Guest essay by Andy West
Posts at WUWT have often featured scientific papers that are clearly impacted by a cultural bias towards CAGW. Given the impressive reach of WUWT and the likelihood that a number of folks from academia will be peeking here, some examination of the impact upon conclusions, and also how bias has occurred for particular scientists or organizations, not only keeps alive healthy skepticism in science but hopefully might result, one day, in a reduction of the CAGW bias. In that spirit, this post revisits ‘Science or Science Fiction? Professionals’ Discursive Construction of Climate Change’ by Lianne M. Lefsrud and Renate E. Meyer, LM2013; It is not pay-walled.
An article at Forbes plus the Investor’s Business Daily on the paper, triggered a WUWT post here. Unfortunately however, the former articles misfired into a tangent that was not well considered, greatly distracting from a deeper look at the paper; hence also from something that I believe is valuable, plus deeply ironic for the authors.
The post is adapted from supporting material in my essay The CAGW Memeplex summarized in a WUWT guest post here. However, no particular memetic insight is invoked here and none is needed to see how the authors of this paper have fallen victim to bias and ended up with unsupportable conclusions; just an appreciation (from history) that social narratives can acquire an inertia of their own, a kind of insistent culture that sometimes dominates events while leaving facts far behind. This can happen not only where the narrative is long-lived and wide in scope, e.g. mainstream religions evolving over many generations, but also where an original narrative is narrow in scope, e.g. Lysenkoism. Such narratives and counter narratives compete in our social space and may do so via strong or weak alliances and wider coalitions, for instance Lysenkoism was strongly coupled to Stalinism in the USSR, and the culture associated with Eugenics was loosely allied to right-wing politics in various countries, later becoming strongly coupled to Fascism especially in Germany. Religions have often found alliances within shifting maps of state and regional politics. The increasing number (and depth) of comparisons between CAGW and religion (e.g. see the varied selection: UK MP Peter Lilley , blogger John Bell, Michael Crichton via blogger Justice4Rinka [Jan 10, 2013 at 10:07am], Richard Lindzen, blogger BetaPlug, philosopher Pascal Bruckner, blogger sunshinehours1 [cult], professor Hans Von Storch [prophets], Evangelical skeptics, and a Climate Etc post discussing this area, plus very many more), acknowledges that CAGW is a (successful) social narrative, an ‘insistent culture’ that has indeed left reality behind.
With the above in mind, the approach of LM2013 seems at first to be admirable. For instance social coalitions (termed ‘discourse coalitions’) are understood to be important entities backing the survival / growth of competing ‘storylines’ within a contestable narrative space, where coalition members attempt to ‘frame’ the debate so as to promote their storylines while trying to ‘break the persuasiveness’ of competing stories, a process within which apparent truths are relative (‘…experts construct interpretive packages or frames that stand in for the ‘truth’.’) It is also recognized that these ‘frames’ are intimately linked to the legitimacy and identity of the framers: ‘Besides defining the issue, framing is also the means by which professionals draw from broader values (Hulme, 2009), construct their self-definitions and expert identities.’ The latter is consistent with literature (e.g. the concept of the ‘The Social Mind’ by neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniger) essentially saying that our thoughts and identities are in some part formed by the societal entities we’re embedded in. This concept not only helps with understanding the motives of the players, it also helps regarding awareness of one’s own social embedding and hence the attempt to distance oneself from personal bias, as presumably the LM2013 authors would wish. Ultimately the authors appear to grasp that it’s a narrative war out there, in which ‘the truth’ may not always win out.
So what’s not to like? Shouldn’t a paper that recognizes these principles be robustly impartial? In trying to analyze the various ‘storylines’ shouldn’t the authors have attempted to position themselves, at least so far as is possible, outside of all of the relevant narratives? Well, unfortunately not…
The survey that forms the heart of the paper was conducted upon experts from or associated with the petro-chemical industry (in Alberta, Canada), showing that within this sector frames largely supporting the ‘C’ in CAGW add up to 41% of respondents, and frames that are largely unsupportive add to 51%. These findings and others lead the authors to a large discussion and conclusion section that includes for instance this bold assertion: ‘it seems unlikely that the defensive institutional work by those in powerful positions within fossil fuel-related firms and industry associations can be breached in the near future without global enforcement mechanisms.’ While other conclusions are not so audacious and there is a reference to ‘scientific disagreement’, readers would be correct in assuming a similar flavor. The rather strident tone of this quote leads one to suspect a fatal flaw within the whole analysis, namely that the authors have failed to recognize their own framing, and hence have done nothing to prevent this framing from biasing the whole analysis. A search for such bias and inherent framing is all too easily rewarded.
For instance there is more than a nod to the ‘storyline’ that older males in senior positions ‘are more defensive’ to climate regulation. This invokes what is effectively a cultural cliché now, therefore alerting us regarding potential misuse to aid a particular framing. Of course within the context of the sector the authors are analyzing, whose interests lie largely in the petro-chemical industry and wider economy of Alberta, it is true; their survey is no doubt correct. But having read many of the Climategate emails, it is clear for instance that the core of defensiveness from the ‘Hockey Team’ (as they once called themselves) against making climate science more open, sharing data, and embracing rather than suppressing scientific uncertainties, also comes from older males in senior (academic) positions. Another similar scenario is that the core of defensiveness against toning down alarmism inside environmental NGOs, comes from older males in senior (administrative) positions. Regarding the latter, see the article about male domination within the leaderships of the WWF and Greenpeace, at No Frakking Consensus here: http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2013/05/09/the-male-dominated-green-landscape/.
So, by isolating a narrow (climate-change ‘resistive’) sector completely from the context of the wider narrative competition, the authors have thus succeeded in morphing a relatively firm metric that surely we all knew about anyhow (i.e. older males dominate org leaderships), and one that is neutral with respect to climate narratives, into a storyline that is not neutral with respect to climate narratives, and is subtly deployed within their CAGW supportive frame to try and morally undermine those who are leaders in the petro-chemical sector. The implied storyline is: ‘those bad old dudes are harming the climate for self-interest; dudettes and younger dudes are way cooler than those stuffy old types anyway’. This storyline is a recurrent meme within the social phenomenon of CAGW and indeed within other cultural movements that foster radicalism and seek a change to the current regime, sometimes attempting to frame that regime in terms of an ‘Ancien Régime’. Yet a universal truth regarding the statistically dominant position of older males in society (which recent changes addressing gender bias have not yet balanced out), lends no legitimacy whatever to subcultures like CAGW that attempt to leverage this fact for demonization of opposing leaderships; let CAGW adherents look to their own frame-related leaderships, most of which will have the same male over-weightings.
The ‘older male’ storyline within LM2013 is only a minor contributor to the total narrative of the paper. But it exposes the fact that the authors have failed to recognize the full scope of the narrative competition and hence their own place within this contest, and thus are working within their own inherent framing. At the heart of this blindness is a critical and fatal error; the assumption that framings are to a large extent consciously constructed, deliberate if you will. This error occurs despite the authors having recognized a link to identity (and so potentially to subconscious behavior).
Hence I speculate that the authors’ reasoning regarding personal bias would run somewhat like this: “we are not consciously or deliberately constructing any frame, we are merely ‘seeking the truth’, hence we must be impartial.” But this is not so. They have not grasped that their own identities are linked to a very powerful framing (i.e. *C*AGW) within the wider contest, and so they’re unknowingly engaged upon promoting the storylines within that framing as though these were unbiased ‘truths’. This error is in turn based upon the lack of recognition that CAGW, with an emphasis on the ‘C’, is simply another framing in itself, i.e. another (and aggressively infectious) culture if you like. They have mistaken this framing for ‘scientific facts’ or ‘environmental reality’, and then identified with it.
This all too common mistake is revealed by the opening of the ‘Discussion and Conclusion’ section: ‘Climate change could irreversibly affect future generations and, as such, is one of the most urgent issues facing organizations’. While the authors mitigate slightly with the word ‘could’, the level of impact and urgency (if any!) is precisely one of the relative truths that is being fought over in the narrative contest of storylines and their alliances within frames. Above a certain level of scientific uncertainty about climate behavior and interactions, there is no absolute truth regarding the major issues of impact and urgency. Despite (at one time) a successful narrative about ‘settled science’, it transpires that there is and always was a wide enough uncertainty to allow a blossoming of arbitrary narrative competition (in essence, no scenario could be completely ruled out). Hence every position, including of course that of the IPCC itself, is just an interpreted package (frame) filled with storylines that promote this position. This does not mean that all frames are completely devoid of facts, just that the ability to compete in a narrative war is rewarded more than the level of verifiability, a situation which typically results over the long-term in factual content being skewed or drowned out. (Skeptic and Luke-warmer narratives have tended to compete poorly, in my opinion partly because they rely more heavily on unadorned facts, including the realities about uncertainty, which thus seed much less sensational storylines).
LM2013 applies terms that lend an inappropriate emotive weighting to certain frames; for example the terms ‘resist’ or ‘resistance’ are used to describe the defensiveness of professionals against challenges to expertise or legitimacy, but the context is always in the sense of those groups resisting (the cause of) climate change or associated emissions regulation. This short statement within the conclusion effectively summarizes the context of LM2013’s usage: ‘With our findings, we provide additional insights into climate change resistance.’ Yet there appears to be no equivalent terminology regarding the resistance of professionals to that which calls out problems with Consensus climate change theory or related policy (and which skeptics might be tempted to call ‘science resistance’, though I’d be kinder and call it something like ‘debate resistance’). An objective analysis of the narrative competition ought to apply the same terminology and associated meaning to all players, all frames. Where no-one does or can own ‘the truth’ (the authors must assume this in order to aspire to complete objectivity), no differential weighting of terms should be applied. So it is perfectly fair to use ‘climate resistance’ only if one also uses ‘climate-debate resistance’ and ‘moderate policies resistance’ and all the other ‘resistances’ that each frame is engaged upon for their own best interests. (For this same reason I expressed all my frame comparisons five paragraphs above using same term ‘defensive / defensiveness’). In the great majority of cases, ‘their own interests’ will be inclusive of what the frame promoters believe is a good course for society as well as self, but belief is not absolute knowledge and is formed in part from narrative immersion.
Despite the above interpretive bias LM2013’s assessment of the emotive content of frames is likely reasonable, and says of the ‘economic responsibility’ frame (which is unsupportive to the ‘C’ in CAGW): ‘They express much stronger and more negative emotions than any other group’. Yet once again we must remember that only a small sub-sector of the total narrative competition is considered, and one that is relatively skeptical overall. So while no doubt in this extremely limited context their results are once again true, what of the full narrative competition and the content of all frames?
Well even a cursory look at the full picture regarding CAGW shows that many frames are absolutely saturated with emotive content, which also appears to be heavily biased towards pro-CAGW frames (e.g. as supported from the major NGOs like Greenpeace and WWF, advocacy orientated climate scientists, mainstream media, political framings allied to CAGW, mass comments on pro-CAGW sites, etc.) Content includes the highly exaggerated language of disaster, the inappropriate emotive leverage from ‘threatened grandkids’, demonization of ‘denialists’ and more, all of which proliferate. This does not mean that the cynical and emotive content within ‘climate resistive’ framings per the LM2013 examples (centered on ‘scam’, ‘hoax’, or ‘left-wing conspiracy’ perceptions) doesn’t exist, but within the full narrative contest these are heavily outgunned by opposing emotive storylines such as (I paraphrase) “we’re all gonna fry”, “your coastal cities are gonna drown”, “your grandkids are gonna die”, “only N days to save the planet”, and the attempted suppression of argument by deployment of the ‘denier’ term, which diverts enormous and negative emotive power from a completely different narrative domain (Holocaust denial) and injects this into the climate arena.
