descends even deeper into the absurdum: “Oh, now we’re going to blame Morrison or Trump for a volcano erupting in New Zealand?”

Setting all that aside, I think they think they’re making an argument. I think the warrant behind these arguments might run something like this: Even if climate change is real [probably a big if, for some of them], there’s no point in addressing it because nature just fucks everything up anyway.

Sadly, it’s starting to look like this argument may come to be true, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, as we approach a “cascade of tipping points,” beyond which we will not be able to recover.

It’s like we have a glass of water that we really don’t want to spill. It was no big deal when the glass was half empty, but we’ve unwisely filled it right to the brim. Now, we’re outside, walking heel to toe, trying not to break the surface tension. But it’s cloudy, and… well, you know, rain’s gonna rain, right? Mother Nature’s a bitch. What are we supposed to about it?