A pertinent article:
The article links to this, which is an interesting project:
Unfortunately, the situation in the States is far worse than these problems of convincing somewhat rational people what’s more or less an immediate crisis. Even if we manage to get a different administration, I doubt our culture will be righting itself for quite some time. We’ve been sliding down this slope of schizoid thinking for nearly 20 years now. It seemed like the Obama presidency would correct it, but it just accelerated during his tenure.
From “What is QAnon? A not-so-brief introduction to the conspiracy theory that’s eating America”:
Earlier this year, in March, I was talking to a friend about COVID-19 and the national lockdown. He’s 10 years older than me and lives in a small town in the Midwest. I live in Long Beach, California. While chatting with him on the phone about all the unexpected difficulties that have arisen from teaching my English classes online, he suddenly volunteered the opinion that COVID-19 would be a positive development in 2020.
“Yeah?” I asked. “How so?”
He proceeded to tell me, with complete sincerity, that after Trump is re-elected in 2020, he will deliver “free energy” to the people of America. Not only that, he’s also going to abolish the income tax. Right now, at this very moment , United States troops have been deployed underground where they’re busy “cleaning out” covert subterranean tunnels, “saving hundreds of children from satanic slaves,” and kicking out the “black hats.” Without skipping a beat, my friend then insisted that news of this game-changing development would be “coming out” soon.
“It’s a great thing,” he told me in measured tones. “Trump will have to use the Emergency Broadcast System to give this news to the American people because the media keeps lying and social media like Twitter and YouTube are censoring and deleting videos that report reality the way it actually is.”
Furthermore, my friend said in tones of absolute certainty, Trump supporters working behind the scenes (referred to by my friend as the “white hats”) had recently wrested control of the entire Google corporation from devil worshippers, which is why you could now retrieve “accurate information” from that particular search engine.
What scares me is that possibly humanness manifests in other parts of the universe, i.e. other planets, and very much likely the same situation takes place there. I mean, the rupa grasping aggregate must take other shapes, but certainly the impact and effect to the surroundings must be the same… 
Reminds me of SN15.3
At Savatthi. There the Blessed One said: “From an inconstruable beginning comes transmigration. A beginning point is not evident, though beings hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving are transmigrating & wandering on. What do you think, monks: Which is greater, the tears you have shed while transmigrating & wandering this long, long time—crying & weeping from being joined with what is displeasing, being separated from what is pleasing—or the water in the four great oceans?”
“Long have you (repeatedly) experienced the death of a father… the death of a brother… the death of a sister… the death of a son… the death of a daughter… loss with regard to relatives… loss with regard to wealth… loss with regard to disease. The tears you have shed over loss with regard to disease while transmigrating & wandering this long, long time—crying & weeping from being joined with what is displeasing, being separated from what is pleasing—are greater than the water in the four great oceans.“Why is that? From an inconstruable beginning comes transmigration. A beginning point is not evident, though beings hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving are transmigrating & wandering on. Long have you thus experienced stress, experienced pain, experienced loss, swelling the cemeteries—enough to become disenchanted with all fabricated things, enough to become dispassionate, enough to be released.”
But you know what? I have an alternate theory. (After all, this is the Watercooler!)
My theory is that Artificial Intelligence, Robots etc are simply another step forward in the Evolution of Species. Life is preparing to leave the planet… just like the tadpole becomes a frog to leave the pond. Mere flesh cannot bear interstellar space, but the rupa of metal and silicon can!
It turns out, rationality is a lot thinner than we supposed.
One of the devastating results of conspiracy thinking is, as the quote you give so well illustrates, that people—even in the same family—end up living in entirely different realities. There are endless stories of people watching their relatives, often but not always, elderly, getting sucked into Fox news, and now QAnon. Heck, I’ve heard it, even in Oz, the shift into this bizarro alt-reality. It’s really devastating.
This conversation with mental health professionals is a good primer for how this happens.
Rats! We’re all going to die. 
It seems I’m fairly late to the topic. Something which hasn’t been discussed is the origin of the article in the original post. To the uninitiated, it may seem like the study was published in Nature. In fact, it was published in Scientific Reports, which has radically different editorial policies than Nature itself—even though it is a subsidiary of Nature Research. Scientific Reports accepts far more manuscripts (~48% vs. ~7%), has a much lower impact factor (4.0 vs. 42.8), and has been involved in far more controversies, including publishing junk science and plagiarized manuscripts, the latter leading to the resignation of 19 editorial board members (Scientific Reports - Wikipedia). This should be enough to remain somewhat suspicious of the author’s claims regarding catastrophic collapse.
