Historian Matthias Dörries reveals the role of fear in our understanding of climate change
From apocalyptic forecasting to estimates of mass extinctions, climate change is a topic which is filled with fearful predictions for the future. In his latest research, published in WIREs Climate Change, historian Matthias Dörries examines the cultural significance of fear and how it became a central presence in current debates over climate change.
Climatic change, as represented by the media, often prompts headlines predicting disastrous events, frequently adopting fear laden language including analogies with war and warnings of the imminence or irreversibility of pending catastrophes. For Professor Matthias Dörries from the University of Strasbourg, a culture of fear is alive, and doing very well.
Professor Dörries looks at the issue of fear from a historical perspective, asking how our current society has come to conceive of climate change in terms of catastrophe and fear.
“Recently historians have underlined the necessity to revise the grand Enlightenment narrative of science as antidote to fear,” Dörries stresses, “We should now look at how popular and scientific discourses frame fear, and study the constructive and destructive functions of these fear discourses in societies.”
The 1960s and 1970s were characterized by an increasing appropriation of the future by science, leading to a rise of fear discourses by scientists themselves.
“For the very long run, science has indeed some terrifying prospects to offer for the planet Earth, and on a scale of decades, science has identified serious threats, such as anthropogenic climate change,” Dörries remarks.
“The current discourse of fear over climate change reflects the attempts to come to grips with the long-term issue of anthropogenic climate change,” concludes Dörries. “They are appeals for action, they imply claims to power, they stress that the issue is political and cultural, not merely a matter of science and reason alone.”
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The problem with crying wolf all the time is that when the wolf finally turns up no one is really that bothered.
Governments have always needed the scare thing to unite or should that be control their populations.
After Hitler we had Reds under the Beds and as the Cold War ran down they figured that a Climate of Fear would do the same thing, only they were wrong.
Problem is most people are to scared to live, they live in fear that something might happen to them, so yes fear is probably the biggest fear of climate change.
As we do not create climate change why worry about something that is beyond our control.
I am reminded of the story of Professor Heinkel and the bumble bee, according to Prof Heinkel the laws of aerodynamics indicate that the bumble bee cannot fly, in blissful ignornance of this the bumble bee flies
The greatest threat is the push for national and global taxes to redistribute the wealth under the guise of combating AGW/biodiversity. That’s something everyone has reason to be afraid of.
The climate will probably continue doing what it does – I find that terrifying – not…
“The current discourse of fear over climate change reflects the attempts to come to grips with the long-term issue of anthropogenic climate change,” concludes Dörries. “They are appeals for action, they imply claims to power, they stress that the issue is political and cultural, not merely a matter of science and reason alone.”
Thank you, “Climate Science”/Post Normal Science, for [apparently] fooling people like Dorries by ignoring that little ‘matter of science and reason’ and going straight for the claim to power based solely upon fear-mongering and your own abjectly ignoble will to power.
I love it. I Googled “Historian Matthias Dörries” and the first hit is this article. Is Google noting the fact that I frequent WUWT or is the traffic so high articles come up at the top of their searchs within minutes?
Anyway, here is a link to the short paper. Apparently Wired is running it.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wcc.79/pdf
There is no question that a great number of intelligent people have a suspension of reality when it comes to climate. I am continually amazed at the echo chamber, the cycle of reinforcement, that permeates the Warmists thinking. Here is a classic example:
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2010/11/05/imaginary-temperatures-in-washington-go-viral/
A 3 degree temperature drop in Wash. DC is turned into a 3 degree rise. Was the falsification intentional ? Or merely an attempt to make data fit the preconceived fears of the Warmists? Who knows. But what is clear is that the false data will now become part of the AGW meme and the actual data buried from sight. And anyone who cites the real data will be considered a crackpot, or anti-science, or a Tea Partier, etc.
Another EPA bully left under fear of confrontation (hearings in the House)
Lisa Heinzerling, the head of EPA’s policy office, will return to her position as a Georgetown University law professor at the end of the year, said EPA spokesman Brendan Gilfillan.
Lisa Heinzerling, an advocate for aggressive regulatory expansion to combat global warming, has resigned:
She is no longer able to play the fear card and push their agenda.
We are living in interesting times, but wait!…do not exaggerate, you are the hosts of the UN and its Holy IPCC, why don’t you rally against it as JH (aka:”trains” ) rally against you all? while planning to take all non-believers to re-educational camps in his “trains”.
Is he planning a new version of kilns perhaps?, this time microwave kilns? 🙂
For him this is a serious matter, for us they and their theories are nothing but a joke, but beware, the dangerous thing is that they keep on with their agenda.
Is there so much in it or it is just the obsessions of a bunch of lunatics?
I think we need the help of a psychiatrist to analyze the facts.
It is not clear from this exerpt whether the author thinks that the political and cultural impacts of CAGW fears serve a constructive or deconstructive function in society. Dorries seems to be summarising, not drawing personal conclusions.
Personally, I can think of only two constructive functions of perpetuating CAGW fears. The first would be to make some people extremely wealthy. The other would be to help a few individuals ascend into power positions in government.
It has always been alive and well and has been around for donkeys’ years. We used to burn witches over failed rains. :o)
100 years of warming and cooling fears
http://www.businessandmedia.org/specialreports/2006/fireandice/fireandice.asp
150 of global warming and cooling fears
http://newsbusters.org/node/11640
1895-2008 warming and cooling fears
http://www.almanac.com/sites/new.almanac.com/files/1895_cvr1_0.png
60 years of warming and cooling ice age fears
http://www.climate4you.com/ClimateAndHistory%201950-1999.htm#1950:%20Significance%20of%20the%20Arctic%20climatic%20change%20in%20Greenland
Well it looks like Dörries has swallowed the bait and is pursuing the green. You would have thought an historian would be well aware of the dangers of cargo cult climate science.
