|
|
After thirty years of Green-Blob disaster porn, there are casualties.
Climate change [propaganda] takes a toll on our minds
Psychologist Susie Burke tells the story of a woman who came to her for counselling after having her first child. Not because she was suffering from post-natal depression, but because she was “struggling with the enormity of what she had done.” She felt she had brought her child into a “world she knew was going to be a lot harsher and a lot less safe,” Burke told DW.
“She came to me when she was overwhelmed by this distress; questioning whether she had done the right thing. The fear she had for his future was really huge.”
Look out for the new hotline (Can someone find this number?)
Burke is an Australian psychologist and academic who specializes in eco-psychology. She treats people suffering mental illness as a result of climate change, and also recently set up a free hotline called the “Climate Change Psychological Support Network,” where Australians can call a qualified psychologist to talk through their feelings about environmental change.
Look out for the handbook:
‘The Climate Change Empowerment Handbook’ is a handy […]
Forget the plight of snow skiers who won’t know what snow is — it’s cricket that will be hit hardest.
That’s why the sport must take notice of a report published by Climate Coalition, …
The document names cricket as the sport that will be hardest hit by climate change in England, stating that “wetter winters and more intense summer downpours are disrupting the game at every level”.
God forbid. This is a death spiral:
.. Glamorgan Head of Operations, Dan Cherry, …warned that climate change could “fundamentally change the game”.
“The less cricket we play, the fewer people will watch it, the less they will come to the ground and pay to enter, the less chance there is for young people to be inspired,” said Cherry.
This change, it seems, has already begun.
Wait til you see the evidence:
In international cricket, 27 percent of England’s home one-day internationals since 2000 have been played with reduced overs because of rain delays. The rate of rain-affected matches has more than doubled since 2011, with five percent of matches abandoned completely.
By crikey. That is a six year weather […]
From Jo: Bookings close this Sunday.
Hope to see you in Sydney the weekend after next!
I’ll be speaking with Ian Plimer at the ATA Friedman18 conference.
It’s a great line up of speakers on May 25-27, or come for the Gala dinner.
Get a 10% discount with the code Nova18.
On Climate, There’s A Sharp Generational Divide Within GOP
USNews, Alan Neuhauser
A Pew survey exposed a stark gap between younger and older Republican voters on global warming and energy policy.
Neuhauser doesn’t mention it but the implications are pretty dire — look how long it takes to recover from school:
Republican millennials – people roughly ages 22 to 37 – are far less likely than older generations to support the use of coal, oil and other fossil fuel sources. By one count, while three-quarters of Republican baby boomers and older generations supported more offshore oil and gas drilling, fewer than half of millennial Republicans felt the same way.
At least most Republicans grow up:
Among [young and old] Democrats, by contrast, there was only a small divide.
If half the population is shifting in the same direction […]
More support for snowflakes.
Are you feeling stressed about imaginary man-made climate change that hasn’t even happened yet? Thanks to taxpayer funds, there is a virtual reality event that may help you (or not). The Bureau of Meteoranxiety is on in Melbourne this week. This experimental, untested technique doesn’t look like it gets to the nub of the problem.
If victims spent 45 minutes with a friendly skeptic instead, they could be cured for life. Where is the grant for that?
Image credit: Michael Tartaglia
Are you feeling stressed about the end of the world? If yes, you might want head to this Next Wave event. An immersive live art experience incorporating VR technology, Bureau of Meteoranxiety by Perth-based artists Alex Tate and Olivia Tartaglia will allow participants to work through their fears of climate change by exposing them to “experimental visual therapies and sensory remedies” and providing “new language and coping strategies to help stay above the metaphorical and literal flood line”.
Blindside: Bureau of Meteoranxiety.
Book your tickets for Melbourne (or pick an airline and fly somewhere else).
Hannah Francis of The Age tells us the treatments seem “counterintuitive”. […]
Ain’t that the way? When it comes to taking individual action, skeptics are more environmental than the people who call themselves “environmental”.
