Climate Change — and Baseball — Deniers are Just Afraid of Their Feelings

from Slate.com

Remember I talked last week about being called names for wanting to safeguard the future? Well, the latest epithet thrown at me was "drama queen" because, don't you know, humans are resilient and adaptable — to increasing temperatures and heat waves and droughts and floods and storms and pests and crop losses and water shortages? Yeah, sure.

But this little episode of name calling helped me realize something. These so-called deniers must actually be scared witless about the climate change emergency, mustn't they? Otherwise why would they be spending so much of their time reading and responding to articles and social media posts about climate change? If they weren't somehow almost pruriently attracted to slagging climate change activists, they would be doing what normal climate change ignorers do. You know, gardening and jogging and reading novels and parenting and working for a living. 

It's like if I spent all my free time on baseball websites and baseball fan listserves and baseball FB groups calling people who like baseball nasty names and denying that baseball is an actual sport. In order to do that, I'd have to secretly have some attraction to baseball, wouldn't I? Otherwise I wouldn't throw my time at it, would I? I'd be sticking to macramé or gourmet cooking, wouldn't I? 

Baseball deniers probably love the sport but simply don't know how to express their feelings about it. They were perhaps always chosen last to play on a team. Or maybe they're embarrassed that they don't actually understand the rules of the game. It's possible that they dreamed for years of playing in the major leagues but they just weren't good enough. For whatever reason, baseball deniers just can't let baseball go, so they hang out with baseball lovers all the while slagging them and the sport.

So when that climate change denier called me a drama queen for wanting to protect the future for the children of all species, I suspect he was actually asking ... we're resilient and adaptable, right? I don't have to be scared, right? Everything's going to be okay ... right?

Sadly, wrong. We are witnessing the great unravelling of the web of life. If you're not skilled enough, educated enough or courageous enough to face it and to help, that's okay. But please, go play some baseball or do some gardening so that those of us with our fingers in the dike trying to stave off the sixth mass extinction can at least do it in peace.

The Hero of Haarlem