Andy Hoffman has flown from Michigan to deliver the pop science solution to our atmospheric catastrophe.
You may have thought it was about planetary radiation, or moist adiabatic lapse rates, but Hoffman is here to save you from the waste-of-time science debate. Discussing science with “climate deniers” is like “talking to a wall” he says. We agree — anyone who denies we have a climate is thick-as-a-brick. Have you ever met one? No, neither have I. The mythical climate denier seems to be causing global warming through their inaction, but no one as yet, can name a single person who denies the climate.
I’m sure Hoffman wouldn’t want to be loose and inaccurate with his words — so no doubt he will find an actual “climate denier” or start to speak English instead.
Perhaps the debate he says he wants, will start when we speak the same language?
It’s obvious the Great Global Warming Scare is unravelling when the losing team turn into sour-puss-psychologists — finding dark mental failings in those too stupid to understand their Gift with The Weather.
When it comes to pop-psychology anyone can play…
Hoffman thinks skeptics aren’t convinced because they are afraid:
MANY climate sceptics do not trust environmentalists because they consider them “borderline communists” who want to curtail people’s freedom, a leading US social scientist says.
Speaking on Wednesday night, the University of Michigan’s Andy Hoffman said US global warming sceptics had “a serious distrust of the political ideology behind its proponents”.
“The fear is that environmentalists are left-leaning, they are socialist, borderline communists, and they are using the government to try to control your freedom,” Prof Hoffman said in the Sydney Ideas lecture at the University of Sydney.
“The expression for environmentalists is watermelons, they’re green on the outside, but they’re red on the inside. That really represents their feeling.”
We think Hoffman is using pop-psychology because he doesn’t have the science. (He will disagree. All he needs to do is phone-a-friend and find that mystery paper — the one that finally shows the models assumptions about relative humidity in the upper troposphere were right?)
Though he seems confused:
“It’s not about CO2, it’s not about climate models, it’s about values, it’s about world views,” the business and environment academic said.
If it’s not about CO2, that explains why the carbon tax doesn’t work. Will it cool the planet if I drive my SUV with a different world-view instead?
I can do that… 🙂
Once again, those-without-persuasive arguments resort to character assassination and confounding slurs:
Professor Hoffman said a “social consensus” to fight climate change needed to be built, similar to that created in the past to combat smoking and slavery.
(So does that mean finding some evidence to support your case Andy, or were you thinking “Civil War”?)
This about sums up the current state of play:
The losing team are plain flummoxed and confused. They tried to convince the unconvinced by calling them “Deniers” but that didn’t work. Then they declared that 97% of the anointed Gods-of-Climate-Science had seen the light through unvalidated climate simulations. When skeptics pointed out the models were wrong, the upper tropospheric hot spot was not there, and 7000 quintillion joules of energy were missing, the climate scientists responded that the skeptics were oil funded renegades from the tobacco movement.
At this point the dumb punters became more skeptical.
Not so coincidentally, about then, the pop-psychologists appeared to try to pretend they are not losing.
My favourite line
“One of the most important first steps in engaging the debate is not to blame or mock or ridicule,” he said.
Which is why he calls us deniers right?
—————————————————–
h/t To Geoff Derrick
PS: Sorry to Barry. I know we talked about being nice.
PPS: Thanks to the good souls who’ve been donating to my personal account. I didn’t realize it was so busy. Cheers to Keith (x 3!), Rodney, MaxL, and especially Mal, Tom K, and Wes. 🙂