My journey through global warming skepticism to Steemit.

I didn't want to believe it, when I put Naomi Klein's book "Climate change vs capitalism, this changes everything" down, I didn't want to believe it.

So I became a climate change skeptic or perhaps more accurately, I was a person enjoying their unsustainable life, pretty much ignorant about climate change and desperate to find something to convince me that things were not as bad as Klein was making out.

I googled the subject and was quickly reassured by the plethora of YouTube videos and blogs telling me that

1. it is normal for the earth to go through climate cycles,
2. the scientific community was not agreed on whether it was happening let alone whether it was anything to do with human activity
3. there had been no warming since 1998
4. the Antarctic was actually expanding not contracting
5. carbon dioxide does not drive global temperatures with graphs to prove it
6. world leaders are on the case and everything is good
   bla, bla, bla, bla, bla

"Phew" I thought, it's just something that is being blown out of all proportion and left it at that, my little bubble was in tact, I had done my research and had a considered, researched opinion and I guess for a couple of weeks, I was a climate change denier.

It was a chance encounter on YouTube with the Potholer54 channel that brought me to my senses. Perhaps the YouTube algorithms had selected this video for my attention because of my previous apparent interest in climate change so I tapped the screen to watch the video and slipped down the rabbit hole.

If Potholer54 has one central message, it is to check the sources for articles found in the blogosphere and specifically in relation to climate change, he demonstrates over and over again that when you do this, you will find that the "skeptics" mistakenly or otherwise misinterpret the peer reviewed scientific literature if they even bother to refer to it at all.

God dammit, I thought I had this one nailed down. Earnestly, I checked my arguments using my new found skill and discovered that it was all bullshit. At this point, I have to declare that I have degree level science knowledge and so I am not inclined to believe that for decades now, scientists have been faking results and conclusions, whilst their peers have been turning a blind eye in order to propagate more research funding. If you believe that, then in my humble opinion your denial is cast iron and you might as well be closing your eyes, covering your ears and shouting "NO!" repeatedly.

After a couple of weeks I had completely dismantled my own position, burst my comfortable bubble and had started burrowing deeper into the rabbit hole asking questions like

• how bad can this get
• how come we have been tackling the problem globally for 30 years and yet our upwards emissions trajectory has not changed
• why is there virtually no mention of a problem that poses an existential threat right now for millions and over the coming decades for billions of people.
• why did I find predominantly climate change denial videos when I looked on YouTube
• why does the fossil fuel industry receive so much grant money from governments purporting to be working to tackle climate change?
• if ordinary people like me have not been educated on a regular basis about possibly the most important and certainly the most difficult challenge ever faced by mankind, what else is the media playing down, spinning or simply not reporting
• could Naomi Klein have been right all along?
• why the hell did I read that book!

Looking back I can say with absolute certainty that I was a naive 45 year old who would willingly get behind any cause brought to my attention by the mainstream media and swallowed everything I heard on the MSM hook, line and sinker, believing that I was a member of a large audience of people becoming evermore well informed by the MSM with knowledge that we could use to draw our own personal conclusions to better understand the complicated world in which we lived.

My worldview has changed.

I am now a 51 year old skeptic.

I constantly question anything given to me by the MSM

• Why are they telling me this
• What do they want me to believe and why
• What are they not telling me about

I refuse to be a passive consumer (which I have come to believe is, in fact, the true meaning of life in a capitalist system).

I look for other, similarly skeptical people politically left or right leaning to find out what they are saying and that brings me to the reason I am here on Steemit and why I value this platform.

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....” Noam Chomsky

Currently the spectrum of acceptable opinion is being ever more severely limited with voices of dissent having their channels blocked on YouTube and accounts frozen on Facebook and Twitter. Steemit is controlled by the community and the spectrum of acceptable opinion is controlled by Steemians themselves - not sociopaths with world domination as a goal!

Here we can be informed in order to develop our own personal opinions. Thank you Naomi Klein and Potholer54 for sending me down the rabbit hole and bursting my little MSM constructed bubble.