Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 11/30/2009 11:00:10 PM PST by Libloather
I'd rather not know: the psychology of climate denial
PARIS, Dec 1 (AFP) Dec 01, 2009
If the evidence is overwhelming that man-made climate change is already upon us and set to wreak planetary havoc, why do so many people refuse to believe it?
The UN's panel of climate scientists, in a landmark report, described the proof of global warming as "unequivocal." That was two years ago, and since then hundreds of other studies have pointed to an ever-bleaker future, with a potential loss of life numbering in the tens of millions, if not more.
Yet survey after survey from around world reveals deep-seated doubt among the public.
A poll published in Britain on November 14, to cite but one example, found that only 41 percent of respondents accepted as an established fact that human activity was largely responsible for current global warming.
The majority said the link was not proven, that green propaganda was to blame or the world was not heating up at all.
Last week, a private exchange of emails among climate scientists stoked a firestorm of skepticism after it was hacked and posted on the Web.
The memos expressed frustration at the scientists' inability to explain what they described as a temporary slowdown in warming, and discussed ways to counter the campaigns of climate naysayers.
Experts see several explanations for the eagerness with which so many dismiss climate change as overblown or a hoax.
"There is the individual reluctance to give up our comfortable lifestyles -- to travel less, consume less," said Anthony Grayling, a philosophy professor at the University of London and a best-selling author in Britain.
While deeply anchored in the West, this resistance also extends to emerging economies such as China, India and Brazil where a burgeoning middle class is only today tasting the fruits of a lifestyle they have waited so long and worked so hard to obtain.
For Tim Kasser, a professor of psychology at Knox University in Galesburg, Illinois, the reality of climate change impinges on core aspects of our identity.
"We are told a thousand times a day, notably through advertising, that the way to a happy, successful and meaningful life is through consumption," he said.
"But now scientists and environmentalists come along and say part of the problem is that we are consuming too much or in the wrong way."
Yet there may also be a darker explanation. It is the human instinct to shut out or modify a terrifying truth: that the world as we know it is heading for a smash.
"It's a paradox: when it comes to disasters, people do not allow themselves to believe what they know," explained Jean-Pierre Dupuy, a professor of social philosophy at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris.
"Because everybody is in denial -- or would like to be in denial -- and would prefer to not shoulder too much of the responsibility for dealing with the problem, you have a kind of disconnect here," Grayling said.
Even scientists reluctantly pushed by their growing sense of alarm into launching public appeals for action have trouble coping.
When Clive Hamilton, a professor of public ethics at Australian National University, attended a September climate conference at Oxford tasked with imagining a world warmed by 4.0 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit), he was struck by how researchers spoke among themselves.
"It was very revealing. As they relaxed somewhat, they began to speak about their fears, about losing sleep, not wanting to think about the implications of what they do," he recalled.
Under such circumstances, people are resourceful in finding ways to reassure themselves or turn their backs on the threat posed by climate change.
Some applaud their own environmental virtue: "Changing to compact fluorescent bulbs makes people feel good -- 'I've done my bit for today'," said Kasser, describing a common attitude in the United States.
"Blaming China and India is another great psychological defence mechanism."
A more sophisticated variant is to conclude, with a sigh of resignation. that individual action isn't enough.
"Even if all of us were at our most maximally green, it probably wouldn't make much more than about a 0.5 percent difference," said Grayling in characterising this mentality.
At some point, however, reality may bite.
Hamilton, who is running for Parliament in Australia, said more and more people he meets are having what he calls an "Oh shit!" moment.
"It's that moment when you really get it, when you understand not just intellectually but emotionally that climate change is really happening. I think we will see a rush of that over the next couple of years," he said.
It may take one or more terrible shocks -- national bankruptcies, a major environmental disaster in a vulnerable country like Bangladesh -- for that to happen, said Grayling.
Once it does, "it will be impossible to look back over your shoulder and think, 'it's not true,' or 'there will be a scientific fix, it will all go away'."
Another global warming scientist is born.
With the recent disclosures, Globull Warming has shifted from a religion to a cult. I wouldn’t be surprised to see people defend GW to the point of violence. The Ed Begley Jr. meltdown is a good example of this.
I SO enjoyed that. The B-actor is an ignorant, pompous, insufferable as*. I don't know how his wife stands him.
It made my day to see him frothing at the mouth. He's afraid his only source of income, his tv show based on all things green, might be evaporating before his eyes.
What a twerp.
Without open peer review, there is no science to the “Science of Climate Change”. The hacked emails and docs show an effort and an agenda of hiding or suppressing instead of sharing data with those who might either debunk or validate Climate Change theorists’ contentions. Instead of science, we hear vindictive accusations and excuses. Seems to me that there is nothing here to discuss. They have no evidence, and that is what they are so insanely and viciously trying to obfuscate. They fool no one. I feel rightly vindicated, and yet observe with pity and disgust the way formerly respected scientists throw away any semblance of intellectual integrity.