This high level of emotive expression is not merely from some fringe framing. It is mainstream and systemically applied, plus legitimized by influential folks in the media, government, charities and science. Indeed many from all of these domains use the ‘denier’ term, and the scientist that folks associate most with Global Warming, James Hansen, not only pushes the psychological hot-button regarding threatened grandchildren, but calls coal trains ‘death trains’. Due to such a high level of promotion there is also mass public adherence to these emotively charged frames, an adherence that overwhelms skeptic numbers (and also objections). Yet attempts to find plausible real-world drivers for this excessive emotive content show only that Consensus science as summarized by the IPCC itself does not support any of the above paraphrases or the actual quotes they represent; the emotive content is due to iterative framing activity, and so is not rooted in likely outcomes (at least for approx a century timescale), even as perceived by the majority of scientists who contribute to the IPCC. Indeed AR5 confirms that the IPCC now fosters at least two frames, if not more; the framing represented by the summary for policy makers being significantly more alarmist than the core Consensus science framing.
Surveying the environmental NGO and activist sectors using the methods defined by this paper would likely produce results off-the-scale regarding plays of emotion, and most especially negative emotion. Yet no context or balance from the wider narrative competition is invoked by the authors, which would enable readers to realize for instance, that the ‘economic responsibility’ frame as defined by LM2013 is very far from being the strongest emotive play in the whole game. Providing this balance would almost certainly give the paper a very different flavor and undermine the current conclusions. Though the authors have limited their scope to just one narrow sector (which they regard as ‘resistive’), I’d love to see a similar survey of the entire CAGW narrative landscape, including all the Catastrophe ‘sympathetic’ sectors, using the same criteria to characterize frames. I suspect very different conclusions would then emerge.
The emotive term ‘denier’ is also used in the conclusion of LM2013; this is yet another sign that the authors are blind to their own inherent frame and associated framing activity. It does not appear in the sense say, of merely acknowledging the use of the term by others or attempting to analyze its arising and effect; the authors do actually use it to identify and label a class of opposition to CAGW. For instance: ‘However, given the polarized debate (Antonio & Brulle, 2011; Hamilton, 2010; McCright & Dunlop, 2011), gaining access to the reasoning of deniers and skeptics (Kemp, Milne, & Reay, 2010), let alone unraveling their framings, is far more difficult than analyzing supporters of regulatory measures.’ I have not followed up Kemp, Milne, & Reay, which appears to be pay-walled. But my opinion is that this statement is sheer myth. It is no more difficult to analyze skeptical framings than any other. But if one starts from the position that they are ‘deniers’, ‘an aggressive framing in action’, one will seriously cloud any data one may attempt to analyze further, and most likely it is therein that lies the source of their problem. All framings contain some level of narrative aggression, this is their entire point. Yet all are analyzable using a single methodology, unless one is too immersed oneself in a particular frame within the competition, especially a frame that attempts to characterize opposing frames as ‘not normal’. No analysis of the relevant competition can survive such an immersion bias. Essentially, another storyline is being promoted here: ‘regulatory supporters are normal and so can be analyzed; skeptics are not normal and so cannot easily be analyzed’. This of course is utter tosh!
I return now to this snippet from the conclusion: ‘it seems unlikely that the defensive institutional work by those in powerful positions within fossil fuel-related firms and industry associations can be breached in the near future without global enforcement mechanisms’. Underneath the trappings of academia and the raft of references, this quote highlights that LM2013 is treating us to more than a hint of those calls from highly immersed green street-activists; i.e. CAGW must be right and thus forcing regulation must also be right, where in the activist case overriding democracy plus direct action against oil and coal interests are both candidates for action. No doubt, unfortunately, such activists will benefit from this type of academic work. What a disappointing and very unenlightened dead end to a promising approach, which if it were but wider in context could hardly fail to identify to the authors their own framing work, and maybe provide a good formal entry port into an analysis of the memetic mechanisms that drive narrative wars. Not to mention exposing the aggressive framing of the self-named ‘Hockey Team’ (the small core of climate scientists promoting the original Global Warming theory). As the well-known climate commenter and contributor to BEST surface temperature series, Stephen Mosher, said: ‘Rather than using this methodology to understand skeptics, it’s probably better used to understand “the team” .’ See here for the original comment.
In not explicitly mentioning that the same process (of narrative competition) occurs across all sectors, and also in taking the word of the IPCC as an ‘absolute truth’ that is somehow magically defined as outside of this entire competition, the authors have painted a picture of the narrative struggle as though it is merely a secondary issue. An issue regarding only the dissemination of this ‘absolute truth’, plus the consequent policy action (or lack thereof), both of which are impeded or accelerated by the resistive or supportive frames within their arbitrarily narrowed contest. Yet the authors’ own frame and the supportive home for their storylines is enabled entirely by (unacknowledged) CAGW culture, by far the most dominant uber-frame within the environmental domain. Hence a very intelligent and careful work, no doubt associated with a great deal of effort to conduct their survey and analyze the results etc. is in my opinion completely undermined by a cultural bias to which the authors appear almost entirely blind.
To summarize: The authors’ haven’t sought to distance themselves from their own immersion in a (dominant) frame within the narrative competition they seek to analyze. Hence LM2013 is highly entangled with their own framing activity, including emotive content. While equal terminology ought to have been applied to all frames, this simply cannot be done in any case when only one small sector (experts from or associated with the petro-chemical industry [in Alberta]) of the battleground is considered; many entire frames that prosper outside this sector aren’t even acknowledged! One cannot analyze a single narrow sector in isolation from the wider narrative competition, and still draw useful conclusions about that wider competition. Even the more limited conclusions one might draw should be tested for possible framing bias from the wider competition. Nor can one take a near universal truth (e.g. regarding older males in society) as being meaningful for or against any particular frame in a given narrative competition; it will have near equal weight in all frames and hence should be disregarded. The authors appeared to recognize that all ‘truths’ in the total narrative competition are relative, yet then contradict themselves by singling out one particular relative ‘truth’, i.e. that of the orthodox IPCC view, and granting this the status of an absolute. While they may claim that the law (in the form of emissions regulation) supports their ‘absolute truth’, it is well established that arbitrary framings can in any case alter the law* and even morals* in their favor; hence this is no excuse for ceding objectivity. [*see my essay for more on this, including supporting refs].
NOTE: The 41% largely supportive of the ‘C’ in CAGW (or at least the need for strong controls on human emissions to combat climate change) is made up of two frames, a 5% ‘regulation activist’ frame and a 36% ‘comply with Kyoto’ frame, of which only the latter strongly believes that ‘humans are the main or central cause’ of global warming (the 5% frame accepts the possibility of a larger natural component). Some skeptics have thus made much of this result, i.e. only 36% of the respondents, a significant minority, believe ‘humans are causing a global-warming crisis’. For example see the Forbes article and IBT article (later discussed at Watts Up With That here). However this article, which calls the LM2013 survey respondents simply ‘geo-scientists and engineers’, fails to point out that the entire sample consisted of experts from or associated with the petro-chemical industry in Alberta, Canada, a state in which this industry also dominates the economy. Hence the respondents would clearly be defensive of their industry and economy and thus pretty biased towards skepticism. I very much doubt that a truly broad world-wide sample even among generic ‘geo-scientists and engineers’, would produce anything like this result. While I agree with the Forbes article regarding unmistakable bias, and indeed the article makes a similar point to me regarding biased terminology, stretching the LM2013 results inappropriately ‘out of sector’, a similar error to those the authors themselves make, is not the way to set matters straight. In my opinion this paper completely falls apart on its own merits; it needs no push whatsoever. (The comment by Brian Angliss at WUWT alerts to inappropriate assumptions in the Forbes article, as do various comments below the article itself – though the scientist/engineer ratio is not a critical issue and I am not endorsing or otherwise further comments by Brian – the limited sector of the respondents is highly relevant). In their own objection at Forbes, Lesfrud and Meyer warn against making generalizations from a ‘non-representational data set’. The data is indeed not at all representative of the whole narrative contest, and hence should not make assumptions about unexamined frames within the contest, such as for instance that IPCC framings contain ‘more truth’, or indeed ‘an absolute truth’.
Once a major narrative war is well under way, the accumulated weight of narrative frames will tend to dominate over any truths that may still survive beneath the battle. Critically, highly persuasive storylines from winning frames will actually alter perceptions so much that searches for the truth (scientific or otherwise) will very likely become highly biased or outright corrupted, as occurred in the historic examples mentioned at the top of this post (and it is all too easy to see this in climate science). Hence the successful narratives will tend to maintain conditions that maximize those uncertainties which led to the narratives arising in the first place. The apparently rampant CAGW bias in academia is a result; very likely the extremely poor progress on bounding climate sensitivity in the last twenty-five years (perhaps the single largest contributor to uncertainty) is also a symptom of this mechanism.
Many articles at WUWT have highlighted CAGW bias in academic papers across a great diversity of topics from ‘threatened’ butterflies to agricultural impacts to core climate metrics like temperature and sea-ice extent. I picked this particular paper because its mode of investigation holds both a very deep irony for the authors, and also something very well worth rescuing indeed; something immensely valuable in fact. I mentioned above that more and more folks in the climate sphere, whether well-known or less so, and some even from within the Consensus itself, are applying religious metaphors to CAGW. Also they are increasingly using terms like ‘framing / reframing’, ‘meme’ and ‘narrative’ (e.g. ‘narrative competition’ ‘successful narratives’, ‘reframing the Climate Change narrative’, ‘dominant narrative’ etc) to characterize the evolution of the CAGW phenomena and the many struggles this spawns. LM2013 homes in upon this angle, and it is the right angle, a highly valuable angle, for attempting to understand the social phenomena of CAGW. Religions are essentially successfully evolved narratives, and the same mechanisms that support them also support the rise of CAGW. Reality (including acknowledging the real uncertainties) has been left far behind because once conditions were right for a narrative war to blossom, narrative success became more important than factual content; the winner so far in this particular war is the aggressive CAGW culture. Understanding that culture will help defeat it.
The deep irony for the authors is that they had in their hands the right tool that could provide a much better understanding of what is really happening regarding CAGW, yet they discovered nothing of note. They failed to acknowledge their own cultural immersion and hence have not realized their uncritical acceptance of CAGW supportive frames. While I see no reason to doubt the immediate findings of their survey of Alberta’s petro-chemical industry, what this paper doesn’t say regarding the whole narrative contest, plus the fact of the authors’ CAGW cultural bias, together rob the conclusions of any real meaning and betray the paper’s supposed objectivity. Rather than remain neutral as academics should, they have significantly furthered the purpose of their own frame with LM2013, which might be labeled ‘authority of academia’, and which appears to be wholly allied and committed to CAGW.
