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Home » David Roberts on Climate Change is Simple at TEDxTheEvergreenStateCollege (Transcript)

David Roberts on Climate Change is Simple at TEDxTheEvergreenStateCollege (Transcript)

David Roberts

David Roberts, former climate and energy writer at Grist.org Presents Climate Change is Simple at TEDxTheEvergreenStateCollege. Here is the full transcript.

Listen to the MP3 Audio here: Climate change is simple by David Roberts at TEDxTheEvergreenStateCollege

TRANSCRIPT: 

Hi, this talk started out of a Twitter conversation. I haven’t decided whether to be embarrassed about that or not.

But I was on Twitter one day and a relatively prominent left of center pundit, piped up and said “You know, climate change seems like a really big deal, why are so few people talking about it? Why have so few thought leaders made it their signature issue?”

And another reasonably prominent left of center pundit piped up and said “Well, for my part, the reason I don’t talk about it is it seems really complicated, I don’t feel like I have a good grasp on all the science and so I just don’t feel qualified to go out and assert things publicly about it.”

You know, anybody who has ever so much as mentioned climate change on television or on the internet will understand why this person thinks the way they do. Any time you mention it, the hordes descend, bearing complicated stories about the medieval ice age, or sunspots, or water vapor, and there is a lot of myths about climate change borne by these climate skeptics but to debunk those myths you have to know, you have to go online, and research, and read, and be able to respond to them in detail, and a lot of people just find that prospect dreary, and so they don’t bother. And this, of course, drives me crazy.

So I piped up on Twitter and said “You know, climate change is not actually that complicated.

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