The Kind of Community I Intend to Run

A statement of community culture for adaptive-resiliency.info/, Climate Tribe Social, SDL5, and the current and future projects of Climate Change Community LLC.

This Is Not a Terms of Service Page

This is something more personal than a Terms of Service page. Formal Terms of Service, privacy policies, and community guidelines have their place, and every serious platform needs them. But legal language does not fully explain the culture of a community, the judgment of the people responsible for it, or the line its leadership is willing to defend.

So I want to be clear about the kind of environment I intend to build and protect across adaptive-resiliency.info/, Climate Tribe Social, SDL5, and the other projects of Climate Change Community LLC. These spaces are meant for learning, honest conversation, climate and ecological awareness, creativity, cooperation, and the difficult work of helping people become more resilient in a changing world. They are not being built as arenas where cruelty is mistaken for debate, intimidation is excused as personality, or deliberate deception is rewarded because it generates attention.

I want people to feel free to question, challenge, disagree, teach, learn, change their minds, and sometimes get things wrong. I do not want them to feel that participating requires accepting harassment, humiliation, stalking, hate, threats, or manipulation as the price of being online. Those are two very different things.

The Internet Has Already Taught Us What Happens When Abuse Is Treated as “Just Part of Being Online”

One reason I take this seriously is that the history of online communities has already given us enough warnings. The early promise of the internet was that people could find one another across distance, share knowledge, build communities, and give a voice to people who might otherwise never meet. That promise was real. But so was the darker lesson: when a platform refuses to establish and enforce norms, the most aggressive participants can begin setting the culture for everyone else.

Pew Research Center has tracked this problem for years. In its surveys, the share of U.S. adults reporting some form of online harassment rose from 35 percent in 2014 to 41 percent in 2017, and stood at 41 percent again in its September 2020 survey. The headline number stopped climbing. What happened underneath it did not.

The share reporting severe forms of harassment — physical threats, stalking, sexual harassment, or sustained harassment — rose in every wave the Center measured: 15 percent in 2014, 18 percent in 2017, 25 percent in 2020. The share who had experienced multiple types of abuse rose from 16 percent to 28 percent over the same period. In other words, roughly the same number of people were being harassed, and what was happening to them was getting worse.

That 2020 survey remains the Center’s most recent full study of the subject, so those figures are now several years old. More recent measurement comes from elsewhere. The Anti-Defamation League’s 2024 survey found that 22 percent of U.S. adults had experienced severe harassment on social media in the previous twelve months, up from 18 percent the year before, with reported physical threats rising from 7 percent to 10 percent. Fifty-six percent reported experiencing online hate or harassment at some point in their lives.

Those two sets of numbers are not directly comparable, and I am not going to pretend they are. Pew asked about lifetime experience across the internet generally. ADL asked about the previous twelve months on social media specifically. Different instruments, different questions, different populations. What they share is a direction.

And behind every percentage is a person deciding whether it is still worth speaking, participating, or returning. A community can technically remain “open” while becoming practically unusable for the people who are being targeted. I do not consider that openness. I consider it a failure of stewardship.

Firm Moderation Is Not the Opposite of Community

There is also evidence that enforcement can change behavior. In 2015, Reddit banned several communities for violations of its anti-harassment policy. Researchers later examined more than 100 million Reddit posts and comments using causal inference methods to see what happened. Among users from two of the banned communities who remained on Reddit, the use of hate-related language fell by at least 80 percent relative to matched control groups. The researchers also checked whether the problem simply migrated: many other subreddits received an influx of displaced users, and those subreddits showed no significant increase in hate speech. The receiving communities did not inherit the behavior.

I want to be careful about what that study does and does not show. The researchers also found that a larger-than-expected number of users from the banned communities stopped using Reddit altogether. Where those people went, and what they did there, the study cannot tell us. The honest summary is the one the authors themselves used: the ban worked for Reddit. That is a narrower claim than “banning works,” and I would rather state the narrower claim accurately than the broader one loosely.

But even the narrow version challenges the familiar assertion that enforcing standards is automatically pointless, authoritarian, or destined to make things worse. Sometimes drawing a boundary is exactly what allows healthier participation to continue.

That is the approach I intend to take. I would rather lose a disruptive member than lose ten thoughtful people who quietly stop participating because they no longer feel safe. I would rather remove a popular account than teach everyone else that popularity buys immunity. I would rather be criticized for enforcing a clear standard than become afraid to protect the people who trusted me to provide a decent space.

