What if that person think CO2 is good for life?
this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2026
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Nothing. You canβt logic someone out of a position they didnβt use logic to get to in the first place. Thereβs way more unmotivated and un-mobilized people out there that believe in human caused climate change that are more worth your time and energy.
If your house is too warm and you're running 20 electric heaters but for some reason think it's something else causing the heat, it'd still pay to turn off some of those heaters to compensate for the external cause since you actually have control over the heaters.
If you really think that anything you say will have any impact on them then maybe it doesn't matter what the cause is as long as you can get them onboard with the solution. The two are inextricably linked so if they're really adamant about this you'll probably not be successful in this endeavour but it's worth a try if you have some faith in them. If they think it's all long term cyclical solar patterns or some other non anthropogenic cause it might be worth pointing out that it's still happening and causing consequences. The trouble will be not implying too heavily as I have in my heaters example, that the solution is obviously linked to the cause, even if it is. Otherwise they will not believe you have common ground.
So... where's the extra heat coming from? If you acknowledge it exists where's it from?
Is it a problem? If it is shouldn't we prevent or prepare for it?
We have people like this running Egypt. They're constantly cutting down trees!
Trees in Egypt?
Do research. Give them that. Walk away and never think or talk about it with them again.
You can't fix stupid.
Save your breath. It's honestly not worth it.
Exactly, just say "you are too stupid to understand the explanation" and walk away.
Nothing. You benefit more from having someone who will help you plan and prepare for the effects of climate change than you do from having someone who agrees with you about the causes.
The reason for that is you and your comrade canβt do anything impactful about the human sources of climate change.
Just be like, "Okay, what about the pacific garbage patch? Did human activity cause that? Should we be trying to fix it?" It's pretty hard to argue that the fish made all the used water bottles themselves.
Nothing. Just walk away. I don't understand why people would willingly engage in completely pointless arguments at all... it's a huge part of why I left Facebook and Reddit and come here now instead. People on there literally just to argue and pick fights with other people.
I don't care if it's my dad, my neighbour, or an old friend from school ... if they believe that, they believe that, and nothing I can say is going to change their mind - and it's not my place to change their mind.
If my son said that to me, yes, it is my place to make sure he is properly educated, so we'd go through some Wikipedia articles and/or watch a couple documentaries about it, so people who understand all of it a hell of a lot better than I do can explain it to him properly. I am not a climate scientist.
This seems to have worked with my boomer mom: "be that as it may, wouldn't we all be better off by reducing pollution?"
Slap them in the face. If they complain, tell them the pain is real but human activity didnβt contribute to it.
I came to post pretty much the exact same thing π€£
I told my dad that even if climate change isn't real, or if it is humans don't contribute... what's the harm in doing something about it? What's the harm in doing something to help your grandkids have a world to grow up in and enjoy?
He installed solar panels a few years ago and now likes to talk about how he heats and cools his home without paying ConEd
Just show them that one xkcd about how abrupt the current warming is and how nicely it lines up with industrialization. The comparison between the natural slow shifts in global climate vs. what's been happening the last century or so is the clearest counter to "but the climate has always been changing".
The other times that things have changed in comparable timescales, it's been caused by supervolcanoes or other such calamities.
Edit: Oh yeah one caveat: The xkcd is ten years old and we're now actually already around +1.5Β°C.
I was about to find that same xkcd. π
It really is a good way to portray that.
It also shows quite well that shit is hitting the fan, almost horizontally, in a time period where we have proper temperature measurements from all around the world. Even if humans were not at fault, we need to do something about it.
Yeah, as if "Mass extinctions are a natural occurence!" were an excuse to carry on business as usual :D
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Maybe show them this:
I tell them their brain is fried and I move on. Nothing will convince these people.
I tell people that burning a 100 million barrels of oil a day, everyday, has to have an impact.
Imagine how much exhaust that is everyday.
The idea that burning a million barrels of oil everyday would not have an impact on the atmosphere is absurd.
I think CO2 is good for life, but cement in cities, deforestation and the heat produce by burninf fuel must be bad.
I don't trust too much the CO2 crisis, we got other pollution like micropastics and eternal chemicals I believe are more serious.
Anyways I still commute by public transport even though I have a company car with petrol, everyone can help.