Thanks Robbie. For those of us outside academia, can you give a little explainer on how to go about checking these details for journals?
I think, in general, I always like to go back to the primary source of information. E.g., a bit of searching reveals that the Bloomberg article shared by Gabriel above is based on Guarino et al. (2020), published in Nature Climate Change. I happen to be already familiar with this journal, but if I wouldn’t have been, I’d first want to roughly know what kind of journal this is. (Top-of-its-field? Predatory? Something in-between?) From its Wikipedia page, I notice that it seems to have a high impact factor of 20.9 (but be careful: interpreting impact factors is tricky). Based on that I suspect Nature Climate Change (let’s abbreviate this as NCC) is a top journal in the field of environmental sciences, but to be sure I check with Google Scholar’s Metrics tool. Out of all journals, NCC is ranked 70th in terms of its h5-index (for a brief explanation of h5-indices, see Google Scholar Metrics Help). But how does it compare to other journals in the field? If the top 100 contains 20 environmental science journals, NCC might not be top-tier after all. So we plug in the relevant category and subcategory: “Life Sciences & Earth Sciences” and “Environmental Sciences,” and the top EnvSci journals are Environmental Science & Technology, Nature Climate Change, and Science of the Total Environment. So, NCC seems to be a top journal in its field after all. Coming back to Guarino et al. (2020), we also need to know what type of content this is! It’s a misconception that academic journals only publish peer-reviewed research. This step may seem like nitpicking, but it’s crucial—and super easy to do after a few times. Most journals include different types of content in each issue, which are subject to varying levels of scrutiny. For example, here is the list of content types for NCC: Content Types | Nature Climate Change. Notice the difference between (a) articles (“a substantial, novel research study of high quality and general interest to the broad climate change research community” which are “always peer-reviewed”), (b) comments (“opinionated pieces that focus on a topical issue in climate research that is relevant to policy, the economy or society” which “may be peer-reviewed at the editors’ discretion”), and (c ) perspectives (“intended to provide a forum for authors to discuss models and ideas from a personal viewpoint. They are more forward looking and/or speculative than Review Articles”). It turns out that Guarino et al. (2020) is an article, and hence peer-reviewed and supposed to be reliable. Now, what about the first arctic summer? Will it arrive in 15 years as the Bloomberg headline wants us to believe? Guarino and co-authors write that “The Last Interglacial (LIG), a warmer period 130,000–116,000 years before present, is a potential analogue for future climate change” (abstract), and “The ability of the HadGEM3 model to realistically simulate the very warm LIG Arctic climate provides independent support for predictions of ice-free conditions by summer 2035” (conclusion). This already sounds more nuanced (and more sciency!) than the Bloomberg headline. Natural questions (which I won’t try to answer) might be: “To what extent can the last interglacial be considered analogous with the present?”, “What about other models besides HadGEM3?”, and “What other evidence or counterevidence is there for an ice-free 2035 summer?”
So far, we have (1) checked the reliability of the source, (2) its type, and (3) what it actually says about an impeding Arctic summer. We also briefly considered potential limitations of the study in the form of follow-up questions. What we haven’t done is (4) scrutinizing the article itself. (Who are the authors? What are their backgrounds and affiliations? Any hidden or non-hidden conflicts of interest? What data and methodology did they use? Has another research group independently confirmed their findings? Etc.) Such due diligence takes a lot of effort and practice, but luckily (1)-(3) already weeds out a lot of junk science, and gives a more nuanced understanding of whatever information we find.
Thanks so very much Robbie, this is fantastic. It’s so important to know that there are ways and means of assessing such things.
I remember reading about Dr Pachauri in the newspapers. Memory is a funny thing 
. I remember the scandal and the trial by media as well as his resignation. But I have zero recollection of his having being cleared by the investigation committee or of his having won his libel cases!
Yes, I saw this one. The ice sheet collapse in particular seems to consistently outpace projections, yet the climate models are still using older data. Even the latest IPCC projections don’t keep up with the data. We’ll see how this affects the next major IPCC report, which I believe is due in 2022. No doubt Covid-19 will make that deadline harder to keep.
It seems that even the self regulating mechanisms were broken by us…
There’s been some truly devastating news recently.
Sadly this is a real risk…