This article, like so many on the same topic, refuses to acknowledge that there is any reason to doubt catastrophic climate change will play out as the alarmists say it will. Predictions of the future based on computer models that are written with built-in assumptions of how the climate will respond to increased concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide are not science. They are just guesses.
Also, it is ludicrous to imagine that scientists are perfectly honest beings who are indifferent to social or financial pressures to hype their predictions. Look what happened to Bjorn Lomborg, as punishment for admitting that climate change is far down the list of threats to real people. The Science is not settled, but brother, it is fixed.
And this is a rich people’s problem. Rich people don’t care about restrictions on energy use because they are always going to be able to drive and fly. They certainly don’t care about the hundreds of millions of people on Earth living without electricity.
And many billions of dollars can be made selling things like solar panels, wind turbines and electric cars. Don’t tell me that the threat of climate change is not a marketing opportunity, with concomitant dangers of corruption, because it is.
Here’s what is likely to happen: Twenty years from now, when it will have become obvious that it is impossible for human beings to restrict the use of fossil fuels, and when the harms done by climate change are minimal, or at least much less than have been prophesied, people are going to shrug and admit that the whole thing was a monsters-under-the-bed story. That’s the way to bet.
The above comment should have been used to illustrate, if not the entire article, certainly the last paragraph.: “The climate debate, Marshall demonstrates, is no longer about carbon dioxide and temperature-change models. It’s about biases, values, and ideology. It’s about the way that social and psychological filters lead us to practice motivated reasoning. Scientists will not have the final word in the public debate on this issue. Instead, people will continue to take positions that are consistent with their pre-existing values. For that reason, efforts to present ever-increasing amounts of data, without attending to those values, will only yield greater resistance and make a social consensus on climate change more elusive.”
Addressing climate change through fear is difficult for politicians to back. It’s the emotional equivalent of fire-and-brimstone evangelism, which is extremely effective for modifying the behavior of youths (who don’t vote), but not seasoned adults who’ve been around long enough to have read Hal Lindsey’s ‘The Late Great Planet Earth’, ‘The Rapture’ and other books on end times prophecy. Once predictions fail to manifest by a certain date, and the more alarming the warnings, the less believable they become. Evangelicals utilize evangelism bridge tracts (pamphlets) to inject guilt/shame, fear of damnation, and panic into unbelievers, and then ask for an immediate response of Faith in order to save and comfort the new convert. Then they’re sent out 2 by 2 to repeat the process. A similar approach might work for climate change, but most people won’t convert until they’re on their deathbed.
In the end, it won’t matter who’s correct. Scientists can also adopt a “wait and see” attitude. How different might the world have been if the French hadn’t lopped off the head of Lavoisier? How often have clerics accused scietists of heresy? Climate change predictions (notably global warming) have been being made since 1955 - earlier if one counts the work of Lomberg and Arrhenius. Most of these have been pretty spot on. In a democracy, people can vote on whether they choose to “believe” and then “act on” the predictions of scientific research. However, we cannot wish away the consequences of well-founded scientific research. Those talking about climate change and global warming were mostly older white men, part of the privileged elite. This in itself ensured that what they had to say wouldn’t be listened to, let alone acted upon.
Climate Change is meaningless to most people. From a narrow human perspective, it’s hard to justify why any one person should care about Climate Change enough to willingly change his or her life. More than likely, he or she holds zero power to implement any kind of policy initiative to combat Climate Change. What can people really do, stop driving their cars, eating meat, and using electricity? That’s not going to happen, and it shouldn’t. No one should be expected to sacrifice their quality of life today for a wispy threat like Climate Change when there’s no guarantee of tomorrow or an afterlife. And who’s NOT going to forgive them, Greta Thunberg and generations of nameless, faceless unborn humans from the future? Give me a break. In my opinion, we are doomed. There’s just no way to really change the trajectory we’re on; it’s too complex, too difficult, too costly, and there’s not enough time. And of course, Climate Change has become a useful Trojan Horse for SJW causes and agendas. There’s nothing like a good ole boogyman to provide an excuse to reorganize society to your liking. Talk of so-called “Climate Racism” and “Climate Justice” will ensure that people dig into a trench and turn down the volume.