A new psych study shows that skeptics are more likely to use cloth shopping bags, catch public transport and buy eco-friendly items. Hall et al somehow got 600 people to fill in a survey up to seven times in one year about their belief in “climate change” and their self-reported action. They found there are three types of people: the “highly concerned” about climate change, the “cautiously worried” and the “skeptical”. The “highly convinced” believers may tell the world we have to act, but they were more likely to use plastic bags themselves and drive their car. They were more likely to want government policies to magically solve the problem. Skeptics meanwhile, were more passionately against government meddling than any group was on any issue. It was the single most definitive score.
Skeptics (blue) were more likely to reuse shopping bags, buy eco-friendly things, and catch the bus and train. The highly concerned (red) were more likely to recycle goods and otherwise support government action.
Researchers were pretty much baffled by their results and admitted as […]
New research looking at three and a half billion social media posts from tens of millions of individuals showed the very unshocking result that people are happiest on sunny clear days around 25C. Facebook and Twitter comments on those days used more positive, fun terms. Days below 20, above 30, that were cloudy or had a humidity above 80% put people in a less happy mood. So did terrorist events, and the effects of weather were pretty comparable. Temperatures that are below freezing put a real dampener on expressions of positive sentiment. (The next ice age is going to be no fun.)
Peak positive occurs in the mid to high twenties and on days with zero mm of rain.
The effect of temperature and rain on Facebook and Twitter moods in the US.
Some people have a sunny disposition, others have cloudy faces and everyone over two knows what those expressions mean.
If our aim is to maximize human happiness and productivity, shouldn’t the UN Weather Control Committee (IPCC) be aiming to reduce freezing days and maximize the zone of 25C days on areas with the highest population density?
Judging by this awesome Hedonometer graph, during the hottest ever […]
The implications are staggering, half the population fail at blink tests, and can’t see newspaper headlines about “climate change”. If only we could make them see by using rhetorical and psychological trickery to get past their faulty filters, the world would be saved. Please send us another grant!
The research you’ve been waiting for:
Why some conservatives are blind to climate change
Naturally, this self-serving, circular, and poorly researched piece is brought to you by The Conversation. Where else?
The big insight looks like pattern seeking and confirmation bias to me:
When we modified the test to measure people’s attention to climate change, we found people who are concerned about climate change are better at seeing climate-related words, such as carbon, right after the first target than those who are less concerned.
When we analyzed the data, we found a pattern: Conservatives who were less concerned about climate change were less likely to see climate-related words than liberals who were worried about the issue.
In short, conservatives showed climate change blindness.
Or in another hypothesis, conservatives had better filters for pointless news stories with a prediction success rate lower than random chance. From experience, […]
Let’s get “certainty” — dump the RET.
Chris Kenny in The Weekend Australian puts almost all the pieces together. This is self-sacrificial, pointless, and the RET is the problem because the subsidies allow renewables to drive out true baseload generation. The so-called hunt for “certainty” is a hunt for high prices because no one will speak the obvious “Dump the Renewable Energy Target”.
Dumping green folly will secure energy future, reboot economy
We are an energy-rich nation. Last year we exported 388 million tonnes of coal (valued at $35 billion) to supply affordable and reliable energy to countries such as Japan, China, South Korea and India. Our liquefied natural gas exports are doubling from 30 million tonnes a couple of years ago to almost 80 million tonnes (valued at $42bn) by 2019.
Australia also remains one of the largest exporters of uranium…
While we happily export our energy advantage, we have deliberately sacrificed it at home.
Turnbull — doing exactly the wrong thing after Trump won:
Astonishingly, less than a day after Donald Trump won the US election promising to abandon Paris, Malcolm Turnbull announced Australia’s ratification. The Prime Minister thumbed his […]
I nearly headlined this: Climate grief group meets at someone’s house, Grist covers it. That’s pretty much all this program is. No one even counts to nine in this story.