Disagreement Is Welcome. Abuse Is Not.

There will be disagreement in these communities. There should be. Climate policy, energy systems, adaptation, conservation, technology, economics, artificial intelligence, community resilience, and political strategy all involve real choices and legitimate disagreements. Members do not need to share identical political beliefs, backgrounds, life experiences, or preferred solutions in order to participate.

What matters is how disagreement is handled. Challenge an argument. Ask for evidence. Point out an error. Offer a different interpretation. Explain why you think a proposed solution is unrealistic, unjust, too expensive, too slow, too risky, or simply wrong. Strong disagreement can be useful when it is aimed at ideas rather than at degrading people.

What is not welcome is the attempt to dominate a conversation through:

• insults, ridicule, slurs, or discriminatory abuse

• threats, intimidation, or dogpiling

• stalking, doxxing, or impersonation

• sexual harassment

• repeated bad-faith disruption

• attempts to follow a member across platforms in order to frighten or punish them

I will not ask the target of that behavior to become endlessly patient while the person causing the harm is given unlimited chances to continue.

Climate Science Is Not a Hazing Ritual We Must Re-Litigate Forever

Climate discussion deserves another distinction. These communities are not designed as debate stages for whether human-caused climate change exists. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded in its Sixth Assessment Report that it is “unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean, and land.”

That does not mean every climate claim is automatically correct, every projection is certain, or every proposed policy should escape criticism. Science advances through evidence, uncertainty, revision, and scrutiny. But there is a difference between good-faith scientific discussion and repeatedly recycling claims whose purpose is to confuse, delay, or derail.

The IPCC has assessed that difference directly. In the same assessment cycle, its Working Group II report found with high confidence that rhetoric and misinformation about climate change, along with the deliberate undermining of science, have contributed to misperceptions of the scientific consensus, to manufactured uncertainty, to risk and urgency being disregarded, and to dissent. It found with medium confidence that vested interests generated much of that rhetoric. This is not an activist talking point. It is a finding in the world’s most heavily reviewed scientific assessment.

History makes the distinction especially important. A 2023 peer-reviewed study in Science evaluated every available global-warming projection produced by Exxon and ExxonMobil scientists between 1977 and 2003 — sixteen projections drawn from company records and peer-reviewed publications. Depending on the accuracy metric used, between 63 and 83 percent of those projections were consistent with subsequent observed warming. Their average projected warming, 0.20 °C per decade, was statistically indistinguishable from the 0.19 °C per decade projected by independent academic and government models, and their average skill score of 72 percent was at least as good. The company’s scientists correctly rejected the idea of a coming ice age, accurately anticipated when human-caused warming would first be detected, and produced a reasonable estimate of the carbon budget for holding warming below 2 °C.

The same study documented that on several points the company’s public statements contradicted its own scientific data.

That history is one reason I will not treat deliberate climate disinformation as merely another harmless “side” that deserves unlimited space. The consequences of information failure are not theoretical. Delay affects infrastructure, public health, ecosystems, food and water systems, disaster preparation, insurance, migration, and the choices communities make about their future.

This concern is now receiving sustained international attention. The Global Initiative for Information Integrity on Climate Change was launched by the United Nations, UNESCO, and the Government of Brazil at the G20 Leaders’ Summit in Rio de Janeiro in November 2024. On November 12, 2025, at COP30 in Belém, that initiative launched the Declaration on Information Integrity on Climate Change, committing signatories to promote accurate, evidence-based climate information in line with international human rights law and the principles of the Paris Agreement. COP30’s final Mutirão Decision recognized information integrity as essential to effective climate action — the first time the issue has been formally embedded in international climate governance. More than a dozen countries have since joined, alongside UN Climate Change, the World Meteorological Organization, the OECD, and civil society partners.

The principle is simple enough to state in the words UN Secretary-General António Guterres used when he welcomed the Declaration: “We cannot achieve climate action without information integrity.”

The problem has not shrunk in the meantime. The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2026 ranked mis- and disinformation the second most severe short-term global risk and the fourth most severe long-term risk, ahead of almost everything except environmental risks themselves.