Excellent article, and sums up pretty well why appeals to science will not get some people to change. The first comment by Ian is a classic. Almost as if, on cue, someone decides to reinforce exactly what the author suggests. But as my country, Australia, burns, I sit here in despair at the stupidity of views like Ian’s. I am lost. Is the earth flat? DoesElvis still live? Do Martians still land in Area 51? Why not?
Am slightly distressed by the dialectic of the responses - perhaps a diagram would help us: Imagine a continuum - full global warming deniers on one end, complete nihilists seeing immanent destruction on the other.. A Buddhist would say to look for the ‘middle path’ - that’s where the truth is likely to be. Problem - the middle path is rarely dead-center. I imagine it shifting as a result of new data, opposed by cultural bias and politics. Perhaps a more ‘agnostic approach’ is called for - analyzing the situation in terms of statistical possibility rather than emotion?
Such a great range of opinion in so few comments! I’m impressed! These comments all have their value and they all seem to be right to at least some degree.
I think the main problem is that the human lifespan is very short compared to the geological scale the Earth works in. To understand the shifts in our world, you have to look so far beyond our ‘lifetimes’ - and I honestly think most humans just can’t (or won’t) do it.
Our ‘Emotional Reality’ is the world we live in, not what some scientific paper or a magazine says. And because logic needs emotion to work, our own emotional reality skews this logic - hence the Denialists vs the Believers, if you will.
Maybe people just need to realise that humans aren’t as smart as we’d like to think we are, we’re more entrenched in emotion than reason & habit than change, and that in all honesty, we’re probably destined for evolutionary destruction, where most Life on this planet ends up! Not a nice thought, even if it’s (possibly hundreds of) thousands of years away.
So, the question this leads to is: HOW do we go about living our short little lives in the meantime…? Hence this book has been written!
I liked this article - and the comments it elicited - enough to buy George Marshall’s book, anyway! Should be an interesting read!
PS - on that continuum, Lewis, I’m somewhere between the middle ground and the nihilists. It seems I have learned to only trust humans as far as I can throw them 😉
COMMENTS
BY Ian Coleman.
ON July 25, 2019 08:33 PM
This article, like so many on the same topic, refuses to acknowledge that there is any reason to doubt catastrophic climate change will play out as the alarmists say it will. Predictions of the future based on computer models that are written with built-in assumptions of how the climate will respond to increased concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide are not science. They are just guesses.
Also, it is ludicrous to imagine that scientists are perfectly honest beings who are indifferent to social or financial pressures to hype their predictions. Look what happened to Bjorn Lomborg, as punishment for admitting that climate change is far down the list of threats to real people. The Science is not settled, but brother, it is fixed.
And this is a rich people’s problem. Rich people don’t care about restrictions on energy use because they are always going to be able to drive and fly. They certainly don’t care about the hundreds of millions of people on Earth living without electricity.
And many billions of dollars can be made selling things like solar panels, wind turbines and electric cars. Don’t tell me that the threat of climate change is not a marketing opportunity, with concomitant dangers of corruption, because it is.
Here’s what is likely to happen: Twenty years from now, when it will have become obvious that it is impossible for human beings to restrict the use of fossil fuels, and when the harms done by climate change are minimal, or at least much less than have been prophesied, people are going to shrug and admit that the whole thing was a monsters-under-the-bed story. That’s the way to bet.
BY Michael Miller
ON August 19, 2019 11:41 AM
The above comment should have been used to illustrate, if not the entire article, certainly the last paragraph.: “The climate debate, Marshall demonstrates, is no longer about carbon dioxide and temperature-change models. It’s about biases, values, and ideology. It’s about the way that social and psychological filters lead us to practice motivated reasoning. Scientists will not have the final word in the public debate on this issue. Instead, people will continue to take positions that are consistent with their pre-existing values. For that reason, efforts to present ever-increasing amounts of data, without attending to those values, will only yield greater resistance and make a social consensus on climate change more elusive.”
BY Nick
ON September 17, 2019 02:32 PM
Addressing climate change through fear is difficult for politicians to back. It’s the emotional equivalent of fire-and-brimstone evangelism, which is extremely effective for modifying the behavior of youths (who don’t vote), but not seasoned adults who’ve been around long enough to have read Hal Lindsey’s ‘The Late Great Planet Earth’, ‘The Rapture’ and other books on end times prophecy. Once predictions fail to manifest by a certain date, and the more alarming the warnings, the less believable they become. Evangelicals utilize evangelism bridge tracts (pamphlets) to inject guilt/shame, fear of damnation, and panic into unbelievers, and then ask for an immediate response of Faith in order to save and comfort the new convert. Then they’re sent out 2 by 2 to repeat the process. A similar approach might work for climate change, but most people won’t convert until they’re on their deathbed.
