I hope the Climate Activists are proud of the effect their lies are having on the younger generation

Simon Barker: 
 

Something I realised a while back is that attempting to persuade somebody that they are wrong on something that matters to them is utterly futile.  

I have spent a large part of the half-century of my professional life “attempting to persuade” other professionals that they are wrong on something which matters to us. When I have been right, I have often succeeded. When I have been wrong, they often eventually succeeded. (Then there are all the other cases …. :-) ). 

Thankfully, we are in a professional forum, not a social-media echo-chamber. My brief experience has been that people here largely (not exceptionlessly, but largely) think before and as they post. As indeed one would expect from the IET Rules of Conduct. I started in forums with usenet groups in the mid-1980's.  Five years later, I quit, and migrated to closed professional mailing lists (one of which I still run myself). 

Post Office Limited has in recent years been persuaded that the arguments it used for many years to persuade courts that subpostmasters were committing fraud were in fact facile and largely wrong. And now it has been told that by the Court of Appeal in 2021 in no uncertain terms. And accepted that judgement. It has taken a decade. Sometimes people and organisations do take that long to change their minds.

Ten years ago, I took part in a year-long international research group at the Uni Bielefeld on distasters, the social phenomena they engender, and communications. We watched a film about a group of Pacific islands whose fishing way of life had been drastically altered over the course of about a decade, forming a serious emergency. A developed-world activist told them - persuaded them - that the changes were due to anthropogenic climate change, largely caused by the behaviour of the developed world. One of the islanders turned into a UN envoy who inter alia went around the world explaining their plight and campaigning for sensitivity to the problem and countermeasures. I argued at the time that that could not be right. As far as I could tell, anthropogenic climate change was a secondary effect that would manifest over the time scale of many decades, and that short-term effects such as the loss of this island nation's fishing resources likely had another cause. Now (you will appreciate) I think I was very wrong about that. 

Those are just two examples from my immediate experience.

 

So I think it's time I abandoned this whole thread.

For what it's worth, I don't, and would encourage you to continue.

Simon Barker: 
 

Something I realised a while back is that attempting to persuade somebody that they are wrong on something that matters to them is utterly futile.  

I have spent a large part of the half-century of my professional life “attempting to persuade” other professionals that they are wrong on something which matters to us. When I have been right, I have often succeeded. When I have been wrong, they often eventually succeeded. (Then there are all the other cases …. :-) ). 

Thankfully, we are in a professional forum, not a social-media echo-chamber. My brief experience has been that people here largely (not exceptionlessly, but largely) think before and as they post. As indeed one would expect from the IET Rules of Conduct. I started in forums with usenet groups in the mid-1980's.  Five years later, I quit, and migrated to closed professional mailing lists (one of which I still run myself). 

Post Office Limited has in recent years been persuaded that the arguments it used for many years to persuade courts that subpostmasters were committing fraud were in fact facile and largely wrong. And now it has been told that by the Court of Appeal in 2021 in no uncertain terms. And accepted that judgement. It has taken a decade. Sometimes people and organisations do take that long to change their minds.

Ten years ago, I took part in a year-long international research group at the Uni Bielefeld on distasters, the social phenomena they engender, and communications. We watched a film about a group of Pacific islands whose fishing way of life had been drastically altered over the course of about a decade, forming a serious emergency. A developed-world activist told them - persuaded them - that the changes were due to anthropogenic climate change, largely caused by the behaviour of the developed world. One of the islanders turned into a UN envoy who inter alia went around the world explaining their plight and campaigning for sensitivity to the problem and countermeasures. I argued at the time that that could not be right. As far as I could tell, anthropogenic climate change was a secondary effect that would manifest over the time scale of many decades, and that short-term effects such as the loss of this island nation's fishing resources likely had another cause. Now (you will appreciate) I think I was very wrong about that. 

Those are just two examples from my immediate experience.

 

So I think it's time I abandoned this whole thread.

For what it's worth, I don't, and would encourage you to continue.