Being Wrong Is Not the Same as Lying

At the same time, I do not want a culture in which people become afraid to ask a question because they might use the wrong word or repeat something inaccurate. People learn by asking. People arrive with different levels of knowledge. Sometimes a person shares bad information because they genuinely believed it. That calls for correction, evidence, and conversation.

Deliberate deception is different. So is a pattern of ignoring corrections, manufacturing evidence, impersonating experts, deceptively editing material, repeatedly posting claims already shown to be false, or using misinformation as a tool to provoke and exhaust a community. Moderation should be capable of recognizing the difference between a mistake and a campaign.

The standard I want is not “agree with me.” The standard is intellectual honesty. Show your work. Use credible sources. Be willing to correct a claim when the evidence changes. If you are making an opinion argument, present it as opinion. If you are making a factual claim, expect people to ask what supports it.

The Standard Applies to Me First

I should say plainly that this section is not decorative. Everything I have written above is a standard I have to meet before I can ask anyone else to meet it.

That is why this piece tells you that the Pew figures are from 2020 rather than presenting them as current. It is why it says the Reddit ban worked for Reddit rather than claiming that banning works everywhere. It is why the Pew and ADL numbers are presented as measuring different things rather than stacked together to look like a single trend line.

None of those admissions weaken the argument. Each of them is the argument. A community that only demands rigor from the people it disagrees with has not established a standard. It has established a weapon.

If I get something wrong here, I would rather a member correct me publicly than have the error sit uncorrected because nobody wanted to embarrass the person who runs the place.

Privacy Is Part of Safety

People should not have to surrender unnecessary personal information in order to belong. Not everyone can safely use a real name, photograph, employer, location, or other identifying details online. Some people have experienced stalking, domestic abuse, political harassment, workplace retaliation, or other circumstances that make privacy especially important. Others simply value a reasonable boundary between their offline life and their online participation.

That means doxxing, exposing another member’s identity, posting private correspondence without a legitimate reason and appropriate permission, publishing screenshots from private community areas to shame someone, or gathering personal information in order to intimidate a member will be treated seriously. The fact that information can be found somewhere on the internet does not automatically make its weaponization acceptable here.

Members should also respect confidentiality when another person shares something personal in a community space. Trust can disappear much faster than it is built. I want people to understand that protecting another member’s dignity is part of participating in the community, not an optional courtesy.

If Young People Participate, the Standard Must Be Higher — Not Lower

Any cCc project that opens participation to minors has an additional responsibility. Young people should never be treated as smaller adults who are simply expected to navigate adult risks on their own. Youth participation requires stronger privacy controls, careful moderation, reporting mechanisms, appropriate limits on private messaging and adult-to-minor contact, and clear responses to grooming, sexual exploitation, coercion, harassment, hate, threats, and attempts to move young people into unsafe private channels.

I do not believe a community should invite young people in first and invent the protections later. The protections come first. Access comes after the safeguards are designed, configured, and tested.

No Member, Donor, Expert, or Friend Is Too Important to Moderate

This point matters enough to say plainly: status will not purchase immunity. A paid subscriber does not own part of the community. A donor does not receive a harassment exemption. A person with impressive credentials does not get to humiliate beginners. A large following does not make threats acceptable. A friend does not get a secret rulebook.

I intend to listen, investigate when facts are unclear, distinguish conflict from abuse, and avoid acting impulsively. Fairness matters. Context matters. People deserve the opportunity to explain themselves when the situation reasonably allows it.

But there are behaviors for which I do not need to pretend uncertainty. Credible threats, doxxing, stalking, grooming, predatory behavior, targeted hate, serious intimidation, or an obvious campaign to harm another member may justify immediate removal. In less severe situations, the response may begin with a correction, content removal, warning, cooling-off period, or temporary suspension. Repeated behavior can lead to permanent removal.

I am not frightened by that responsibility. Moderation is not a popularity contest. If I am responsible for the space, then I am also responsible for making decisions when a line has been crossed.

Protecting a Community Does Not Mean Controlling Every Conversation

Strong boundaries should not become an excuse for arbitrary control. I do not want a community where moderators silence criticism, protect leadership from scrutiny, or label every uncomfortable question “disruptive.” Members should be able to criticize cCc decisions, challenge something I write, question a moderation practice, and recommend better ways of doing things.

There is a meaningful difference between dissent and sabotage. A person who says, “I think this policy is wrong, and here is why,” is participating. A person who targets members, floods discussions, spreads fabricated material, or repeatedly derails every conversation so nobody else can use the space is doing something else.

