Hi Doug,

As another commenter pointed out, writing about climate change and "doing something about it" are not mutually exclusive.

Both because, as you write near the end, "communicating with other people has an essential role in addressing climate change," and also because people can write and take other actions at the same time, such as reducing their direct emissions, lobbying politicians, etc.

If I can dig out your actual criticism, it seems to be with "doomers," though I think that risks conflating doom with apathy. It's unresolvable whether alarmism and doom actual frightens people enough to spur them into action or inaction, or whether optimism engenders a can-do spirit or passive complacency.

That leaves us with a simple metric: the more we talk about it, the better. We humans have an evolutionary bias to elevate imminent threats at the risk of de-prioritizing those more far off and abstract. So thinking about it and talking about it on a daily basis helps bring it into the here and now.

I find the climate posts very useful, from those that discuss potential solutions and mitigation efforts to the "scarier" ones with the direst predictions. And I do this all while having made mitigation and adaptation efforts in my own life.

All the best,

TJ