Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Because “Older people can be wealthy”.
Why the climate movement must do more to mobilise older people
June 3, 2021 2.34am AEST
Aled Jones Professor & Director, Global Sustainability Institute, Anglia Ruskin University
Bradley Hiller Visiting Fellow, Global Sustainability Institute, Anglia Ruskin UniversitySome say age is only a number. Others associate age with wisdom. Or perhaps it is a state of mind. Whatever it is, age is a factor in climate progress, and 2021’s renewed climate momentum must mobilise the oft-overlooked elderly demographic.
To date, the global climate movement has engaged young people en masse. Pre-COVID, the world witnessed a swathe of student-led climate protests, leading to broader public debate and increased youth representation in key international forums.
…
Elderly people are relatively invisible in climate discussions compared to the youth demographic, yet are arguably the most critical for broader climate action. Here are five reasons to broaden the youthful momentum to engage and empower the elderly:
…
5. Older people can be wealthy
The elderly collectively control an increasing share of global wealth, spending and assets. For example, the 55-and-over population in the US already spends twice as much as the much-targeted millennial market. By 2030, it is estimated that just 11% of investable assets in the US will be held by people younger than 45. Yet despite holding most shareholder voting rights, older investors tend to consider environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors less strongly than younger investors.
…
Read more: https://theconversation.com/why-the-climate-movement-must-do-more-to-mobilise-older-people-161732
Top marks for honesty, at least about wanting old people to contribute more towards the cause.
So why are old people so disengaged? Plenty of old folk have children and grandchildren they love, so the suggestion I have seen that old people simply don’t care doesn’t wash. Old people are usually (though not always) very well informed, so it is unlikely they are unfamiliar with climate crisis claims.
One possible explanation, is age gives old people the experience and perspective to realise the climate crisis narrative is a pile of bull pucky.
Everyone over 50 remembers the Global Cooling crisis, because we all watched the wildly popular “In Search of” documentary on the coming ice age.
I remember watching “In Search Of … The Coming Ice Age” as a kid. Everyone believed the documentary, because the presenter was actor Leonard Nimoy, who played Dr. Spock in the original Star Trek series. The ice age documentary also featured an impressive lineup of scientists, including Chester Langway, James Hayes, Gifford Miller (who described how the descent into the next ice age started 3000 years ago), and Stephen Schneider, who speculated about using nuclear energy to melt the ice caps, to halt the big freeze.
Stephen Schneider hilariously backflipped a few years after the documentary, and started pushing global warming theories with as much sincerity as he previously pushed the global cooling scare.
My point is, at the time we all believed Nimoy’s flick, just like young people today believe all the global warming nonsense they have been force fed, because young people just aren’t old enough yet to have personally witnessed a major settled science backflip. After you see a few abrupt shifts in direction (fat good? fat bad? Pritikin diet? Atkins Diet?), often with the same people pushing the new line with just as much sincerity as they previously pushed the opposite position, you would have to be stupid not to wonder at least a bit whether the so called experts were making it up as they go.
But it seems most people have to witness this kind of shameless scientific backflip for themselves, to lose their automatic faith in authority.
Thankfully we have had a recent series of in my opinion shameless public scientific backflips, which with any luck will do lasting damage to the climate crisis narrative.
Dr. Fauci’s public backflips on Covid (lab leak? natural? kids need masks? kids don’t need masks?) may have done more long term damage to young people’s willingness to accept scientific authority at face value, than anything I have ever written.
I’m so old – I remember the ‘population bomb’.
Now we have an existential societal crisis over failing global birth rates…
I helped make the ‘population bomb
Happy to assist in reversing the falling global birth rates (& without any blue pills), but I don’t do back seat of cars any more !!!
Thank you for your service! 😜
She and I were alone in the car at the drive-in theatre. We were getting on so well that I suggested, “Time to get into the back seat now?” Crestfallen look said “But Geoff, I want to stay in the front seat with you.”
Back seats these days are a lot more cramped than they used to be.
You missed one. Oldsters have grown children and grandchildren, whom they dearly want to succeed. They dislike watching them engaged in foolish and fruitless programs promoted by others in their own (old) age group. They want them to have health and a reasonable amount of wealth, and be free of oppression by those who would seek to control their every thought, word, and deed.