“They are appeals for action, they imply claims to power, they stress that the issue is political and cultural, not merely a matter of science and reason alone.”
Without good science to support CAGW, the best response id do nothing. Temperatures oscillate up and down quasi-cyclically over time and if it turns cold instead of warming we will be wasting trillions for a lost cause.
Saw an article in the paper today, teh UN is pushing for global taxes to fight AGW. They would have all teh money they need if they removed 30% of the usless family members on staff there
Fear was the great motivator underlying 20th century politics. It’s now, (thankfully), impossible for almost all of us to imagine what it was like for Europeans, (especially), and Americans to live through the three decades of 1914-1945. And from 1945 onwards there was the Cold War and the threat of nuclear destruction. It was this constant fear that largely drove the desire for, or at least acceptance of, big government in developed societies.
Now no one under 70 can remember World War II; no one under 25 can even remember the Cold War. Fear has greatly abated. Government can, and should, retreat from people’s lives. Historians of the future may see AGW as a last attempt to re-kindle fear by people who didn’t understand how to govern in its absence.
Catastrophism as a movement and scientific mindset was very big in Victorian England, eventually it petered out discredited and disbelieved only to lie dormant like a virus for three or four generations before rising again in our own times. The hysteria that fuels the madness burns out eventually; sanity finally prevails and the human race returns to the business of living for today.
One example of how incredible Climate Change/Global Warming allegations can be:
Everyday I hear at a local radio an ad saying that “Because of Climate Change all sources of water will disappear”, everybody gets scared in spite of the fact that the world is 71% covered with water and, if salted it can be turned into drinkable water by just passing it through a low cost reverse osmosis equipment.
Of course these ads are paid by a known bank, which is a branch of a well known NY investment Bank, showing that there is big money behind Climate Change. If that wouldn’t be the case it should have ended long time ago. So, it does not matter how intelligent or how many skeptics’ arguments may be, there is an obvious expectancy of big gains, but which are these?, selling silly windmills? , solar cells?.. No, I don’t think so, there is much more involved. Does somebody have a precise idea?…or it is plainly the control of the whole world by a very small elite?
Everything in our culture is based on fear… Edward Bernays and the modern Admen have only rediscovered and refined the ages old psychological lynchpin of religious manipulation – FEAR
Now virtually every product (from soap, to politician, to beliefs) is packaged and sold emotionally and idealogically, the memes developed by trillions in research at giant tax-exempt foundations and corporate think tanks.
Ha ha. This reminds me of a couple of weeks after Y2K never materialized, we watched a video (I was in school at that time) saying that the earth tends to start over every million years and (they claim) scientists say that it will probably happen again around 2050.
I remember sitting there thinking “Really? You can’t even wait a month before declaring another apocalypse?”
” …not merely a matter of science and reason alone.”
Boy…they hit that proverbial nail right on the head, eh? Nothing like redefining the issue, just so they can contrive some kind of foundation for their agenda.
Next we’ll be hearing from the EPA the same thing they said about ETS: it doesn’t matter what the science says, or does not say, the “consesus” of the American people believe is it’s unhealthy!
“That wheel in the sky keeps on turning…” I don’t know where we’ll be tomorrow…
Enneagram says:
November 5, 2010 at 10:19 am
“Does somebody have a precise idea?…or it is plainly the control of the whole world by a very small elite?”
It is plainly the control of the whole world by a very small elite.
Too bad to see a historian of Climate Alarmism go over to the dark side (AGW). I would love to see a documentary, or a great series, with gorgeous photography that gives the history of Earth’s amazing life-altering (whether extinctions or expansions or diversity radiations) changes. The more humans understand the tremendous changes of plate tectonics (earthquakes-earth motion), mountain building, volcanoes, large igneous province flows, floods, droughts, asteroid/comet impacts (many more than we imagined before), glaciations-intrastadials, effects of change in the oceans on land, solar cycles, and many, many more, the more we (I definitely include myself) might to be able to take this Climate Fearmongering in stride and examine the evidence.
Change is the natural order and organization of life. Adjustability is one of life’s most precious “possessions”. Terror prevents developing adjustability in favor one final solution — and the one today seems to be a kind of total marxist control (totalitarian) by a global bureaucracy. I hope real scientists will work just as hard as have Climate Alarmists to educate us humans about Inevitable Natural Climate Change. Indonesians are experiencing the “Disruption” aspect of it these days. Inbetween the disruptive times, there is awesome natural beauty and the opportunity to live as prosperous a life as possible. People need to know.
Thanks to Henry chance (9:00 am) for the good news that one marxist in the U.,S. administration has bit the dust. Lisa Heinzerling, aggressive head of EPA’s policy office has resigned, returning to the Law School at Georgetown University. Now you get an idea as to why so many lawyers are falling for the marxist line — too many stupid (uninformed-religiously marxist) law professors.
On the other hand, fear is not an effective selling strategy as insurance companies discovered long ago. People tend to turn off as they have been tuning out to the whole global warming scare.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
H. L. Mencken
I have always thought that the line “We have nothing to fear but fear itself” was nonsense. Fear is a rational reaction to perceived threats which trigger fight or flight responses. We should be very wary of our perceptions of course and be fearful of those who either exaggerate dangers or falsely minimize them.
nemesis says: “The whole aim of practical politics …”
is to persuade a bunch of gullible people that voting for a political elite once in a blue moon who then stuff us the rest of the time is the best form of government we can ever hope to achieve.