Religious narratives essentially never run out of fuel; there is and likely always will be some level of uncertainty about the existence of God(s). Secular narratives, especially those spawned by science, should in theory run out of fuel one day, *if* the scientific method survives of course, as this is the means to eventually remove uncertainty. But there is vast social inertia behind CAGW now, to the extent that even a 17 year ‘hiatus’ in global temperatures has had surprisingly little impact on the big narrative beast. Most likely it won’t be tamed for some years yet, but understanding the nature of the beast can only help.
Footnote 1: I make the caveat here that the narrative competition is essentially unrelated to whatever is happening in the real climate, and whether that is good, bad, or indifferent. Social narratives feed upon uncertainty, and even if a ‘bad’ real climate scenario emerged (though this seems increasingly less likely), most of the excesses of the aggressive CAGW culture would swiftly die-out. This is because a real enemy not an array of fantasy ones would now be identified, and just like for a war or a natural disaster, society would soon grasp what to do and folks would simply get on and do it.
Footnote2: References regarding various points above, such as the comparison by many folks of CAGW with religion (or use of religious metaphors), narratives altering the law, etc. can be found in my essay The CAGW Memeplex; a cultural creature. A memetic perspective provides great insight on the competition of social narratives, and allows a detailed exploration of how and why these happen, which is simply not possible in the space of the post above.
The ‘older male’ storyline within LM2013 seems very similar to the methodology of Lewandowsky that Brandon Sholenberger recently exposed. Taking a finding with a small group (Alberta oil execs) and saying that the finding is due to the “group”, because that ois what you are looking for… and not controlling for other factors.
You can find anything that way.
So I wonder if doing such an analysis oif the Hockey Team would actually add any light.
Can anyone put their own bias to one side when doing this sort if thing?
Very good analysis. And of course, they use the “peer review” method to advance the supposed credibility of their thesis, even though that entire system is shot through with the same types of biases as has been examined here.
The referenced paper reads like a report from a committee of Scientologists, trying to examine and explain why some people are skeptical and resistant to the Manifest Truth of Dianetics.
4500 words.
Needs editing down.
Actually Eugenics was coupled with Left wing socialism. The right or conservative wing promotes religion generally which promotes inherent value of the individual.
Darwinian liberalism promotes ‘survival of the fittest’ eugenics.
Germany under Hitler was socialist.
It is pretty clear that the CAGW believers do not practice what they preach. Thus they are a fraud. However, there may be a handful that live in the woods which is fine. To what extent do believers of any religion or cult practice to the letter their belief? And to what extent is a religion forced upon a population? And to what extent are we to be free of the resultant powers that force others into compliance? I say the answers are in the history of who leads and who follows. What is enforceable and to what extent is enforcement?
An excellent commentary and understanding of why the embedded memes within academia perpetuate the ongoing dogma. Moreover, it shows why attempts to use data and science to derail the AGW narrative as it evolves and re-invents itself are ultimately futile: the change has to be at the source — in the framing of the foundational political narrative of global salvationism itself.
Thankyou, Anthony.
Andy.
On “Academia”
1. They are the problem.
2. They are co-commies.
3. They voted for Al Gore, they voted for John Kerry, they elected B. Obama.
4. They not only lie on the facts they lie to themselves.
5. They will not change.
6. They must be defeated.
keep it simple
“he culture associated with Eugenics was loosely allied to right-wing politics in various countries, later becoming strongly coupled to Fascism especially in Germany.”
I think you have that very very wrong. You really have to watch the pea with an eagle eye because a favorite sport of MSM propaganda is convincing us black is white and slavery is freedom.
Heck even the Guardian has a story: Eugenics: the skeleton that rattles loudest in the left’s closet, Socialism’s one-time interest in eugenics is dismissed as an accident of history. But the truth is far more unpalatable
The Fabian link to Eugenics is explained in this article. The eugenics movement Britain wants to forget
Fascism in Germany was under the National Socialists or in German Nationalsozialismus. However now no one wants to claim fascism.
E.M. Smith does a good job of explaining the links of Fascism to the “Third Way” beloved of Clinton and the Fabian founded London School of Economics HERE, as well as clearing up the confusion of why corporate CEOs favor socialism not capitalism. (They HATE capitalism for very good reasons.)
Here is another essay on the hot potato of Fascism “The line between fascism and Fabian socialism is very thin. Fabian socialism is the dream. Fascism is Fabian socialism plus the inevitable dictator.” ~ John T. Flynn
Fabian Anthony Giddens, former head of the London School of Economics, defends third-way politics
In 1998, a new term hit the political scene. According to the two most powerful leaders in the developed world, US President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair the “Third Way” was the ideology of the future. Their declarations, and a series of subsequent Third Way summits, evoked strong responses from political parties in all parts of the ideological spectrum.
And an explanation of the link between “Third Way” and fascism.
It is a rather murky subject because hiding the facts is a major past time of politicians and their puppet masters. Just look at the word ‘Liberal.’ That used to mean ‘Classic liberal’ but now means the opposite, hence the addition of classic to the term.
fobdangerclose says at January 27, 2014 at 6:49 am…
Well, that is simple.
But is it too much of a generalisation?
And, is it helpful?
“4500 words.
Needs editing down.”
Although I do understand your point, and sympathize a bit, remarks like this always remind me of Emperor Joseph II as portrayed in the film, “Amadeus”: “Too many notes, my dear Mozart, too many notes!”
I would suggest a one or two paragraph “Executive Summary” at the beginning, for those who simply wish to skim the main points without worrying about the attributions, followed by the bulk of the article in which the case is carefully laid out.
The core of this problem is an economic reality, that can not be “papered over”, with introspective white-washing.
If you subsidize steel, you get more steel. If you subsidize windmills, you get more windmills. If you subsidize, poverty you get more poverty.
When you subsidize CAGW research, you expect to get un-biased research?
There is more than enough evidence to prove that those that push the ‘C’agw narrative are either deluded or have vested interests.
being a sceptic is not a position or frame, it is just not believing the deluded people! alarmist often try to box sceptics so they can counter only a few arguments (often not the actual argument) because there is no other way of countering what is essentially not a position at all. ie uncertainty.
while there is a level of uncertainty, it is not with the fact that ‘C’agw is just plain wrong, it is just about how much influence does co2 actually have over our global tempertures. something that will not be known until the science is removed from the political process.
so, the weather will set the publics belief dial it seems, lets just hope it keeps flat/cooling.
“To summarize: The authors’ haven’t sought to distance themselves from their own immersion in a (dominant) frame within the narrative competition they seek to analyze. ”
translation: The authors are not very smart.
I’m so glad I left University.
the paper is a Lewandowsky with slightly less snark, more words and, if possible, even more false assumptions.
Thanks for the hat- tip not so many people would be so gracious.
”I make the caveat here that the narrative competition is essentially unrelated to whatever is happening in the real climate, and whether that is good, bad, or indifferent.”
That may be true to a point, but a GAST (global average surface temperature) nose dive would certainly make it difficult for all but the most devoted to “The Cause” ™ to keep the faith. Unlike the circa 1940’s – 1970’s cooling, the satellite data will ensure the record isn’t adjusted to fit the narrative to the degree that would likely be necessary to hide a decline if it should occur. If ocean “heat content” also doesn’t cooperate, excuses exhausted on the already uncooperative GAST (where’s the accelerating warming of the 1990’s assertions?) would make the meme difficult to sustain as well. Like the day after a predicted (projected) rapture, many true believers suddenly awakened to the fallibility of their idols while the idols are forced to recalculate in an attempt to save some face.
I also see signs of an increased realization that, yes, we’re in a warmer world than circa pre-industrial revolution and that world is better. Warming is nothing to fear, cooling is the real enemy. True geologic timescale thinking and knowledge of past climates and the life supported in those climates could serve to soothe the anxiety some have about what they may perceive as the unknown (unprecedented) from a few degrees increase in GAST.
”The apparently rampant CAGW bias in academia is a result; very likely the extremely poor progress on bounding climate sensitivity in the last twenty-five years (perhaps the single largest contributor to uncertainty) is also a symptom of this mechanism.”
Yes, they cannot admit to what their own numbers say. According to them: Total downwelling IR (GHE) is 300 – 350 W/m^2; total temperature gain from the GHE including all feedbacks is 30 – 60 degrees Celsius; and 2XCO2 enhancement of the GHE is approximately 3.7 W/m^2. This means the sensitivity to 2XCO2 is probably between 0.3 and 0.8 degrees Celsius from simply S = (T gain) / GHE X D(GHE) assuming the law of diminishing marginal returns hasn’t already significantly reduced addition IR heat flux from increasing temperature in which case the sensitivity to 2XCO2 could easily be indistinguishable from zero but very doubtful that it’s greater than 1.
‘being a sceptic is not a position or frame, it is just not believing the deluded people! alarmist often try to box sceptics so they can counter only a few arguments (often not the actual argument) because there is no other way of countering what is essentially not a position at all. ie uncertainty.”
there is only one “successful” mode of being “frameless” and that is a practice known as “deconstruction’ as practiced by Derrida. And even it is not frameless. Frames can be anything: metaphors, storylines, binary oppositions. Try writing or expressing a thought without a frame. You might be able to in pure math or logic, but other discourse and thought is shot through with frames and framing. To think is to frame.
Lets look at your frame. Do you see how a presupposition of belief is built into your definition of skeptic as a disbeliever? It’s hard to see your own frame.
The notion that one can be “frameless” is the ORIGINAL FRAME, the deepest frame: the frame that somehow you can be outside the “box” you mention. That somehow by adopting a certain position you can be above or outside of the human condition. Put another way, are you sure about the uncertainty?
to give you a clue, defining skepticism as a refusal to believe “deluded” people, presupposes a decision to classify them as deluded based on a position of definitive knowledge. In short, you know they are deluded and define yourself in opposition to that. So instead of basing your disbelief in uncertainty, which you claim, you’ve based it on the certainty that the “other” is deluded.
You’ve fallen into an old trap that’s related to the errors of the academic skeptics. You’d be better off reading Pyrrho and focus on the concept of ataxaria
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ataraxia
I’ll make it easy: understand the concept of suspending judgement.
not believing “deluded people” is not suspending judgement because you’ve made the judgement that they are deluded. Suspending judgement– is just that, living in uncertainty
which includes the recognition that you might be wrong about your own lack of knowledge.
In short, you are living and acting as if you know, while proclaiming that you dont.
Memes are an important, and too infrequently appreciated means, of altering culture and prevailing beliefs and values. In fact, there’s a book called Good Work that readily acknowledges education is deliberately manipulating memes (it uses term) to destroy capitalism as an acceptable economic system.
As explained here CAGW plays a major role in both the US Common Core K-12 implementation and the UN’s plans for the rest of the world’s education as well. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/translating-the-off-putting-term-dialectical-materialism-and-discovering-the-intended-process-in-all-classrooms/ When changing actions in the material world is the whole point of a theory of transformation, hyping potential catastrophes like CAGW or grievances like racism or sexism is highly effective in guiding desired behavioral changes.
“Skeptic and Luke-warmer narratives have tended to compete poorly, in my opinion partly because they rely more heavily on unadorned facts,..”