The author sure knows how to put lipstick on a pig.
The emails discussed destruction of data to keep their conclusions from being fact-checked; faking research and smearing critics.
What's this guy got in his bong?
Its funny how many people think that, out there, somewhere, everyone else is traveling and consuming just way too much and by Jove we've got to do something about it.
I wonder what he would think if "doing something about it" meant that philosophy professors had to work as greeters at WalMart.
In a truly green paradise I don't know that we can afford the carbon footprint of a guy who thinks about thinking and takes up whole classrooms teaching other young folk to think about thinking. Huge carbon cost there for too little gain. He can think about thinking while greeting the hoi polloi coming to buy low-carbon chinese imported goods at WalMart.
There a major environmental disaster in Bangladesh ever other year. OF course, the warmists will exploit any tragedy for their own propaganda.
maybe its the messengers
Ed seems like he's off his God damned rocker.
If he wants to live like a monkey in a tree with his wacko-enviroreligion, more power to him, but I don't think he should be able to force, or get the government to force us, to do the same.
It was fun watching that again. Ed Begley Jr. is an intellectual microbe.
Thanks to Google or other search engines, you can easily see how a story is promoted/reported... or not. The MSM can decide what is news, and they have decided that Climategate is definitely not.
This test searches a number of leading news sites for the term "climategate". This test is quite revealing, for on the left-wing sites where it appears - which are very few - it is either in an opinion column, where it is disparaged or in a blog comment.
One might argue that they may use a different term for the fraud, which is fair enough... however, for that reason, I included the "Huffington Post", a left-wing Liberal site/forum/blog where the term has been published THOUSANDS of times - all of which makes it more conspicuously absent from the MSM. The left-wingers are using the term very freely amongst one-another - but you wouldn't know that such a term even existed if you relied upon the MSM for your news.
I have constructed a chart to show actual numerical results according to Google site searches done today.
Using Google, you can do a simple test to immediately see press bias by searching each site individually for the term, and simply counting the results pages.
For example, to search CNN for the term "climategate" simply type the following into Google and see:
| site:www.cnn.com climategate |
Here are the results of this press bias test:
| Site | Search Term | Results |
|---|---|---|
| CNN | site:www.cnn.com climategate | 0 |
| BBC | site:www.bbc.com climategate | 0 |
| NY Times | site:www.nytimes.com climategate | 5 (in comments mostly) |
| MSNBC | site:www.MSNBC.com climategate | 0 |
| CBS (See BS) | site:www.cbs.com climategate | 0 |
| ABC News | site:www.abcnews.com climategate | 0 |
| Wall St. Journal | site:www.WSJ.com climategate | 1 |
| Financial Times | site:www.FT.com climategate | 8 (comment/Opinion) |
| NY Post | site:www.NYPost.com climategate | 36 |
| Sky News (UK) | site:news.sky.com climategate | 68 |
| Huffington Post | site:www.huffingtonpost.com climategate | 6,530 |
| Fox News | site:www.foxnews.com climategate | 855 |
| Free Republic | site:www.freerepublic.com climategate | 13,400 |
While CNN has ZERO pages on Climategate, they have more than 100 about the Whitehouse Gatecrashers.
There are about 39 hits in a search for Newsweek, but they are all people arguing about it in forum/comment posts or disparaging it.
A cult.... only without the mass suicides.
“Yet there may also be a darker explanation. It is the human instinct to shut out or modify a terrifying truth: that the world as we know it is heading for a smash.”
“It’s a paradox: when it comes to disasters, people do not allow themselves to believe what they know,” explained Jean-Pierre Dupuy, a professor of social philosophy at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris.
Like the UK, France, and other European countries regarding Germany in the 1930`s. Deep down they knew what was coming, but buried their heads in the sand and told each other,,,”no problem, everything is under control.”
The real science is fairly straightforward. The hypothesis that greenhouse gases can cause climate change can be tested by empirical historical data. The earth has experienced GHG levels ten and twenty times higher than today. If GHG levels affected climate, the historical record would show it. Right?
We do not need a computer model or any other data to address the hypothesis: have historical levels of GHGs ten times today’s levels caused climate change?
