'I thought climate change was a hoax. Now I've changed my mind'

While it's wonderful she finally started questioning things, she deserves to feel way more than embarrassed for all the time she wasted and all the lies she repeated while believing it was a hoax.

Especially considering she was a science teacher before she finally changed her mind. Think of how many years she spent teaching misinformation. Is an "I'm sorry" and being embarrassed enough to make up for that, really?

It took her until well after "Climategate" to begin questioning it, and it seems like she listened to Rush Limbaugh religiously.

I'm glad she changed her mind, but this story is not inspiring to me. It's anger-inducing that we have to fucking free these people from the mental fucking cages they built for themselves. Her being an absolute fucking disgrace to science education who woke up and was like "Oh shit, I don't want to be an absolute fucking disgrace anymore" isn't fucking newsworthy or inspiring. It's bare minimum expectations of a decent fucking human being.

No amount of apologies will be enough from people who spread this religiously-backed bullshit misinformation. It has held back human society for fucking hundreds of years now.

People should have woken the fuck up when Galileo was punished by the church for promoting Heliocentrism. The Inquisition basically threatened him with death for telling the truth. Why the fuck people still follow this religious horseshit is a mystery to me other than people like this chucklefuck parrot it half her life.

There are so many people in these comments calling her stupid for believing in the ideas in the first place. You have to keep in mind that these ideas are what she would have grown up around all her life and would have been told to her by those around her. You should be happy for people who escape these ideals, not critical that they held them in the first place. It does no one any good

I’ve lived in the South. There is immense social pressure to not even consider climate change as real alongside all the outright lies and rationalizations about climate change being pushed constantly that you don’t even want to open your mouth to publicly question denialism. You don’t want to deal with the shit you might get for speaking up. It’s like being an atheist. You learn to dodge the issue if you don’t want to deal with either the ignorance or the grief.

I never bothered to look into it but I'm sure it's a hoax. I heard it somewhere so it must be true

goddamn brainless morons everywhere and they all fucking vote. She *should * feel embarrassed.

She’ll burn like the rest of us on this fiery hellscape we’re creating.

I was doubtful it was mostly man made, but listened to the experts when they told us what was what. Regardless, WTF wouldn't we support conservation and not polluting regardless? We have reversed rivers literally being on fire with all the oil in them. Without enforced regulation, we get where we are now.

I’m glad she found her way out of the right wing disinformation sphere. A lot of folks have relatives that still haven’t made it out, and would be happy with them coming to their senses now, even if it’s later than it could have been.

My husband didn't get home from work until late, so I would have four or five hours at home by myself every day, always with the kitchen radio on, tuned to conservative stations.

We listened to Rush Limbaugh, a radio host known for his controversial opinions on topics such as race, LGBT rights and women, and I would hear him every day for two hours.

He would talk about how climate change was just a hoax.

Up to that point, I had been exposed to a lot of misinformation about evolution in my church groups, but I had studied the theory of evolution at university, so I was equipped to spot it.

But I didn't have that same skill set for climate change.

My conviction that climate change was a hoax solidified when I heard Limbaugh talk about Climategate. It was a controversy involving research from the University of East Anglia. Only much later did I learn that the material was twisted and taken out of context.

...

I craved intellectual stimulation, so I kept the radio on while I was cooking dinner or while driving in my car. But there were only a few hours of Rush Limbaugh each day.

That's when the big turning point came.

I tuned into NPR, a US non-profit broadcaster. I don't remember which show it was, or the specific news story, but I remember how they described the issue in a completely different way from what I had heard on my usual stations. And it sounded so reasonable.

I realised how much my social network had changed since I had stopped teaching. At school, I was around people from all over the world, gay or straight, conservative and liberals.

Without that school environment, all I had in my social circle was my church group.

Had a degree in zoology and taught science.

I studied social science and law. I see the evidence of climate change everywhere I look.

I can see the insects and bacteria that aren't supposed to be anywhere near me killing off the native species. When n was a kid you would drive for twenty minutes on a summer night and have to wash your windows from all the splattered bugs. You can see there are no more bugs on the window any more.

She has no excuse other than she is a gullible fool. As far as I'm concerned, someone who was fooled so badly has no business with a platform. If she can be tricked as to something so readily apparent and obvious, nothing she says has any credibility. How does she not completely implode upon realizing she could be wrong about literally everything she thinks she knows?

I think the community thing is a big part of these sort of weird anti-science movements that people don't always think about. I watched a documentary about Flat Earthers a while ago and that was one of my big takeaways from it, that a lot of people are there just for the sense of community and belonging, and if it means they have to convince themselves the Earth is flat then so be it.

Climate Denial is a slightly different bag because they've done actual real damage to the world and everything living on it, but I can see how people fall into it, kind of.

But either way I don't suppose it much matters at this point, I get the feeling that we're pretty much fucked anyway.

“I’ve been rowing the opposite way for years, now I finally stopped.” Cool, here’s a cookie, Sharon. Also we’re all gonna die. Thx.

To move away from those people meant leaving behind an entire community at a time when I didn't have many friends.

maybe you didn't have many friends because of the way you acted?