Excuse #101: Denying Climate Change is an Evil Depraved Sin so we don’t need to bother coming up with reasons anymore
Why is Krugman sticking pins into Denier Dolls? It makes him feel better.
He said it himself — if people disagree about climate change in good faith, it means climate believers need to be more persuasive. But if they are just evil, there’s nothing you can do. This is the end-days desperation. And after thirty years of propaganda, there’s nothing left in their communication toolbox. The awful truth is that in the muted, lopsided debate, they had all the money and institutions but they still lost.
When you can’t convince people with polite discussion all that’s left is to agree with your opponents or demonize them. So that’s what Krugman does. Change the goal-posts — he’s saying these evil people are not even worth talking to.
Humans are incredibly good at rationalizing stupid things. Pace Paul Krugman, who wrote this in the NY times last week. This week, the Sydney Morning Herald became the copy-paste late repeater of junk analysis and naked smear by a failed economist. Bravo.
Denying climate change is evil
Climate denial is rooted in greed, opportunism and ego. Opposing action for those reasons is a sin.
Paul Krugman
Denying climate change, no matter what the evidence, has become a core Republican principle. And it’s worth trying to understand both how that happened and the sheer depravity involved in being a denialist at this point.
Spot the projection. Believing climate change has become a core Labor-Democrat principle.
Next comes the bait and switch: Krugman pretends to be reasonable…
>Wait, isn’t depravity too strong a term? Aren’t people allowed to disagree with conventional wisdom, even if that wisdom is supported by overwhelming scientific consensus?
Then he ignores every argument any skeptic ever made:
Yes, they are – as long as their arguments are made in good faith. But there are almost no good-faith climate-change deniers. And denying science for profit, political advantage or ego satisfaction is not OK; when failure to act on the science may have terrible consequences, denial is, as I said, depraved.
But hey, his evidence is a pop-psychology book written by a climate scientist who invented a “trick” to “hide the decline”:
The best recent book I’ve read on all this is The Madhouse Effect by Michael E. Mann…
As Mann explains, climate denial actually follows in the footsteps of earlier science denial, beginning with the long campaign by tobacco companies to confuse the public about the dangers of smoking.
With the difference that doctors could predict which group was more likely to get cancer, while climate scientists can do 3,000 model runs that are 98% wrong.
Why would anyone go along with such things? Money is still the main answer: almost all prominent climate deniers are on the fossil-fuel take. However, ideology is also a factor: if you take environmental issues seriously, you are led to the need for government regulation of some kind, so rigid free-market ideologues don’t want to believe that environmental concerns are real (although apparently forcing consumers to subsidise coal is fine).
More projection of his own ideology — if you are a collectivist, climate scares are the top excuse to “collect”. What could be better. Pay up or I’ll wreck the weather? Storms a’ coming, give me your super (your 401k). Feed me or there’ll be floods? This game of extortion is good to go as long as we don’t get perfect weather forever. Exactly. It’s such a good game it’s been going on for thousands of years, but now the druids wear lab coats.
As for the old smear that all prominent deniers are fossil funded, hello, where’s the evidence? Skeptics are the grassroots volunteers funded by mums and dads (thanks to all who keep me writing through donations here). Believers get 3,500 times as much (and even more since then). Who are we kidding, if skeptics got the kind of money believers get, tens of thousands of skeptics could attend two-week-long international junkets — and for the next 24 years in a row. Will the SMH do some research, interview some “prominent climate deniers” (in their unscientific namecalling jargon). Will they give me right of reply?
Money is still the main answer: let’s talk about how many prominent climate believers are or were on the government-take — totally dependent on government grants, salaries, or subsidies. Many fossil fuel companies are also on the take, lobbied for the climate scare, and even the “evil” Exxon spent more funding believers than skeptics.
Or forget them all, lets talk about Banker Believers and the Billions they want to make from carbon trading. As I said, bankers are everywhere:
Bank of America is spending $50 billion to save the world. Citigroup committed $100 billion to “climate change”. DeutscheBank built giant clocks of doom and wrote 50 page scientific reports. And the list goes on… in the end, climate change is potentially a $7 Trillion dollar money making venture for bankers.
You can see why they might be interested.
If you take environmental issues seriously, you look at the evidence, not for any excuse to call in Big Gov. That’s what a collectivist ideologue does.
Big Krug accidentally gives his motives for character assassination away
And these motives matter. If important players opposed climate action out of good-faith disagreement with the science, that would be a shame but not a sin, calling for better efforts at persuasion. As it is, however, climate denial is rooted in greed, opportunism, and ego. And opposing action for those reasons is a sin.
This is a fake national policy “debate” by character assassination. It might as well be neolithic witchcraft. How do we decide what generator to use in national energy grids? Obviously, use evidenceless smear, cast aspersions, do no research, and poke pins in a mythical anti-science denier doll. How many MegaWatts is that?
The intelligensia at the SMH are going to hate it when history shows they slavishly and gullibly sided with Big Money and Big Governments, acting as a propaganda tool …
h/t David B