I remember in a 1970 physics class being told that at that time they weren’t sure if the earth would be warming or cooling as they weren’t sure if the earth was moving closer or farther away from the sun.
With age comes wisdom. The older people have been around and they aren’t stupid and naive like the brainwashed youth. They won’t be swayed by lies and half-truths.
Don’t f..k up with old people, your parasitic scoundrels!
These a-holes spend all their time denigrating and blaming old people for everything, climate, Trump, Brexit, war you name it, and Oh! now you want some money?
Go phuck yourselves!
Now that’s just wrong ……..
Except that it’s right. Go fcuk yourselves. Send your 52-week Paid Time Of request to AOC, c/o thetalkingchipmunk.com
I remember a time in 1970 when I was in grade 7 or 8 when the teachers herded all of us kids into the school gym to watch a movie that proclaimed: within 15 years the air would be too polluted to breathe and the water would be too polluted to drink. So, yeah, we oldsters have seen this “movie” before and we know how it ends.
I was about to say, we’ve heard it for 50 years and none of their dire predictions have come true yet. It’s become clear to us that they mean to dismantle Western Civilization by beating it with their hammers and sickles without considering that changes like that mean no more Internet, no more cellphones, and no more Frappuccinos.
If I can still have my avocado toast, I’ll come through it all just fine.
(Oh….. OK………. 😜)
“Dr. Fauci’s public backflips”
Well, that, and having paid the Chinese to invent the virus.
Shhhh. Don’t ever suggest that gain of function research is far more dangerous to the future of mankind than the earth’s ever changing temperatures.
Scientists. Some of them are the dumbest people in the room. And definitely the most dangerous.
ifly,
Do please make that specific to climate research.Good science was used to let you fly safely. Geoff S
I’m 86 and have lived here on and off for 50 years and damme if the vegetation has gotten lusher into that time and it ain’t just a wet spring.
“scientific authority” – a helpful rephrase for me in discussions with family or friends on the left..
I get frustrated when I hear someone say “I believe in science” or as Fauci said this week “...they are attacking science“.
I will try to make the point that what they are really saying is “I believe in scientific authority” or “they are attacking scientific authority (in this instance meaning attacking me, Dr. Fauci)”.
Making “authority” the subject may be more meaningful or fruitful.
(Attempting to argue that “science” in that context is a meaningless abstraction usually does not connect with a Progressive.)
The climate scam is of course socialism’s Trojan Horse poison pill for Western Democracies.
Socialism basically destroys every traditional institution it touches. Most long lasting institutions, like family, church, community, are bottom-up organized. Bottom-up organization makes them anti-fragile, to use Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s descriptor from his book by the same name. Socialism, like all forms of authoritarian state directed political systems, is a top-down directed political system of State directed economic activity over individual. They are poison to bottom up organized social structures.
As such socialism has infected and destroyed the professional science academies, in the US a process started by VP Al Gore in 1993, and continued by Obama’s anti-science Science Advisor John Holdren 2009-2016. Now Dementia Joe’s handlers have put Gavin Schmidt in charge of continuing the climate corruption of science. It will take a concerted, grass roots uprising among you get, disaffected scientists to perform an exorcism on the socialist science-body snatchers. The older scientists now are the Mannian corrupted generation rotten to the roots.
Does this include getting coerced climate statements from people on their deathbed? I would not put it past them.
If you make the wrong statement and you are really old, it’s because you are senile. That’s what they said about Maggie Thatcher when she changed her mind about global warming.
Trust.
Our level of trust in people changes as we get older.
Everyone one is different as they are shaped with different experiences, but in general, as a child our default is to trust someone and as an adult our default is to mistrust someone.
This explains part of the problem
https://youtu.be/qkXZ3_ZmKzw
This is plagiarism! I have written the exact same comments more than a few times on various websites, including posting the Youtube In Search Of clip.
In my youth, I completely bought into a coming ice age. And I remember just how freaking cold the 60s and 70s were. Over the years, I’ve observed the raw data (before it was butchered by multiple ‘adjustments’ done by bureaucrats who altered the data to fit global warming hypothesis) and determined that the earth warms and cools in multi decade cycles. It has been that way for a very, very long time. Unfortunately, those bureaucrats have successfully ‘smoothed out’ the earth’s cooling cycle that happened from the 1940s to the 1980s.