BY Peter
ON September 29, 2019 01:16 PM
In the end, it won’t matter who’s correct. Scientists can also adopt a “wait and see” attitude. How different might the world have been if the French hadn’t lopped off the head of Lavoisier? How often have clerics accused scietists of heresy? Climate change predictions (notably global warming) have been being made since 1955 - earlier if one counts the work of Lomberg and Arrhenius. Most of these have been pretty spot on. In a democracy, people can vote on whether they choose to “believe” and then “act on” the predictions of scientific research. However, we cannot wish away the consequences of well-founded scientific research. Those talking about climate change and global warming were mostly older white men, part of the privileged elite. This in itself ensured that what they had to say wouldn’t be listened to, let alone acted upon.
BY Matt
ON October 10, 2019 01:14 PM
Climate Change is meaningless to most people. From a narrow human perspective, it’s hard to justify why any one person should care about Climate Change enough to willingly change his or her life. More than likely, he or she holds zero power to implement any kind of policy initiative to combat Climate Change. What can people really do, stop driving their cars, eating meat, and using electricity? That’s not going to happen, and it shouldn’t. No one should be expected to sacrifice their quality of life today for a wispy threat like Climate Change when there’s no guarantee of tomorrow or an afterlife. And who’s NOT going to forgive them, Greta Thunberg and generations of nameless, faceless unborn humans from the future? Give me a break. In my opinion, we are doomed. There’s just no way to really change the trajectory we’re on; it’s too complex, too difficult, too costly, and there’s not enough time. And of course, Climate Change has become a useful Trojan Horse for SJW causes and agendas. There’s nothing like a good ole boogyman to provide an excuse to reorganize society to your liking. Talk of so-called “Climate Racism” and “Climate Justice” will ensure that people dig into a trench and turn down the volume.
BY Tony Schumacher-Jones
ON January 16, 2020 11:28 AM
Excellent article, and sums up pretty well why appeals to science will not get some people to change. The first comment by Ian is a classic. Almost as if, on cue, someone decides to reinforce exactly what the author suggests. But as my country, Australia, burns, I sit here in despair at the stupidity of views like Ian’s. I am lost. Is the earth flat? DoesElvis still live? Do Martians still land in Area 51? Why not?
BY Lewis Woodford
ON August 7, 2020 04:33 PM
Am slightly distressed by the dialectic of the responses - perhaps a diagram would help us: Imagine a continuum - full global warming deniers on one end, complete nihilists seeing immanent destruction on the other.. A Buddhist would say to look for the ‘middle path’ - that’s where the truth is likely to be. Problem - the middle path is rarely dead-center. I imagine it shifting as a result of new data, opposed by cultural bias and politics. Perhaps a more ‘agnostic approach’ is called for - analyzing the situation in terms of statistical possibility rather than emotion?
BY Robyn
ON February 3, 2021 04:16 AM
Such a great range of opinion in so few comments! I’m impressed! These comments all have their value and they all seem to be right to at least some degree.
I think the main problem is that the human lifespan is very short compared to the geological scale the Earth works in. To understand the shifts in our world, you have to look so far beyond our ‘lifetimes’ - and I honestly think most humans just can’t (or won’t) do it.
Our ‘Emotional Reality’ is the world we live in, not what some scientific paper or a magazine says. And because logic needs emotion to work, our own emotional reality skews this logic - hence the Denialists vs the Believers, if you will.
Maybe people just need to realise that humans aren’t as smart as we’d like to think we are, we’re more entrenched in emotion than reason & habit than change, and that in all honesty, we’re probably destined for evolutionary destruction, where most Life on this planet ends up! Not a nice thought, even if it’s (possibly hundreds of) thousands of years away.
So, the question this leads to is: HOW do we go about living our short little lives in the meantime…? Hence this book has been written!
I liked this article - and the comments it elicited - enough to buy George Marshall’s book, anyway! Should be an interesting read!
PS - on that continuum, Lewis, I’m somewhere between the middle ground and the nihilists. It seems I have learned to only trust humans as far as I can throw them 😉