Depressed about climate change? There’s a 9-step program for that.
Imagine Alcoholics Anonymous mixed with an environmental humanities course, and you’ll begin to get a sense of the “good grief” group started by Schmidt. Its goal is to help people cope with what’s been called “climate grief” — anxiety, sadness, depression, and other emotions provoked by awareness of the planet’s march toward a hotter,… future…
What she found was that feelings of sadness and anxiety, and even literal nightmares, were common. Last year, with the help of her partner, Aimee Reau, Schmidt developed a nine-step program for building resiliency loosely modeled on AA…
But this is big:
About a dozen people attend each session and 50 subscribe to its mailings.
If I get 12 people to my house, and have 12,000 subscribers, do you think Grist will write it up?
Perhaps they have some good results?
Perhaps not:
Schmidt, who now works as an outreach coordinator at the environmental group HEAL […]
The Milgram Experiment. Image Wikimedia.
The chilling Milgram experiments have been replicated, and yet again, 9 out of 10 are willing to inflict electric shocks and pain on another person. In these infamous experiments the power of a white lab coat was enough to get more than half the participants (26 out of 40) to deliver a fatal shock (the participants didn’t realize the shock was faked, and the victim an actor).
This willingness to obey authority is both a great strength of humanity when authority is worthy and yet leads to the darkest abyss when it is not.
By nature, we are largely empathetic creatures: most people really don’t want to cause pain, they get quite upset themselves in the process. Yet many people will override this inbuilt ethical wiring if a person in a position of authority insist they do. It’s time we talked about ways to train people to resist. There is hope as outlined below in a different study from last year.
Conducting the Milgram experiment in Poland, psychologists show people still obey
Press Release: The title is direct, “Would you deliver an electric shock in 2015?” and the answer, according to the […]
More Fake News from the NY Times
Here’s a creative effort to sell the story that the people with billion dollar industries, all the academic positions and a sympathetic media entourage are going underground, forced to disguise their belief about “climate change”.
This is a death-throes type article, clutching for ways to pretend Global Worriers are still relevant, and to feed a fantasy that they might be the underdog.
In America’s Heartland, Discussing Climate Change Without Saying ‘Climate Change’
So while climate change is part of daily conversation, it gets disguised as something else.
“People are all talking about it, without talking about it,” said Miriam Horn, the author of a recent book on conservative Americans and the environment, “Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman.” “It’s become such a charged topic that there’s a navigation people do.”
What really happened is that climate change is overused agitprop and people are tired of being beaten over the head with it. The first most compelling example the NY Times can find is a farmer called Doug Palen who talks about “carbon sequestration” in his soil (and what crop farmer wouldn’t?) Palen is painted as a “believer”:
With every baseless scare come the inevitable victims: those who are gullible, through no fault of their own, like children, graduates of eco-science degrees, and people who think the ABC gives them impartial information.
Psychoterratica: or earth related (terra) mental health (psyche) states or conditions.
© 2013 Glenn Albrecht.
GlennAlbrect did a Ted talk, if you can bear to watch it, tell us the best quotes: I spot a “Tipping point of the brain”. He’s a philosopher. If only he understood the philosophy called science, he might be useful.
We live in the richest, safest era of human life on Earth. For a hundred thousand years everyone was afraid of dysentry, snakes, and the marauding tribe next door. They all starved periodically and buried their children often. They said prayers to pagan gods they hoped would save them. Now 1 – 2 billion lucky sods have escaped that dreadful fear, and live a life rich beyond the wildest dreams of the neolithic grinder. Some that won the lottery worry instead that burning coal in Queensland will melt arctic ice and create homeless polar bears. Or they think there are climate death squads.
Apparently the ABC is […]
It’s “depressing”, “hopeless” and “dismal”
The climate debate is more polarised than ever. David Roberts at Vox is very honest about the challenges believers face to solve the deep partisan political divide. But despite all the grants and funding to solve this problem, the experts miss the obvious. I explain below why polarization will solve itself. Indeed, all their best efforts to reduce polarization in the climate debate are creating the polarization. It takes a sustained effort and millions of dollars to keep a false belief alive.