What else could a skeptic of scientific theory, incompetence, data abuse and willful dishonesty rely on. First, adopting a smoke shoveling contest may even the field but how are thinking onlookers to judge. Second, the skeptic has turned the tide quicker than even I thought possible. Holding the team’s feet to the fire works and only because people ultimately understand the importance of facts. Even the team knows they must avoid debate or the cause is lost. They prefer to fill up op-eds, vilify dissent, block and intimidate journal editors, attack the person and the like. What is data and code supporting theory that is being held back by authors and why do they do it. Well exposure of the facts, even if it is the fact that the data was improperly processed, brings down the theory. Yes they know to hide the facts, the selected facts, the rejected facts is necessary for bad science to survive.
An impressive social analysis of the CAGW culture, Andy West (a little outside my own area of knowledge) but I think it could be improved a lot – my point and Gail Combs’s always spectacular instant encyclopedic, annotated, linked comments could be of use in this.
Gail Combs says:
January 27, 2014 at 6:51 am
You are an international treasure. How do you have so much at your finger tips? You could set up well-needed competition to Wikipedia on seemingly all subjects.
Russ R. says: January 27, 2014 at 7:13 am
The core of this problem is an economic reality, that can not be “papered over”, with introspective white-washing.
If you subsidize steel, you get more steel. If you subsidize windmills, you get more windmills. If you subsidize, poverty you get more poverty.
When you subsidize CAGW research, you expect to get un-biased research?
AMEN! My exposure to the issue was in the form of a quote from an unknown author.
“If you want more of something, subsidize it.“
Well done Andy!
A meta-analysis of the references cited in the LM2013 would strengthen your assertion that the authors’ objectivity is constrained by entrenched mental constructs. For example, Hoffman is cited no less than six times and Wittneben (2008) is nothing more than an interview of George Monboit. A statistical analysis of the prevailing viewpoints of the individuals cited in LM2013 would surely skew heavily towards a strong belief in CAGW.
It’s really quite ironic that Lesfrud and Meyer were able to produce a paper devoted to personal (frameworks) belief systems, in a vacuum of metacognition. Alternatively, they may be perfectly aware of their own belief systems, and remain convinced that anyone opposing said beliefs has to be wrong. The former is the mark of a fool and the latter a mark of the Devil.
Friends:
sabretruthtiger wrote at January 27, 2014 at 6:04 am
I copied it here to enable the laughter of those who missed it.
And it provides a challenge.
Can anyone else provide so many laughably untrue falsehoods in under 40 words?
Richard
I think I’ve previously referred to Steven Mosher as “relentlessly glib”. His comments in this thread prompt me to retract that, which I now do.
Not that I am anybody in particular.
Good write up Gail Comb.
Eugenics is a purely collectivist/socialist ideology. Most people nowadays know nothing about eugenics and have sucked up huge sums of pro-socialist propaganda thus believing that somehow eugenics is some kind of politically “diverse” “science”.
Eugenics is the socialists science for controlling the most basic means of production… aka the human being. Long have collectives attempted breed the “prefect human” aka a human that didn’t have any of those nasty rightwing individualist ideas of self. In eugenics they attempted to “codify” what a good collectivist should be through the new found information of genetics.
Only by breeding the “prefect humans” could the collective survive such problems as running out of resources, over population, pollution and so forth(aka insert every common whine made by global warming cultists/other socialists).
It was hoped by socialists that instead of the near random genocide of past socialists utopias’ that with this new “science” of eugenics they could identity the evil individualist and purge him more successfully and thus “this time socialism would work”. That combined with selective breeding of the means of production(aka humans) they could prevent evil individualist thought from ever accruing again.
Eugenics is one of the most basic tenets of socialist/collectivist thought.
temp:
re your post at January 27, 2014 at 10:04 am.
I write to suggest that you study the post sabretruthtiger at January 27, 2014 at 6:04 am.
He posts similar nonsensical and untrue twaddle to yours but manages to pack it in to fewer words. If you were to adopt his style then it would enable people could scroll past your rubbish quicker.
Richard
From the article:
b>The implied storyline is: ‘those bad old dudes are harming the climate for self-interest; dudettes and younger dudes are way cooler than those stuffy old types anyway’. This storyline is a recurrent meme within the social phenomenon of CAGW and indeed within other cultural movements that foster radicalism and seek a change to the current regime,
This reminds me of the recent “Occupy Wall Street” movement. Where these people,mostly youngsters, demonstrate that they have taught to resent success. They’ve been taught that success can be likened to greed. They’ve been taught that the wealth of successful people somehow should be theirs.
The Authors of the article, like the occupiers, Are sure their frame is the “truth”. so, tacitly not a frame at all. The implication here is that those older person’s “frames” are false.
A bias story frought with bias.
The Irony, it unwrinkles..
This was such heavy reading, I gave up before the end.
The problem with today’s climate science is the unprecedented size of the troughs, swilling over with money. Everyone wants a piece of it – by everyone I mostly mean second rate scientists and statisticians – and more important than this, they all want to see the perpetuation and growth of these obscenely overflowing troughs.
The inevitable result? A fast exit for ethics and morality, all out the window, never to be seen again.
This analysis missed the main question IMHO.
It is often said that one should never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence. So, are the results of this paper a consequence of the authors being trapped in their own reference frame (hence incompetence) or was the paper written with malicious intent?
Given the outright contrived nature of the paper’s subject matter, the very specific industry targeted, and coupled with conclusions in regard to the action that should be taken (authoritarian control of disbelievers) that have nothing to do with the central analysis of the paper itself, my conclusion is the latter.
“It is no more difficult to analyze skeptical framings than any other. But if one starts from the position that they are ‘deniers’, ‘an aggressive framing in action’, one will seriously cloud any data one may attempt to analyze further, and most likely it is therein that lies the source of their problem. All framings contain some level of narrative aggression, this is their entire point. Yet all are analyzable using a single methodology, unless one is too immersed oneself in a particular frame within the competition, especially a frame that attempts to characterize opposing frames as ‘not normal’. No analysis of the relevant competition can survive such an immersion bias. Essentially, another storyline is being promoted here: ‘regulatory supporters are normal and so can be analyzed; skeptics are not normal and so cannot easily be analyzed’. This of course is utter tosh!”
Some very profound points, that, though well known by us all, are still not fully appreciated. The term I prefer is being brainwashed. As an operational meteorologist for 32 years, I have an advantage in most discussions when the topic is the atmosphere. At this site, there are plenty, who have equal or more understanding, so I refer to 99.9% of those I interact with.
I can present what I believe is 100% purely empirical data as objectively as possible, about an aspect that would seem to be obvious to everyone from both sides. For instance, numerous studies that show how CO2 is effecting vegetation on this planet. It’s hard to imagine anybody disagreeing with the known law of photosynthesis and key role of CO2. This takes the topic into another realm which is not just theory and would not seem to be so contaminated with labels, buzz words, false assumptions and frames.
I’ll use this link as an example:
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/study-finds-plant-growth-surges-as-co2-levels-rise-16094
It’s assumed that everybody learned about photosynthesis in science class growing up. I try to reach those that disagree thru this understanding. Also, through expressing my strong agreement with them on every single other aspect of what pollution is in the air, water and soil and the need to take aggressive actions, that is except for CO2.
As soon as they know or if they did know to begin with what my position is on CAGW, they find reasons why photosynthesis is not as important as CAGW risks or why none of the other real pollutants are as important as CAGW risks. Photosynthesis in reality should be getting the greatest weight.
Hitler would have admired the results of those that did the brainwashing.
FOBDANGERCLOSE, you are correct, and it is helpful. A bit from my family history: When Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” no one would publish it in book form. The “moderates” said that it was too inflammatory and it wouldn’t be helpful. An ancestor, John P. Jewett, was an abolitionist and publisher information Boston he did publish it. I think that it is time to stand up and say “enough”!
GAIL COMBS Thank you for putting it all together. I have often wondered why they put Marxist-Lenninist Socialism (Communism) at the left end of the spectrum and National Socialism (NAZIs) at the other. It appears that Communism should be at the extreme far left and the Nazis should be placed on the left, only a little more moderate than the Communists. Anarchists (no government) should be on the far right, and the hard-core Libertarians more moderate on the right.
I had a friend whose parents were from Lithuania and another whose grandparents were from Estonia. In both cases the parents/grandparents experienced the Communist dictatorship from about September 1939 to about June of 1941. Then they experienced the Nazi dictatorship until 1944/1945. And in both cases they decided that Nazis were less evil and fled while the Nazis retreated.
By the way, the Soviets and the Nazis signed a non-aggression pact, called the Molotov-Ribbintrop pact. They became allied in the subjugation of eastern Europe. On September 1, 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland from the west. Seventeen days their ally, the Soviet Union, invaded from the east. The Soviets went on to invade and subjugate Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia and part of Romania as per their agreement with the Nazis. They also invaded Finland, but the Fins fought to a stalemate in the Winter War of 1939.
Some might take issue with the equivalence of the Communists and the Nazis. There are clear differences.
The National Socialists promised their followers a Utopia. To do this, they had to have a dictatorship and they had to exterminate certain groups. They murdered some 6.5 to 25 million, with the most common figure being 12.5 million. The Utopia would be so perfect that it would last 1,000 years!!
There are clear differences when compared with the Marxist-Lenninist Socialists.
The Marxist-Lenninist Socialists promised their followers a Utopia. To do this, they had to seize all material property (not only the means of production, but most personal wealth also) in the Name of the People. To do that, they had to establish a dictatorship and exterminate certain groups. They murdered some 120 million to 170 million. Their Utopia was to be better than the Nazis: it would be so perfect that it would be the end of history because no further improvement could be made! It would last forever!!
I would suggest reading the “Black Book of Communism”, translated from the French and published by Harvard University Press.
Regards,
Steamboat Jack (Jon Jewett’ evil twin)
RobRoy Says:
“This reminds me of the recent “Occupy Wall Street” movement. Where these people,mostly youngsters, demonstrate that they have taught to resent success. They’ve been taught that success can be likened to greed. They’ve been taught that the wealth of successful people somehow should be theirs.”
The ironic part is that most of the “Occupiers” could not deal with the cold weather and went back home to the climate-controlled confines of Mom’s basement when the going got tough. Conversely, the courageous Ukrainians are enduring bitter cold temperatures in an effort to wiggle free of Putin’s oppressive boot.
Methinks, that the male of the ‘occupier’ species finally realized that free love with a gal in the next tent…who hadn’t bathed in a week…was hardly worth giving up a warm bed, free food and old reliable PlayStation. Consequently, the current crop of would-be ‘occupiers’ is played out.
An argument from the CAGW crowd is that that the skeptics (“deniers”) will mistakenly see a refutation of CAGW in papers that really support it. The CAGW crowd is usually wrong about this, but they were right in the the case of Lefsrud and Meyer 2013. See…
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/17/global-warming-consensus-looking-more-like-a-myth/
I got a fair amount of grief (from the skeptics, which I am one of) for pointing out the obvious facts about Lefsrud and Meyer 2013. See…
http://climatesanity.wordpress.com/2013/02/17/science-or-science-fiction-professionals-discursive-construction-of-climate-change/
I am happy to see Andy West’s rational analysis of Lefsrud and Meyer here at WUWT. Better late than never. I have found West to be pretty smart guy, and his discourse on memes and the ‘CAGW memeplex’ in general to be dead on. Here is a plug for his blog…
http://wearenarrative.wordpress.com/
Friends:
Totalitarians are dangerous and exist across the entire political spectrum. All totalitarians need to be opposed because they are dangerous whatever their politics. They are all genocidal to opponents.
