An ethics of climate change?

Imagine that you watch someone putting down a substance on all the playgrounds in your neighbourhood. You are then reliably informed that the substance is poisonous and that it has been put down on all playgrounds.

What would you do? Would you keep quiet about it? – Perhaps you should. Even if you see some children die, you don’t know for sure whether it’s really the poison that is lethal, do you?*

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* Some comments:

— Faced with the question of anthropogenic climate change, most far-right parties I know endorse a variant of this argument. Are there any other options? Probably: (a) Some mainstream parties in Germany worry most about the issue that the guy putting down the poison might be out of a job if we cause a fuss. (b) Other parties campaign for building new playgrounds. (c) A further option is to ask the producers of poison for the best strategy. (d) Oh, and another commonly favoured move is to dismiss protests of children as ignorant. Did I miss something?

— If you’ve read this far, why not sign this petition by Martin Kusch (Vienna): “Philosophers for Future”?

— While I think that dismissing findings of climate sciences or other concerns about climate change is immoral, I also see that ‘spreading the word‘ is rather difficult. Meehan Crist writes: “On a rapidly warming planet, one function of climate writing is to get the word out—to spark and help shape public discourse in the midst of ongoing and accelerating catastrophe. We are already too late to prevent some degree of unprecedented change. We know it’s going to be bad, but human activity today could still make the future worse. So it’s true both that we are too late and that there is no time to be lost. Yet if we get the framing of this story wrong—if we see the issue as a matter of individual consumer choice, for example, or choose a purely emotional rather than an explicitly political framing—we risk missing the point altogether.”