Well without a real sense of the size of the atmosphere (which most people don't have), that doesn't really mean anything, other than it being a big number. Any impressively big number can be insignificant in relation to something big enough to easily absorb it.
However, we've added to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere by 50%. I think that says it really is significant.
Nothing, having arguments with people that lack basic critical thinking skills is a waste of time. A simple google search can give you all the data and numbers and you can show it to them but it doesn't matter if they believe they know better than actual scientists. There are people out there that believe the Earth is flat.
Met a director of my company in the UK that made a joke about vegans. I said, say what you want but they're good for the climate! He went off on me about how climate change was fake. I tried my best to just move onto a different topic but he just kept going at me and ended it with: "you started it" ... to which I said, "yes and let's move on shall we?"
They're not worth the effort.
Seems like that company doesn't have very good direction
I had that happen with some random guy over the Iran war where I just made an offhand comment about how bad the US was doing and he starts going on a tirade about how America is #1 and yadda yadda. Anyway I kinda laughed and said I wanted to move on and was uncomfortable. A couple days later I saw him again and he said, "I looked it up and you were right about that one thing you mentioned but I'm still right about most of it." Like sure buddy.
ha... I'm vegan, me sitting at a table to eat is enough for people to feel the need to defend themselves and their choices without me saying anything other than kindly answering their questions from a conversation they start. It forces one to train the skill of not engaging with people like that.
Also he's the one that started it with the (likely bad-taste) joke, not you, but good on you for taking one just to end it. Some people just can't deal with their cognitive dissonance because it would mean facing their actions not matching with their idealized version of themselves, you can't have reasonable conversations with them.
Tell them you're proud of them, they seem to be a high functioning mentally disabled person and are doing great in life.
Highlight the speed of change now, since industrial revolution, compared to historical data.
Don't. Nothing you could say is going to change their mind. They'd need to hear it from new sources they trust and their peers and then it still wouldn't be guaranteed they'd reconsider their position. Confirmation bias and a whole host of other brain stuff makes changing someone's mind incredibly difficult. Save your breath.
Nothing, there's no use in making him feel bad for something he has no control over.
Don't be ridiculous, maybe not in the same measure of all of Exxon etc. , but individuals can and do contribute to pollution and climate change.
I'm not going to feel one bit guilty about contributing a tiny fraction.
It's like wanting an individual to pick up a can lid while companies dump truckloads of garbage.
And they, or the governments they own have zero intention of changing, on the contrary.
who's ridiculous here?
I would generally expect of people not to litter, yes
that is totally not the point
How conveniently lazy of you.
another one that doesn't get it
Personally, now I would say 'fine, it doesn't matter what you believe. We are severely fucked and we are going to be lucky to survive. Making one person accept reality is not going to change anything.'
I've become more and more pessimistic.. simon Clark on YouTube has a bunch of accurately hopeful climate content that helps a bit, but so much hinges on 'if we don't actively make it worse' which is exactly what is happening.
My one hope is we will have enough mortally devasting weather before it's too late so that doubters will convince themselves.
My one hope is we will have enough mortally devasting weather before itβs too late so that doubters will convince themselves.
I'm sorry to say that but it's kinda "too late" already, to some definition. Even if we stop burning fossil fuels right now, human societies will not escape unharmed, there will be more crop failure leading to more famine leading to more war, even ignoring the "minutia" such as heat-related deaths and so on. Of course that's not to say we shouldn't fix our shit right now, because we still can reduce the impact and try to save our global "civilization" (or whatever you want to call the sum of human knowledge, connections, industry, material culture etc).
On a more hopeful level, I also think that pretty much whatever happens, homo sapiens as a species will probably survive. As primates, we are excellent at organizing in small groups and adapting our environments to suit us, however hostile they may be. Earth is huge, its flora and fauna is diverse, and even at +6-8β there will be some areas with ecosystems sturdy enough to sustain small populations of hunters-gatherers and even basic agricultural societies. And then, in a few thousands or tens of thousands of years, as the nature recoils from the shock and more and more land becomes habitable for humans again, they will rebuild. Since there won't be any easily accessible oil or gas in the ground anymore, the new industrial revolution will naturally have to be more sustainable than ours.
Ask them what prompted them to be a geologist.
Ideally? As little as possible.
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