H1tler pretended his political party was not extreme right wing. The extreme right still attempt to pretend that falsehood to this day, and some have disrupted this thread by doing it here.
H1tler and his party was totalitarian and extreme right wing. People who attempt to refute these truths are attempting to dissociate themselves from H1tler and his party: the best way to constrain them is to laugh at their risible falsehoods.
Richard
wws says: January 27, 2014 at 5:45 am
L Graham Smith says: January 27, 2014 at 6:40 am
Thanks both.
Gary Pearse says: January 27, 2014 at 9:09 am
Also thanks. Holding the team’s feet to the fire has worked the best so far; but I wouldn’t regard the current progress (i.e after decades, almost unimaginable sums still diverted from better purposes and still a very dominant ‘catasrophe’ culture) as ‘quick’. However, smoke shoveling has its dangers too; the ultimate in that game is a powerful counter-narrative. Assuming someone could construct the right one, this would likely change the game much more quickly, but just as likely it would then slip the leash and become as much of a problem as CAGW culture.
Steven Mosher says: January 27, 2014 at 8:57 am
Agree, a ‘framless’ position is impossible to achieve in practice, maybe even in theory. Even the various approaches of pure mathematicians feuding or alliancing over a comlex problem that takes a bunch of them years to solve, will be influenced by the frames they occupy, not to mention that the problems we choose to attempt in the first place will have particular social goals associated with them. Perception of what the solutions mean in the physical or social world can also be relative, and change with time too. Even without invoking any malice whatsoever, mathematical or scientific solutions may end up legitimising causes, which later realision revealed didn’t underpin those causes after all.
richardscourtney says: at various times
Thankyou for going where I feared to tread.
The “older male” thing is interesting. At a recent talk by Monckton I was interested to observe the audience to see the types of people who were there.
Skepticism is predominantly an internet community and consequently, apart from notable people whose gender and age are well known, it is generally an anonymous community where clues of age and gender are absent. This talk was therefore my first opportunity to see what my fellow skeptics were like. And for the most part I was surprised to find that they were predominantly in their 50s or older and predominantly male. In other words they were people like me.
So isn’t this confirmation of the older male myth? No! The older male social myth is that old fossils resist change in society by controlling and abusing positions of power. It is a very disparaging meme seeing nothing of value in older males at all. But I would not characterise that audience as consisting of people in positions of power. I would characterise them as non-conformists.
It takes courage to buck the social consensus. And it seems to me that older people often have the self-assurance needed to do this. By the time you get to your 50s you are much less inclined to be swayed by what other people think. If you a looking for one person willing to stand up in a crowd and tell them all that they are wrong, get someone in their 50s. Young people are often too concerned with fitting into a social group.
I’m willing 2014 to be a distinctly cool year. It would be a cosmic custard pie. Let’s see how it works out.
Rob Ricket says: January 27, 2014 at 9:31 am
Thanks Rob. In practice I may not get the chance to do more work on this any time soon (too busy!) but your idea for an analysis of the references is a great one that I never thought of.
tommoriarty says: January 27, 2014 at 11:15 am
Many thanks for the vote and the plug 🙂
davidmhoffer says: January 27, 2014 at 10:32 am
I thought my conclusions were clear enough, but for the avoidance of doubt I am not implying malice, rather that the authors are indeed ‘trapped in their own frame’ as you put it. Conspiracies running on malicious intent generally have a pretty weak stretch, both across society and time. Much more powerful is a cause with millions of adherents who genuinely and honestly believe the cause they are immersed in (albeit it may be partly or wholly misguided), so put all their heart and soul and intellect into that cause. Religions work like this (massive stretch, millennia and hundreds of millions). So, I believe, does CAGW. Social narratives can be incredibly persuasive. While there are a few scammers and schemers and such attached to any large human enterprise, most even in the ‘core’ of a religion or a secular memeplex will believe in the cause they are working for, and simply cannot ‘see’ outside of it. This does not make them abnormal or deluded though; given that the vast majority of humans are religious, and probably all of the rest believe in at least some social narratives (e.g. nationalism), then by definition the entire race can’t be abnormal.
tommoriarty says: January 27, 2014 at 11:15 am
P.S. read your piece at ClimateSanity. Good call. Shame I didn’t happen on it earlier, would have incorporated 🙂
andywest2012;
Conspiracies running on malicious intent generally have a pretty weak stretch, both across society and time.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.
Really? The papacy recently felt compelled to weigh on on the issue of who killed whom some 2000 years ago. I’m in a rush or I’d provide you with a considerably longer list of counter examples.
Today January 27th is Holocaust Memorial Day –
Eugenics …why not take it to the beginning??
-Horrifying American Roots of Nazi Eugenics-
“Hitler and his henchmen victimized an entire continent and exterminated millions in his quest for a co-called “Master Race.”
But the concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race didn’t originate with Hitler. The idea was created in the United States, and cultivated in California, decades before Hitler came to power. California eugenicists played an important, although little known, role in the American eugenics movement’s campaign for ethnic cleansing.
Eugenics was the racist pseudoscience determined to wipe away all human beings deemed “unfit,” preserving only those who conformed to a Nordic stereotype. Elements of the philosophy were enshrined as national policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, as well as marriage restrictions, enacted in twenty-seven states. In 1909, California became the third state to adopt such laws. Ultimately, eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in “colonies,” and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just learning. Before World War II, nearly half of coercive sterilizations were done in California, and even after the war, the state accounted for a third of all such surgeries.
California was considered an epicenter of the American eugenics movement. During the Twentieth Century’s first decades, California’s eugenicists included potent but little known race scientists, such as Army venereal disease specialist Dr. Paul Popenoe, citrus magnate and Polytechnic benefactor Paul Gosney, Sacramento banker Charles M. Goethe, as well as members of the California State Board of Charities and Corrections and the University of California Board of Regents.
Eugenics would have been so much bizarre parlor talk had it not been for extensive financing by corporate philanthropies, specifically the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune. They were all in league with some of America’s most respected scientists hailing from such prestigious universities as Stamford, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. These academicians espoused race theory and race science, and then faked and twisted data to serve eugenics’ racist aims.”
I do recommend that you read the whole article.
– See more at: http://hnn.us/article/1796
In short the authors are guilty of the very things they claim to find as faults in others , but their arrogance means they fail to see or acknowledge it.
Or to put it another way , once again the AGW faithful fail to understand why its all going wrong for them so need to resort to the old stand by of ‘conspiracy of the evil other ‘ in this case ‘older males ‘
rischardscourtney please examine your frame of reference and accept some education in the nuances of political thought from several contributors above who have attempted to educate with facts rather than opinions. I would add that the “left wing” in America in the late 1800’s all the way to WWII were unabashedly in favor of eugenics. The so-called Progressives loved Mussolini, Hitler and Fasism until they actually embarked on their expansionist plans. The Progressives were admirers of the Eugenics movement as exemplified by adherents of liberal or left wing politics such as Woodrow Wilson and Margaret Sanger as two diverse examples. Conflating Eugenics with what we today call “Right Wing” politics is ridiculous and a tortured attempt to mold history into a black and white dichotomy. Comments equating Communism and National Socialism above are more historically accurate, and can be made even more understandable when you add the fact that Hitler was an admirer of communist ideology in almost all aspects except the fact that the leading advocates of communism in the world were all Jewish, thus he felt the need to create a new political party that espoused many of the same ideas, but with a German nationalist flavor, thus the National Socialist Workers Party. He added the anti-Semitic flavor of Eugenics that ultimately discredited the entire movement.
Pro-racist genocidal nut case says:
January 27, 2014 at 11:29 am
“Friends:
Totalitarians are dangerous and exist across the entire political spectrum. All totalitarians need to be opposed because they are dangerous whatever their politics. They are all genocidal to opponents.
H1tler pretended his political party was not extreme right wing. The extreme right still attempt to pretend that falsehood to this day, and some have disrupted this thread by doing it here.
H1tler and his party was totalitarian and extreme right wing. People who attempt to refute these truths are attempting to dissociate themselves from H1tler and his party: the best way to constrain them is to laugh at their risible falsehoods.
Pro-racist genocidal nut case”
Yes yes the classic Stalinist propaganda line. Stalin is a moderate hitler’s right wing. As for political “spectrum”. If you believe the ONLY type of political and ideology is collectivism/socialism then yes hitler was rightwing. However for those of us who aren’t closed minded racist genocidal nut cases we believe that their are other ideologies such as individualism. For those of use who believe people to be individuals we see hitler as leftwing because next to us he is being a socialist/collectivist.
As stated above the definition of socialist is where the government controls and owns the means of production.
For the people who want the real definition without the fancy college speak it read. Socialism is where the government owns and controls all land and all people.
All socialism must be genocidal racist nut jobs. All totalitarians or authoritarians MUST be socialist. Genocide as defined from an economic perspective is where a government fully socializes the means of production.
Don’t listen to the Lysenkoism wanna be who repeat well known and debunked nazi and communist propaganda. Read history don’t let it be reinterpreted by the propaganda minsters. If you read what this people wrote not what other claim they wrote you would know that hitler was socialist and only right wing if you believe stalinist propaganda that stalin was a moderate.
Gary Pearse says: @ January 27, 2014 at 9:09 am
You are an international treasure. How do you have so much at your finger tips?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I love to read but alas do not have Mom’s photographic memory. Bookmarks I do have.
CAGW bias in the MSM.
please explain how thousands of broadcasters & journalists around the world FRAME what they once called AGW as “climate change” & carbon dioxide as “carbon” and no scientific body or media regulator/watchdog – has insisted the MSM uses the correct terminology?
CAGW reporting is now almost incomprehensible, simply because of these two frames.
this framing is happening in media across the political spectrum. news agencies such as AP, Reuters, AFP, no doubt played their part in this re-naming of the two central pillars of the IPCC AGW hypothesis, but that doesn’t explain their adoption by virtually the entire MSM.
with seemingly no institutional interest from scientific or media bodies in demanding MSM uses the accurate terminology – AGW/CO2 – it is evidently only public criticism, whether by contacting the MSM, or by boycotting newspapers & TV stations, that will convince the MSM to revert to the proper naming of these two issues.
temp:
You clearly made a copying error in your post at January 27, 2014 at 1:42 pm.
You said
and then you did not state your point but, instead, made the mistake of quoting me.
Well, it is obvious than nobody would want to read your “Pro-racist genocidal nut case” twaddle so I suppose your mistake is an understandable Freudian error.
Anyway, nobody outside of a padded cell has any interest in your twaddle so I and all other sensible people will not waste time reading any more that you write.
Richard
I would also point out that much of the ideology and fake history that old richard likes to shout about was produced in the USSR and uses a very fantasy version of hitler. I like to call this version of hitler the “peace prize hitler”. Anyone whos done real research into hitler knows that when he was running for election and running the nazi party he was hardly yelling from the top of the capital to put the jews in ovens. He never said to the loving media or the peace prize board “o yeah those jews, ovens for them”. Hitler ran a shall we say in todays propaganda speak a “moderate” position election campaign. Though this is probably news to richard.