And there is the big lie that there was no scientific agreement about a coming ice age. They’ve rewritten history by sweeping those forecasts under the rug along with corrupting the raw data to fit their global warming thesis.
While I do not look forward to the natural variation of global cooling to take hold (we are in the best days of my life in terms of the earth’s weather), I do look forward to the feeling of schadenfreude I will experience when the warmunists run out of reasons why the earth has gone into a multidecade cooling cycle.
Maybe we all figured it out the same way 😉
Well, it is pretty obvious that we’re dealing with natural variations in weather and that man’s impact on weather is de minimis.
Sorry, that original post was meant to be humorous; a fail on my part.
Some say age is only a number. Others associate age with wisdom.
Nailed in 1
Alarmist don’t like historical facts or historical records
I have zero confidence in the predictions of severe climate change.
I like to flatter myself that I am the eldest oyster in the Walrus and the Carpenter: “”0 Oysters, come and walk with us!”
The Walrus did beseech. ….
The eldest Oyster winked his eye,
And shook his heavy head—
Meaning to say he did not choose
To leave the oyster-bed. ” etc
We who are older do not engage in what we realise is a movement driven by fear mongering mumbo jumbo. We who are older recognise how the young are burdened by the propaganda that fills their lives. We who are older will resist the lies and deceits and hope our example will inspire those who are younger to think for themselves.
No, this is wrong. Leonard Nimoy played Mr Spock, not Dr Spock. (Dr Spock was actually a real person).
Because we are old and free of the traps of teenage cults we can not only recognise BS when it is fed us, but we can recognise a cult too, and Climate Changism has the hallmark of one.
Fat good? Fat bad? The native residents of Tierra del Fuego were so acclimated to what we mere mortals would consider foul, bad, cold weather that they sometimes slept outside buck nekkid. I was surprised when I read that. They were, in fact, carrying a layer of body fat that the rest of us do not have, which allowed them to survive quite well in an extremely harsh environment, a feature of their physiology that none of the rest of us have, except maybe Eskimos and other northern inhabitants like the reindeer herders of Yakutia. I was very surprised about this inherited trait that they had, but it made sense. Unfortunately, the last native Fuegian, a woman, died some time ago.
If it really goes blistering cold, most of us will be doomed unless we can find a way to acclimate ourselves to it. I have two good pairs of waterproof, insulated winter boots, plus plenty of thermal clothing, so I think I’m good to go, even if my ski jacket makes me look like a pink snowperson.
I’ll be 61 later this year and have 3 kids, and 2 grandkids (so far) and none of us spend any time worrying about the changing climate. The focus has always been, and will continue to be adaptation – on whatever curveballs are thrown our way. Obviously life is full of them.
Glass is always half full with me and my clan.
You can’t get much older than me, 75. I will say this and I believe it to be true, my high school education in the 60’s was just as good as the average college education is today. My nephew who just graduated from college knows nothing about geography, history, english, literature and even simple math escapes him without a calculator. He has no practical experience with auto mechanics, carpentry, plumbing or electricity. I know all of those things and more. I’ve had time to sift through the ideas that don’t work and stay with those that do.
I will admit that at this age I have lots of time to read and learn about how the world is going today and I don’t like it. People hating others because they don’t support the same guy for President? Check. People fearing for their lives from some pathetic disease? Check. People putting a guy in the White House who has dementia and has caused my life to be harder? Check. Web sites shutting down ideas they don’t like? Check. All the science-fiction novels I read as a kid are coming true, at least the ones that predicted fascistic states. And the US isn’t as bad as Canada where if you leave the country you must then quarantine for two weeks upon return.
And since I read the articles on Watts Up With That every day it is going to be very hard to convince me the world is burning up. I also remember the 70’s when they told us we must sprinkle coal dust on the north and south poles to melt the ice faster due to the coming ice age. But at least back then nobody believed them. Today they do. Actually I don’t know many people who think about this much, way to many other things more pressing.
That’s my thought for the day. I want to follow the science but when it has shown to be just another bunch of money-grubbing hucksters it is very hard.