1. Carbon dioxide changes over millions of years do not correlate with temperature increases, even though CO2 has been 20 times higher than today in the past. “On the time-scale of hundreds of millions of years, carbon dioxide has sharply declined; its concentration was as much as 20 times the present value at the beginning of the Cambrian Period, 600 million years ago [Berner, 1997]. Yet the climate has not varied all that much and glaciations have occurred throughout geologic time even when CO2 concentrations were high.” S. Fred Singer, “Human Contribution to Climate Change Remains Questionable,” EOS, Transactions, American Geophysical Society, Vol 80, page 183-187, April 20, 1999. Only recently has it been possible to obtain sufficient resolution to demonstrate that the increase in CO2 lags by about 600 years behind the rapid warming that signals deglaciation, the end of an ice age and the beginning of an interglacial warm period [Fischer et al., 1999]. Id. Citing Fischer’s study, CO2 Magazine noted: “Over this immense time span, the three most dramatic warming events experienced on earth were those associated with the terminations of the last three ice ages; and for each and every one of these tremendous global warmings, earth’s air temperature rose well before there was any increase in atmospheric CO2. In fact, the air’s CO2 content did not begin to rise until 400 to 1,000 years after the planet began to warm.” http://www.co2science.org/edit/v2_edit/v2n7edit.htm (1999). In summary, “major past climate changes were either uncorrelated with changes in CO2 or were characterized by temperature changes that preceded changes in CO2 by hundreds to thousands of years.” Testimony of Richard S. Lindzen, MIT, former chairman of NAS Climate Change Panel, before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on May 2. 2001.
References: “[C]hanges in CO2 concentration cannot be claimed to be the cause of changes in air temperature, for the appropriate sequence of events (temperature change following CO2 change) is not only never present, it is actually violated in [at least] half of the record.” (Idso, S.B. 1998. Carbon dioxide and climate in the Vostok ice core, Atmospheric Environment 22: 2341-2342.) Petit et al. reconstructed histories of surface air temperature and atmospheric CO2 concentration from data obtained from a Vostok ice core that covered the prior 420,000 years, determining that during glacial inception “the CO2 decrease lags the temperature decrease by several thousand years” and that “the same sequence of climate forcing operated during each termination.” Petit, J.R., Jouzel, J., Raynaud, D., Barkov, N.I., Barnola, J.-M., Basile, I., Bender, M., Chappellaz, J., Davis, M., Delaygue, G., Delmotte, M., Kotlyakov, V.M., Legrand, M., Lipenkov, V.Y., Lorius, C., Pepin, L., Ritz, C., Saltzman, E., and Stievenard, M. 1999. Climate and atmospheric history of the past 420,000 years from the Vostok ice core, Antarctica. Nature 399: 429-436. Fischer et al. (1999) found that “the time lag of the rise in CO2 concentrations with respect to temperature change is on the order of 400 to 1000 years during all three glacial-interglacial transitions.” Fischer, H., Wahlen, M., Smith, J., Mastroianni, D. and Deck B. 1999. Ice core records of atmospheric CO2 around the last three glacial terminations. Science 283: 1712-1714. The latest study concluded: “the CO2 increase lagged Antarctic deglacial warming by 800 ± 200 years.” Caillon, N., Severinghaus, J.P., Jouzel, J., Barnola, J.-M., Kang, J. and Lipenkov, V.Y. 2003. Timing of atmospheric CO2 and Antarctic temperature changes across Termination III. Science 299: 1728-1731. The CO2 history over 500 million years in one study “exhibits no systematic correspondence with the geologic record of climatic variations at tectonic time scales.” Rothman, D.H. 2002. “Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels for the last 500 million years,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 99: 4167-4171. The “comparison with the geologic record of climatic variations reveals no obvious correspondence.” Rothman (2002). Data from other sources – besides ice cores – supports the same conclusion: the rapid rise in sea level caused by the melting of land-based ice that began approximately 19,000 years ago preceded the post-glacial rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration by about 3,000 years. Clark, P.U. and Mix, A.C. 2000. Ice sheets by volume. Nature 406: 689-690.
Al Gore’s famous stump speech uses slides deliberately done to misrepresent this. He uses 100,000 year intervals to show a correlation between GHG and temperature. But when the periods are broken into 1000 year segments, anyone can see that the temperatures go up first, then 1000 years later the GHG levels go up.
What we are now seeing is global cooling caused by decreased solar radiation. See GLOBAL COOLING: THE COMING CRISIS OF CREDIBLITY, http://mottsblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/global-cooling-coming-crisis-of.html
Nor is the type of bullying tactics used to try to drown out skeptics a new thing. See Landsea resignation from IPCC over deliberately obfuscation of hurricane data: http://mottsblog.blogspot.com/2005/02/more-fraud-at-ipcc.html
and “Why did it take years for Climategate to get press?”
http://mottsblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/why-did-it-take-years-for-climategate.html
Recent data is no better for the alarmists. The atmosphere is not acting like their model, which is no suprise to anyone who follows the technical discussion that they are trying to suppress. “A Little Sanity on Global Warming,”
http://mottsblog.blogspot.com/2004/12/little-sanity-on-global-warming.html
You do not have to believe anyone but the data. All of the links and sources are cited in the above blog posts. To me, the debate was over sometime ago and the alarmists lost.
Randy Mott
President
CEERES Sp. z o.o.
[renewable energy company]
Note: We will likely need more electricity from “all of the above” sources since cooling is worst than warming.
That's a great solution for them, and they have thought about it (Save the planet...kill yourself)
Let's get the talking points memo out!
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