This is the hitler that people like richard like to point to say and he had some centrist/rightwing ideas. Which is true so much as he was lying his ass off to get elected and didn’t believe in any of those centrist/rightwing ideals(like leaving small businesses alone which he didn’t). It just goes to show how effective both nazi and later USSR propaganda is today that people like richard still believe in the bold face lies that hitler said to get elected.
Never do these people look at hitler 1941 or many of hitlers published government economic plans which can be summed up as communism in everything but name only economics.
No they always take the peace prize hitler lies at face value.
Pro-racist genocidal nut case says:
January 27, 2014 at 2:35 pm
“You clearly made a copying error in your post at January 27, 2014 at 1:42 pm.
You said
Pro-racist genocidal nut case says
and then you did not state your point but, instead, made the mistake of quoting me.
Well, it is obvious than nobody would want to read your “Pro-racist genocidal nut case” twaddle so I suppose your mistake is an understandable Freudian error.
Anyway, nobody outside of a padded cell has any interest in your twaddle so I and all other sensible people will not waste time reading any more that you write.
Pro-racist genocidal nut case”
You are a typical marxist… you refuse to debate, run away under your bridge troll you refuse to even define socialism because you know the moment you do it can be disproved. Keep following those marx rules of communism, never debate, communism must happen and the scientific method, logic and facts are the devil.
davidmhoffer says: January 27, 2014 at 1:14 pm
Well we have rather drifted off-topic from CAGW bias in academia, but…
I presume from above you believe that Catholicism, or at least the papacy, is a conspiracy. I believe Catholicism is a highly evolved social narrative, a memeplex, a co-evolved set of memes. No doubt lots of the Popes who sat in the palace at Rome or Avignon indulged in conspiracies, especially in medieval times when the papacy competed with kings for territories as well as hearts and minds. For instance conspiracies to undermine an unfriendly monarch, or bolster a friendly one with leverage both spiritual and political, or even have some enlightened chancellor or vocal opponent killed off. Not to mention playing the witchcraft card in order to quell the heresy of the Cathars and kill about 1M souls. But each in this very long list of men is ultimately an expression of the memeplex, and their many varied conspiracies are mostly bit parts in the developmental trajectory of the religion, which none of them could forsee. Each of their lives occupied a tiny fraction of that trajectory, which is steered by the selection of the most successful narratives within the evolving set that is Catholicsim (and its antecedents) down the ages.
Richard S. Courtney, thanks for your remarks concerning the tatics of confusion. Precision and clarity are essential in science, and they are no less essential in social sciences and history. It makes absolutuely no sense whatsoever to swap and change definitions at will. Any “narrative” whre anarchists end up on the right and Nazis on the left ist totally confused at least and perhaps willfully confusing at worst.
“Momknowsbest” states that “Hitler was an admirer of communist ideology in almost all aspects …” That is nonsense! He not only hatet communists (and sent them to death as soon as he could), the NSDAP never ever claimed an equal society as their ultimate goal. Quite the opposite: The promise of the Nazis was: We are the master race, we will rule and take whatever we like, we will determine who will live and who will die – join us and share the profits, oppose us and risk death.
The very core of Nazi ideology is the anti-thesis to the core of communist ideology – or vice versa. It makes absolutely no sense, to confuse them, because if you do, you will never be able to understand either. If you imagine Nazism without aggressive ultra nationalism – then you are wrong. If you think of Nazism as something which would have been ok were it not for eugenics – then you are wrong again. Nazism was from the beginning an aggressive ideology which had the ultimate goal of establishing german supremacy in europe and a system of colonial exploitation in eastern europe and the USSR. Anti-communism and racism was at the heart of the Nazi ideology, the destruction of the USSR the other main obsession of the madman and his followers (besides their anti-semitic lunacy).
Hitler wanted revenge for Versailles, revenge for what he saw as treason: The mutiny of the german Navy, the breakdown of the german front. To him the great war was lost because of treason on the home front, and those responsible for this treason were: “The Left” – anarchists, communists, syndicalists.
PS: Sorry to concentrate on something off the main topic. But I feel it is important and has some bearings on the topic too – think narratives.
richardscourtney says: @ January 27, 2014 at 9:36 am
Friends:
sabretruthtiger wrote at January 27, 2014 at 6:04 am
Actually Eugenics was coupled with Left wing socialism….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
It was embraced by the Fabians like the Webbs and Shaw but it permeated through out society up until the 1970s.
Like CAGW it was not limited to one ideology and trying to pin it to one is a foolish move and plays into the hands of our would be masters.
As I keep trying to get a cross, the global leaders really do not care about ‘right’ or ‘left’ they just find ‘socialism’ more useful as a tool of power for controlling people than individualism. That does not mean they actually believe in ‘socialism’ nor do they have any plans of allowing the person on the street any real control.
What global leaders want is people to have the illusion they are in control while the real power rests in the hand of a select few.
Pascal Lamy was quite blunt about this I see four main challenges for global governance today.
“shared feeling of belonging to a community” is a very important point and one the Globalists have exploited as I explain below
In another article Lamy further expands what he means by legitimacy.
So the UN came up with a solution to the ‘legitimacy in global governance’ problem It is called NGOs.
Perhaps the most brilliant move of Maurice Strong was the development of NGOs. It is said he got the idea from working for YMCA international as a young man.
NGOs give young activists something to join. It makes them think they are DOING SOMETHING. It gave them a“shared feeling of belonging to a community” It more importantly controls their thinking. They can join Greenpeace or Organic Consumers or Food & Water Watch or any of a huge number of other organizations. However the one thing NGOs do not do is give the rank and file a voice.
pat says: January 27, 2014 at 2:18 pm
I think you raise a very important point here. The MSM and the public know little about the science, but the ‘(Catastrophic) Climate Change / Carbon’ narrative will ultimately dominate over the ‘AGW / CO2’ narrative because it is simpler to sell, more easily grasped, and more scary too (scare stories hardly need selling, they fly off the stands, or off the screens these days). But you are right, most of those that do know the science and could correct, should correct, have not done so. And now the inertia is so large that this would be virtually impossible anyhow. Presumably they did not do so because ultimately they believed the core narrative of catastrophe too, and hence believed also (wrongly!) that these inaccuracies would not result in too much harm, plus overall would benefit by adding voice to the fight against calamity. Instead, they have ended up with rampant misunderstanding and horrendous diversion of resources.
Getting back to the main thrust of the article above, I found that it was a very refreshing and insightful discussion of how all discussion can have some level of bias based upon the frame of reference that an argument takes as its basis. Only with concerted effort to dissect the underlying “frame” can you really guard against bias. I wish it could be translated into a more relatable level of prose so that I could share it with others.
The sudden veering into the topic of Nazi’s, eugenics, etc. stems from the fact that several readers detected a comment based on a prevailing “frame” that the author thought was safe, i.e. the characterization of Nazi’s or Facsists in general as “right wing.” Others challenged that frame with facts tying the Nazi’s and Eugenics with left-wing ideology, while others stubbornly defended the frame as true. This sub-debate demonstrates the author’s main point that the frame shapes the arguments of the participants in the debate.
A clever plot twist.
Thomas U. says:
January 27, 2014 at 3:02 pm
I’m sorry but you are hugely missing the point. Nazism is a totalitarian oppressive government. Communism is a totalitarian oppressive government… in case you missed first grade like things go together.
Your argument to put more bluntly in propaganda speak that you speaks is this.
White supremacist hate blacks. Blacks supremacist hate whites.
They are both racist. One is not a rightwing racist, one is not a leftwing racist. They are both racist and therefore the same. Just because they hate and kill each other doesn’t mean they are different. Just because the core ideology of the white group is the anti-thesis of the black group doesn’t mean they are ideology different or left/right wing.
Both groups are leftwing. They are collectivist. Collectivists see things in groups or collectives. Race is a group/collective.
All socialism are collectivist. They believe the economic should be under the collective/groups control. All socialism must have group prejudice, hate, bias, bigot, racism etc. It is the very foundation of the belief system. Stalins communist didn’t focus as heavily on the groups such as “race” or “religion” they tend to focus more on stalinist vs non-stalinist.
Thomas U. says: January 27, 2014 at 3:02 pm
Off main topic indeed. But a great gleam of sense.
Rob Ricket says: @ January 27, 2014 at 10:58 am
………The ironic part is that most of the “Occupiers” could not deal with the cold weather and went back home to the climate-controlled confines of Mom’s basement……………
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Actually I think they went back to their high paying jobs and expensive houses leaving a mess behind for others to clean up. So much for their concern for the ‘enviornment’
If the non-existent ‘younger’ skeptics are anything like I was at age 30 – 40, they are busy at jobs in industry, trying mightily as was I, to adapt to a changing technical environment, reading and studying work-related subjects along with spending time commuting with the remaining balance of time spent on personal life in what time remained …
I was a skeptic (questioning anything authoritatively ‘handed down’) then, I just didn’t know it, as I weighed each new circumstance, situation or ‘news story’ against facts as I knew them.
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Thomas U.:
Thankyou for your informative and cogent post at January 27, 2014 at 3:02 pm.
You add as a PS
Oh, it is very ON topic for the reason you say. Enforce a false narrative and any falsehood becomes possible.
Indeed, that is the error made by the analysis of the paper reported in the above article.
The trolls attempted to side-track the thread but instead – as your post demonstrates – they have provided cogent illustration of the problem of enforced narratives.
Consider the ridiculous nonsense in this thread by temp: anyone who rejects his laughably untrue narrative must be – according to him – a “Pro-racist genocidal nut”. That may seem to be delusional nonsense which is so ridiculous as to be capable of being ignored. But it is no different from a narrative which says people of a particular race are sub-human and comparable to rats, and that narrative was foisted on an entire nation.
In the assessed paper it says
Please note the narrative. People who disagree are exhibiting “resistance”.
H1tler used that narrative.
Richard
I think the implication may be that the the sons and daughters who were protesting were young’uns in households where mommy and daddy made over $100Gs per what is bolded above …
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richardscourtney says: January 27, 2014 at 3:33 pm
Oh bravo. Extra points for bringing the side-thread back on track with a quote from the paper 😉
pat says: @ January 27, 2014 at 2:18 pm
CAGW bias in the MSM.
please explain how thousands of broadcasters & journalists around the world FRAME what they once called AGW as “climate change”…
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Easy, look at who OWNS the presses. link my comment with a list is the first comment.
Gail Combs:
I write to commend your post at January 27, 2014 at 3:16 pm.
Your post is another excellent demonstration to add to that of Thomas U in gaining an understanding of how power-seekers adopt narratives to obtain their objective. His was an historical example of how malign power-seekers used a narrative they believed. And you present the development of a present example which also demonstrates that power-seekers are willing to use a convenient narrative whether or not they believe it.