Now Dunlap and McCright (along with Oklahoma State’s Jerrod Yarosh) have updated their study, giving us a fresh look at public opinion on climate change at the end of the Obama era.
The findings are dismal, if not very surprising: Polarization only accelerated after 2008, the gap between the parties is wider than ever, and the trend shows no sign of stopping.
The League of Conservation Voters (LCV) scores politicians. It tracks the voting records of members of Congress. Way back in 1970 both sides of politics wanted to approve environmental legislation about equally.
(Dunlap et al, Environment)
Public opinion has a similar trend. Here are Gallup poll […]
Only higher education could produce something this silly.
The University of Sussex gets the credit for a paper that argues that countries that are committed to nuclear energy are progressing slower towards the holy grail of meeting “climate targets”. This discovery coincidentally comes exactly as the UK Hinkley Point “hangs in the balance”. What were the odds?
The Newspeak starts in the headline — what’s a “climate target”. My personal climate target is to move into the tropics each winter, but the EU climate target is not about reducing temperatures over Spain, but about “more windmills”. The climate target of the EU has apparently got nothing much to do with the climate:
…the EU’s 2020 Strategy — to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 20%, increase the share of renewable energy to at least 20% of consumption, and achieve energy savings of 20% or more by 2020…
They cluster countries in to 3 groups and discover that the countries that plan to maintain or expand nuclear energy (eg Bulgaria, Hungary and the UK) are not cutting emissions as fast as countries that have no nukes (Denmark, Ireland, and Norway).
Could it be, I wonder, because […]
Here’s the full copy of a half page advert in The Australian. In a normal world, this would be discussed at conferences, and reported by science reporters in magazines like New Scientist or Scientific American, or on shows like Catalyst. Instead, private citizens have to fork out thousands to pay for an advert. — Jo
WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT CLIMATE
The climate cooled for 37 years during the period 1940 to 1976. Books were written expressing alarm. Lowell Ponte’s 1975 book warns: “Global cooling presents humankind with the most important social, political, and adaptive challenge we have had to deal with for 110,000 years. Your stake in the decisions we make concerning it is of ultimate importance: the survival of ourselves, our children, our species.”
We now have a new climate alarm and similar statements are being made. Climate models used by authorities forecast that CO2 emissions will cause dangerous global warming, now referred to as Climate Change.
Sources: Various, as described in the “State of the Climate in 2012” in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society1, August 2013.
PSYCHOLOGY, BIAS ERRORS AND CLIMATE
Recent findings in the area of psychology, “Psychology and Economics” by […]
This example below shows the dangers of cherry picked and buried data. It shows how great news and joy can be reported from rancid results, and the only protection against this is open access. When the taxpayer funds research that is not fully and transparently public, and immediately available, the people are funding PR rather than science. “Peer review” does little to stop this, little to clean up the mess after it happens, and the truth can take years to be set free.
Ten percent of teenagers taking an anti-depressant harmed themselves or attempted suicide. This was ten times the rate of the teens on the placebo. The results of this clinical trial were published in 2001, but those alarming statistics were not reported. The drug went on to be widely used. A new reanalysis of the data, reported in the BMJ, revealed the dark and hidden dangers. The company that funded the research, Glaxo Smith Kline, has already faced record fines of $4.2 billion. The Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry won’t retract the paper.
There are many ways to hide data. In this case, the results of the trial include 80,000 records which were […]
If psychologists want to be taken seriously, and want psychology to be called “a science”, they need to elect a director who knows what science is.
Executive Director: Professor Lyn Littlefield OAM FAPS
The Climate Study group in Australia published a half page advert in The Australian last week – Psychology and Climate Alarm: how fear and anxiety trump evidence. In reply, Prof Lyn Littlefield, Executive Director of the Australian Psychology Society wrote a letter to The Australian protesting — claiming that the Climate Study Group are the ones suffering from the confirmation bias they accuse climate scientists of.