The goal is not obedience. The goal is a community capable of learning, disagreeing, cooperating, and getting useful work done without allowing the most destructive behavior to consume everyone’s attention.

What I Hope Members Will Protect With Me

I can set standards and make moderation decisions, but culture cannot be created by moderators alone. It is built through thousands of smaller choices: whether someone welcomes a newcomer, corrects a mistake without humiliating the person who made it, refuses to join a pile-on, checks a source before reposting it, reports something dangerous, gives another member room to speak, or admits, “I was wrong about that.”

Those choices are part of adaptive resiliency too. Resilience is not only about stronger infrastructure, emergency plans, food systems, energy, or technology. It is also about whether people can maintain trust, cooperation, judgment, and mutual protection under stress. A community that cannot manage conflict without turning on itself will have difficulty responding to larger crises together.

That is why the atmosphere of these platforms matters to me. We are talking about the Climate and Ecological Emergency, biodiversity loss, social strain, displacement, technological change, and the future being inherited by younger generations. These are serious subjects. Serious subjects do not require joyless spaces, but they do require spaces where people are not forced to waste their energy defending themselves from needless cruelty.

The Line I Am Willing to Hold

I want these communities to be warm, curious, creative, sometimes funny, sometimes challenging, and always capable of growth. I want people who have never thought of themselves as “experts” to discover that they have something worth contributing. I want experts to be able to share knowledge without being turned into targets. I want people to be able to change their minds without being mocked for what they believed yesterday. I want disagreement without dehumanization.

And I want anyone considering joining to understand something before they arrive: I will not build engagement by sacrificing the safety of the people who create the engagement.

If you come to learn, contribute, question, create, cooperate, or respectfully challenge ideas, there is room for you. If you make an honest mistake, there is room to correct it. If you are angry about the state of the world and can express that anger without turning another human being into your target, there is room for that too.

But if your purpose is to bully, stalk, threaten, deceive, exploit, intimidate, dehumanize, or make other members afraid to participate, I am not afraid to show you the door.

That is not a failure of openness. It is part of the promise I am making to the people who choose to enter.

Sources and Further Reading

Online harassment measurement

• Pew Research Center, The State of Online Harassment (January 13, 2021), including trend data from its 2014, 2017, and 2020 surveys — https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/01/13/the-state-of-online-harassment/

• Anti-Defamation League, Online Hate and Harassment: The American Experience 2024 — https://www.adl.org/resources/report/online-hate-and-harassment-american-experience-2024

Moderation and enforcement

• Eshwar Chandrasekharan, Umashanthi Pavalanathan, Anirudh Srinivasan, Adam Glynn, Jacob Eisenstein, and Eric Gilbert, You Can’t Stay Here: The Efficacy of Reddit’s 2015 Ban Examined Through Hate Speech, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 1, CSCW (2017) — https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3134666

Climate science and the documented record

• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Sixth Assessment Report, Working Group I: The Physical Science Basis (2021) — https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/

• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Sixth Assessment Report, Working Group II: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, Chapter 14: North America (2022) — https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/chapter/chapter-14/

• Geoffrey Supran, Stefan Rahmstorf, and Naomi Oreskes, Assessing ExxonMobil’s Global Warming Projections, Science 379, eabk0063 (2023) — https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk0063

Information integrity

• United Nations, Global Initiative for Information Integrity on Climate Change — https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/information-integrity

• UNESCO, Information Integrity on Climate Change — https://www.unesco.org/en/information-integrity-climate-change

• UNFCCC, Countries seal landmark declaration at COP30 — marking first time information integrity is prioritized at a UN Climate Conference (November 12, 2025) — https://unfccc.int/news/countries-seal-landmark-declaration-at-cop30-marking-first-time-information-integrity-is-prioritized

• World Economic Forum, The Global Risks Report 2026 — https://www.weforum.org/publications/global-risks-report-2026/

Companion posts: A Kinder Way Forward makes the case for why kindness and information integrity belong in the same conversation. The Climate Emergency Control Center sets out what the Response Hub is and how to take part.

Warm regards,

Mr. Alvarez

Content Curator, Climate Change Community LLC and its current and future projects

Compiled & Mr. Alvarez’s Thoughts | AI Enhanced.

AI is used to enhance my creativity and thinking.