In case anybody missed it, your post is here
Richard
To Thomas U:
You obviously accept the frame of reference that the author used. Yes Hitler hated the Communists, or more accurately, Bolshevics as he called them because they were A) inspired by Marx and others who were Jewish and B) Russian communists were Slavic peoples who he also hated. The debate will go on and on because it depends on your definition of right wing or left wing which changes over generations as the political pendulum swings and political parties morph for political advantage. That is why you have to examine and dissect the frame that you are arguing from. I could debate history further, but all of this discussion just underscores the point the author is making–bias is everywhere unless you strenuously dissect your own underlying assumptions or “frame”.
Just curious now … succinctly, what are the characteristics of the ‘right wing’, in terms of political beliefs and goals, economic beliefs and goals, and in regard to such things as personal rights WRT owning personal property?
As an aside, I rather subscribe to Pres. Reagan’s thoughts on this subject:
You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down.
Up to man’s age-old dream–the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order — or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path. Plutarch warned, “The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits.”
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andywest2012;
I presume from above you believe that Catholicism, or at least the papacy, is a conspiracy.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I said nothing of the sort. I did provide an example of something you said could not broadly exist across society and time which has, in fact, existed broadly across society and time.
temp says: @ January 27, 2014 at 2:44 pm
You have your terminology wrong which has a tendency to ruffle feathers. Try E.M. Smith’s isms, ocracies and ologies and “Evil Socialism” vs “Evil Capitalism”
For what it is worth ‘Socialists’ get irate when called communists or fascists because they are neither.
From E.M.’s point ov view as an economist:
So from the point of view of a communist or some socialists Fascism IS right wing…. From the point of view of a laissez faire capitalist Fascism IS left wing.
It is all “impacted by a cultural bias” and it is darn tough to step out of that bias and try to be objective as Andy West is trying to show us.
A thorough and wholistic understanding of history has to accept the nuances that are there. To argue right or left, communist or socialist, Wall Street or Main Street, black or white, or any other polar opposites is to miss the nuances. Drop your frame of reference (in your cases, I would suggest it might be anti-capitalist) and you can begin to have an interesting discussion, and possibly even find some common ground.
This statement, buried in prose above, read by itself really doesn’t make much sense; care to clarify, extend or amend? (‘individualism’ is not an alternate form of control, and ‘socialism’, per se, is “an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and co-operative management of the economy.”)
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Last post was for Thomas and Richard…
_Jim:
re your post at January 27, 2014 at 3:51 pm.
No, I will not bite that red herring.
My initial responses in this thread were to bluntly refute trolls who were trying to deflect this thread from its subject.
Then Thomas U and Gail Combs used the trolling as reason to introduce powerful examples of how “narratives” and “framing” can be used to direct thought. I have supported those excellent demonstrations.
The paper provides a false “narrative” and “frames” AGW-sceptics as a method to justify a distorted case. Thomas U and Gail Combs have demonstrated how dangerous that is with real examples which have serious effects. That is on topic.
But be deflected onto the side-track provided by the trolls? NO! I will not!
Richard
_Jim says: @ January 27, 2014 at 3:37 pm
Jim you missed the title: In ‘Occupy,’ Well-Educated Professionals Far Outnumbered Jobless, Study Finds
(sorry I mistyped the link the first time so it did not stand out. This cold weather is making the arthur T writus flare.)
_Jim says:
January 27, 2014 at 3:51 pm
“Just curious now … succinctly, what are the characteristics of the ‘right wing’, in terms of political beliefs and goals, economic beliefs and goals, and in regard to such things as personal rights WRT owning personal property?”
(Please just try to have a discussion. This name calling is getting out of hand. On both sides. ~ mod.)
Andy, one thing weak about your framings is indeed the skeptical side. As you may have seen in the past days concerning the papers by skeptics in the Copernicus PRP journal, the roughest treatment they appear to have gotten was from skeptics!! Here on WUWT you see this all the time. Willis gets a lot of admiration for his unique articles presenting his effective scientific takes. He also has to deal with an avalanche of skeptics jumping all over him. Your article is another case in point. You are brave to put your stuff in front of this bunch. But if you want to get honest reaction and any good criticism, it this non-frame bunch that will give it to you.
Thinking, effective skeptics (not politico -ideological types that can be found on both sides) are not a gregarious club, they don’t belong to a fraternity (incidentally I turned down invitations to belong to a fraternity and later the Masons – I didn’t want to take shortcuts. I wanted any achievements I earned to be mine). They are better described as individualists who don’t fall so neatly into an easy frame. You probably know of Leif Svalgaard – grumpy and combative as all get out but honest, forthright, a defender of real science and always educational. Ditto Willis. Casting groups in frames also sanitizes certain values out of them. I know it is quaint to refer to integrity. But it must be clear if you have been at WUWT, Jo Nova, Climate Audit, and the like, that this is a huge part of what drives the real skeptic. Your frames tend to make, say, two groups both of similar values who are opposed but vary their skills in selling their frame’s story. Skeptics come from all over the map and, although the team says we are shills for big oil, we basiically are workiing for free out of desire to not let people get away with stuff and shove people around. No consensus here.
davidmhoffer says: January 27, 2014 at 3:59 pm
Then my apologies. I said specifically that ‘conspiracies’ have weak stretch across societies and time. But memeplexes, of which religions are a prime example, most certainly can and do stretch across many millions of folks and millennia (which I also said in my comment at 12:34). The social phenomena of CAGW is not a conspiracy, though it no doubt has a few conspiracies and scams bolted on the side (most big memeplexes do); it is driven by the same mechanisms as religions.
_Jim says:
January 27, 2014 at 4:00 pm
This statement, buried in prose above, read by itself really doesn’t make much sense; care to clarify, extend or amend? (‘individualism’ is not an alternate form of control….
And that is why those who want power hate ‘individualism’ I was avoiding capitalism because it is a term attributed to Marx and has almost as much baggage hanging off it as fascism does.
Besides we really have not seen capitalism for a couple generations or more. As E.M. pointed out FDR and his “New Deal” was Third Way “Socialist Lite” and we are not only still stuck with it it has metastasised.
That is why I used the word individualism, referring to “the entire package of basic principles related to individual liberty as an indispensable ingredient to a moral, prosperous, and free society.
Gary Pearse says: January 27, 2014 at 4:20 pm
I’m very familiar with all the writers / sites you name, and I agree with your point. Inherent skepticism is some protection against being too immersed in a particular frame, and certainly the dominant frame in a particular domain. And a diverse community of skeptics robustly (but hopefully politely) hammering stuff out is a great way to minimise immersion still further; the sheer scope of viewpoints helps. But we should just remember too that per Mosher’s comment above there is no such thing as zero framing, and even at great sites like this there is often ‘talking past each other’ rather than ‘meeting’, and there’s a few frames on display today (well – that’s normal 🙂 Ultimately facts should negate framing activity, but wherever there is any significant level of uncertainty, even such qualified (e.g. by caveats and uncertainty bounds) facts as are known, frequently get buried beneath rampant narrative evolution, because narrative success is rewarded more highly than verifiability. And some subjects (e.g. politics), have few ‘facts’ anyhow, we are nowhere near advanced enough for that to be a science. I guess the chief point demonstrated by this post is that if society (including science) doesn’t acknowledge this and so work to prevent the negative effects of narrative evolution, then CAGW will be far from the last in a long line of out-of-control narratives. A deeper and more complex problem, is that the reason we are so subject to narrative take-over is that we co-evolved with cultural narratives, which means in turn they have long-term *net* benefits, but you’d need to reference my essay for that long tale…
andywest2012;
The social phenomena of CAGW is not a conspiracy, though it no doubt has a few conspiracies and scams bolted on the side (most big memeplexes do); it is driven by the same mechanisms as religions.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
No. Examine the ways in which antisemitism are promoted, or the hatred of Albanians by Serbs, or the techniques by which Sunnis and Shias are kept at each others throats. You’ll find that the people who actively promote these conflicts use the precise same techniques evident in the paper you just analysed.
I do mean precisely. Label them, find them defective, muse what to do with them. Could these authors have unwittingly echoed the purveyors of hate who have pied their evil trade through the centuries using identical techniques by accident? Read the previous sentence again, Label them, find them defective, muse what to do about them. Accident due to a faulty reference frame my *ss.
Gail Combs says January 27, 2014 at 4:33 pm
I sometimes have to ‘laud’ the effort to paint a coherent picture by tossing ‘buckets of paint’ against the wall (re: the effort to reveal these wide-ranging methods by ‘them’ by which ‘they’ hope to control ‘the world’); this is not one of those times though. I am more prone to think of that saying which goes: “Neurotics build castles in the air, psychotics live in them” but that isn’t applicable here, per se, either …
We have enough ‘control freaks’ in congress (and elsewhere on our shores) without the need to invoke the UN and a whole range of ‘hosted’ smaller entities (NGOs et al). My Mom used to call ‘them’ social workers (implying non-productive busy-bodies interested only in the control and managing of others).
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C’mon Richard; you don’t even know which side of the argument (if any) I was prepared to ‘play’ …
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andywest2012 says: @ January 27, 2014 at 4:24 pm
….. The social phenomena of CAGW is not a conspiracy, though it no doubt has a few conspiracies and scams bolted on the side (most big memeplexes do); it is driven by the same mechanisms as religions.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I sure as heck hope you are incorrect about that because I do not think western civilization can survive a memeplex as destructive as CAGW. (Of course that was always the idea behind the scam in the first place.)
If the hosts of the CAGW memeplex have built-in defense mechanisms against other explanations which protect the hosts from being subjected to changes of the basic belief system then the destruction of our civilization or the return of little ice age conditions will not budge their beliefs. And if the memeplex is long lived then we truly are looking at another dark age.
Energy is the life blood of an advanced civilization and solar power and wind power, the only ‘acceptable’ power source can not support anything more advanced than civilization at the level of the early 1800s… if we are lucky. Unfortunately we do not have the technical expertise needed to go back to the 1800s nor do we have the people willing to do the brutally hard work at least not in the EU, USA and the other advanced nations.
What a mess these arrogant idiots have handed our children.
@ Gail Combs says:
January 27, 2014 at 6:51 am
Thank you for your tour-de-force to correct what struck me as the only glaring problem with the above post. I’m surprised again, reading it, that so many are so confused that they don’t understand that Fascism is a creature of the Left. Benito Mussolini coined the term, after all: former leader of the Italian Communist Party, editor of two communist newspapers, he was anything but “right wing”. Not too surprisingly, it comes as a big surprise to most people to learn that the forward to Mussolini’s autobiography was written by FDR. As it should not, when you consider that he was the leader of arguably, the most Socialist Administration in U.S. history.
Kudos to Jonah Goldberg, “Liberal Fascism”, for a most thorough research into the subject. And to F.A. von Hayek, a Classical Liberal, who also shed great light on the subject. Pity both are so ignored.
Thank you for not letting that one go unchallenged…
_Jim says:
January 27, 2014 at 5:11 pm
…We have enough ‘control freaks’ in congress (and elsewhere on our shores) without the need to invoke the UN and a whole range of ‘hosted’ smaller entities…
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Err _Jim I think you missed this one: ICLEI local governments for sustainability and this one World Summit of Legislatures
YOU may think you have enough control freaks by THEY aren’t listening to you.