“The advertisement, ‘Psychology and the New Climate Storm’ misuses psychology-based arguments to add credibility to myths and misinformation about climate change. In doing so, the authors illustrate aptly the very error bias (confirmation bias) they are erroneously attributing to the climate science community.”
It’s the “the pot calling the kettle black”, exclaims Littlefield. But since her arguments are entirely fallacies, this is the kettle calling the pot calling the kettle black. The Climate Study Group mentioned many scientific observations, and in reply Lyn Littlefield can’t find an error in any of them, she can only cite “the consensus”. […]
Across the West, there is a layer of smart-but-busy intellects who have not been involved in the climate debate. For one reason or another they’ve been too busy setting up IPO’s, doing research projects, or directing companies in perhaps technology, mining or banking, and generally being productive. It is excellent to see some of this caliber adding their brain-power and resources to the public arena. Especially so in Australia, where the debate is almost entirely bare-bones-volunteers versus billion-dollar-institutions, and where the culture of philanthropy is not well developed compared to the US.
This unusual advert was placed in The Australian today. In a normal world, investigative journalists would have already interviewed and discussed views like these, but in the hyperbolic, politicized and religious world of climate-alarm it was simpler for productive people to just get on with it, talk to their peers and make it happen.
Click to enlarge, or read the text below.
Psychology and The New Climate Alarm
Lowell Ponte’s 1975 book warns:
“Global cooling presents humankind with the most important social, political, and adaptive challenge we have had to deal with for 110,000 years. Your stake in the decisions we make concerning it is […]
Big Oil knows no bounds. Not only can it derail governments, and thwart the UN, World Bank, and IMF but now it may be sending out climate death squads to assassinate Arctic Ice Experts. These expert hit squads apparently push people down stairs, run them off the road, and strike them down with lightning. Lightning! (That is one mother of aTesla Coil.) James Bond could learn something. Q, where are you?
Prof Wadhams at Cambridge has been the go-to man for Arctic scare stories across the UK (h/t Delingpole). In 2012, Wadhams predicted Arctic Sea Ice was set to collapse in just four years. Last year, after years of a relentlessly surviving Arctic, even some alarmists threw Wadham under the bus, (so to speak) as being too “extremist”. But now he’s topped that.
You see, in January 2013 there were four leading Arctic experts in the UK, now there is one, and he is very very worried.
No, seriously, you can’t make this up. Let’s try to imagine how much more profitable Big Oil would be if every single Arctic climate expert in the World was dead. (Count the zeros…)
The utter futility of it all escapes Wadhams. After a […]
UPDATE: This is generating some good discussion, which is what I wanted to help me explain why this is relevant. It’s a study about amoeba, but reveals something I think about biological “laws” of all cooperative societies and genetics. It’s very relevant to the nature-nurture debate, and to national politics and policies. UPDATE #2: The cheating referred to in this post is defined as “social cheating” meaning to take some advantage over and above contributions to the social group. The amoeba are a simple “model system” that may help us learn more about the factors that influence the balance of “cheaters” versus “cooperators” in any social species.
See the critics and my replies at #7 and #16. Give it your best shot. :- ) Jo
You might think that corruption in science has only been around for 20 or 30 years. But I say this problem has been around since the Age of Amoeba.
The day after cells evolved to cooperate, some of them learnt to cheat. The battle of the cooperators versus the cheaters hasn’t stopped since and humans are the most socially evolved cooperators on the planet, (which just means we have more socially […]
|
JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
Jo appreciates your support to help her keep doing what she does. This blog is funded by donations. Thanks!
Follow Jo's Tweets To report "lost" comments or defamatory and offensive remarks, email the moderators at: support.jonova AT proton.me
Statistics
The nerds have the numbers on precious metals investments on the ASX
|
Recent Comments