“scientific papers that are clearly impacted by a cultural bias towards CAGW”
Not just affected, but impacted!
p@ Dolan says: @ January 27, 2014 at 5:20 pm
Thank you for not letting that one go unchallenged…
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In the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell warned us about the constant re-writing of history to cover up the sins of the past. Here is another very telling one:
Trying to actually dig up the truth is sometime a real challenge as many of us here on WUWT have found out.
davidmhoffer says: January 27, 2014 at 4:56 pm
Then it would seem our points are ultimately whether the narrative is more in control of the people, or the people are more in control of the narrative. If I have this right, I argue the former, you the latter. I do however concede that those who have done bad things in the name of the narrative, be it CAGW or any other, are not blameless and should face consequence in law (this is in my essay, and I call upon a Duke Law paper about the Law and memetics). However, it is unfortunate fact that a powerful narrative can alter the law in its favour, as CAGW has done in various domains. [Context for above: the narrative is neither sentient nor agential – its ‘agenda’ is purely via selection]. For my view I cite that religions go back even before Homo Sapiens Sapiens into earlier hominids, that racism and war back further into chimps; these are age-old mechanisms that are a fundamental characteristic of our evolution, and will thus have fundamental mechanisms driving them. This imo severely weakens the case for a *prime* motive such as personal malice from individuals or small groups of individuals (like those writing a paper). However, also per my essay, via personal-collective duality this does not mean individuals have no part to play or are absolved in some sense; but if an incredibly persuasive narrative sweeps through society, even with the best will in the world it can be incredibly hard to resist, especially if all those around you are moving too, nowhere to plant an anchor. Over generations, might not even easily detect the movement.
In the end I can’t rule it out, but I do not believe that most CAGW bias in academia is through calculated individual malice, but simply deep immersion in CAGW culture. Regarding your examples of racism, the very fact that it is so powerful, so old, so embedded, so apparantly at odds with the individual values those people would display to ‘their own’, surely adds to the case of a fundamental driver, a societal wide and long evolved driver.
Past bedtime in UK, will have to bow out until tommorow…
Gail Combs says: January 27, 2014 at 5:15 pm
andywest2012 says: @ January 27, 2014 at 4:24 pm
….. The social phenomena of CAGW is not a conspiracy, though it no doubt has a few conspiracies and scams bolted on the side (most big memeplexes do); it is driven by the same mechanisms as religions.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
” I sure as heck hope you are incorrect about that because I do not think western civilization can survive a memeplex as destructive as CAGW”
Well despite you’re dead right about the critical neccessity of energy, and the incredible mess CAGW is making, I have more faith in Western society. It’s survived worse than this, and I think it will get through this this and prosper. Though CAGW is a big and powerful memeplex, in the end it hooked it’s wagon to science, and sooner or later, admittedly after more years and much suffering and a horrendous diversion of resources, not to mention much wriggling as alternate narrative forms attempt to escape the trap of narrowing uncertainties, it will crack and crumble. I think the bigger problem is that, unless we understand these narrative beasts much more, learn about why we co-evolved with them and figure out how to tame the bad ones, then after CAGW will simply come another…
really really must sleep now…
Andy West said in the headpost:
Personally, I see myself as a figment of reality 🙂
Slartibartfast said @ January 27, 2014 at 9:53 am
I didn’t, but yes, it’s very good indeed to see the old Moshpit back 🙂
“Lets look at your frame. Do you see how a presupposition of belief is built into your definition of skeptic as a disbeliever? It’s hard to see your own frame.” Mosher
Yes, it’s hard to see your own frame. I’d suggest we take a note from Feynman who might have said something like: A Skeptic. Hell yes, I’m a skeptic. I look at the data. I form an hypothesis. Then I work it over and try to find every hole and supposition in it and make sure they are fixed so they match the data. Then I’ll publish it and see if anyone else can find the hole’s, suppositions and problems I missed. Then, I’ll go back and get more data and see if that changes anything.
More to Andy’s topic- we need a re-frame- things like ” climate insensitivity denier”, ” bird blender bald eagle killer”, ” ice age denier”, “negative feedback denier”, “carbon, what carbon in the atmosphere. The only carbon is black carbon, mostly from wildfires”, “don’ you know carbon is a black solid. Carbon dioxide and dihydrogen monoxide are both colorless gases that absorb infrared radiation”, “why do you want to kill babies in underdeveloped countries by raising food and energy prices?”, “why do you want to lock poor people into low-paying service jobs?”, ” why do you want to deny third world countries access to affordable energy to help them develop?”….,..,…….
Nice discussion of “framing” of an analysis. Thanks.
There’s a typo. Canada has provinces, not states. Alberta is a province.
Gail Combs said @ January 27, 2014 at 5:39 pm
A bit of perspective is called for here. Prior to the 1960s history consisted almost entirely of the kind of history Fraser and Gerstel lament as being neglected. Historians confined themselves almost entirely to the doings of our social “betters”: kings, popes, generals etc and largely confined to Europe and North America.
The focus a of much (though not all) history since then has been on such things as the life of the poor, how historical economies worked, the progress of philosophy, technology, agriculture and even science. That these histories were written has not in some mystical way removed all those books about kings, queens, battles and religious changes.
I remember reading a letter by a young woman who was caught up in the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. She was writing to a friend about her new cotton dresses. Hitherto, she would have never handled money, that being the prerogative of her father or husband. She would have possessed a single woolen dress that was washed once a year, whereupon it would have entirely lost its shape. The woman being at the lower end of the economic scale, her dress would not have been replaced until it was literally falling apart at the seams of the patches used to extend its life.
She wrote about how she could afford not one, but two cotton dresses that she washed once a week! And far from losing their shape, they looked as good as new. I still find such far more interesting compared to what mistakes Baron von Schnitzelfurter made while fighting the forces of Duke Deadhead at the Battle of Inanity.
Of course I’m writing in this frame because my immediate English ancestors were from the bottom of the heap.
logicalchemist says: @ January 27, 2014 at 6:25 pm
I always liked:
Carbon image is a girl’s best friend
Carbon dioxide is a trees best friend.
The Pompous Git says: @ January 27, 2014 at 6:56 pm
I agree that that type of information is fascinating. (Today I just linked to Asa Sheldon’s auto-biography) However it is the influence people like the robber barons had on politicians that should not be hidden. For example the extermination of the buffalo to make room for cattle and to starve out the Indians at the urging of the R/R barons. I should not be reading for the first time about that nasty era in my country’s history at this late date.
Gary Pearse said @ January 27, 2014 at 4:20 pm
That’s because as you are saying, sceptics don’t necessarily have “a” frame, certainly not one in common. For example, historians (the better ones at least) adopt the frame of the time they are reading in. A medieval frame for example has the reality of God and any number of other supernatural beings as a given. Television and radio are not even dreamt of. Similarly, a well-practised sceptic will adopt a frame for the purpose of thinking through an issue. What happens if I assume X is true?
Lord Monckton often does this when he takes data from IPCC Assesment Reports and assumes they are true. He then examines where those assumption logically lead. The conclusions differ from the IPCC precisely because he does not accept several auxiliary assumptions made by the IPCC.
@ Gail Combes
Not very well hidden:
Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America by Richard White Norton 2012 seems to tell the story that I agree with you, needs to be told. It’s hardly unique; I have read the story in prior volumes, though sadly I cannot recall the titles. My memory is not what it used to be…
Addendum to my previous comment:
I should add that the general reading public is often ignorant of the content of much historiography. Historians are largely to blame for this as they write in what can only be kindly called execrable language designed only for consumption by fellow historians. Happily there are exceptions to this general observation, the most notorious being Barbara Tuchmann. The Git was somewhat taken aback when studying history at UTas to be told Tuchmann, Blainey and other historians he admired were to be ignored.
andywest2012 says:
January 27, 2014 at 5:55 pm
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
You are confusing the existence of a primal imperative with the systematic abuse of it. Not every paper that assumes CAGW as a given is an example of the latter, Most would be an example of the reference frame enabled by the primal imperative. But this specific paper is very specific. It doesn’t survey people in general. It survey’s people from a very specific industry. It then goes on to define them as wrong and hence defective. Then it muses about what to do about the defective people and proposes that there may be a need to “control” them. This is text book hate mongering. It is abuse of the existing reference frame, not a consequence of it.
Gary Pearse said @ January 27, 2014 at 9:09 am
Maybe Gail’s a collective… 🙂
[ducking and running]
The Pompous Git says: @ January 27, 2014 at 7:37 pm
Maybe Gail’s a collective… 🙂
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Not hardly, more a GDI
A soggy wet snowball from the snow we are supposed to get tomorrow is headed your way.
Gail Combs said @ January 27, 2014 at 8:35 pm
The thermometer outside my office reads 43°C, so it doesn’t stand much of a chance of arriving here in anything other than that condition… sadly 🙂
You are most certainly more than a Graphical Design Interface!
I always like your posts, Andy. Keep them coming.
Steven Mosher says @ January 27, 2014 at 8:57 am
“not believing “deluded people” is not suspending judgement because you’ve made the judgement that they are deluded. Suspending judgement– is just that, living in uncertainty
which includes the recognition that you might be wrong about your own lack of knowledge.
In short, you are living and acting as if you know, while proclaiming that you dont.”
there is no uncertainty to the question of whether or not the ‘C’agw alarmists are deluded as per my first line in that post, they are, i framed that. the uncertainty is in agw itself, not ‘C’agw. there are a broad range of sceptics that believe many different things about the function and level of agw, some delusional as well, but there remains one simple identifier, they do not BELIEVE the perceived consensus that IS ‘C’agw. why? because in the past they have reviewed enough information to make that judgement about that one particular aspect.
this need to constantly box sceptics into some fixed position is the game of the alarmists, not the reality. you look at the variety of beliefs, questions and ideas on this website and you will see that there is NO frame for sceptics, it is merely a term to say we do not believe in the ‘C’agw delusion.
When I first started out in scientific research I had the delusion that an individual scientist could be objective. While it’s possible to be as objective as a human can be, this depends on the objective individual totally eliminating emotion from their reasoning. Unfortunately, elimination of emotion also deprives one of the holistic analyses of the non-dominant hemisphere which communicates its reasoning via “somatic markers” (in D’Amasio’s terminology) which are gut feelings about the rightness of a particular hypothesis. The best way to attain an approximation of objectivity, in my experience, has been assembly language programming. The computer is ones totally logical adversary who demands absolute perfection in code and I find the mindset one needs to code efficiently in assembly language resulting in numerous insights into aspects of daily life which I had previously accepted without question. The only problem with such frames of mind is that they make other people wonder about my sanity.
The best description of CAGW is a religion as its adherents believe utterly in its pronouncements and there is an a-priori assumption that the tenets of CAGW are correct. Thus, we have such physical impossibilities as Trenbeth’s “missing heat” and the creation of a theory which, if one views the history of the warmists, is logically unfalsifiable as every negative climate event is viewed as “proof” of CAGW.
One of the more depressing aspects of human nature that I’ve run into recently is the case of “the seekers” who were a UFO cult that predicted the end of the world via a massive flood in 1954. The psychology of cult members was studied by Leon Festinger as they were more determined than ever to hang onto their delusional belief once the apocalyptic event they had prepared for never came to pass. Festinger gives a number of conditions which must be met in order for a social group to maintain a belief in direct opposition to objective evidence of which the presence of social support is probably the most important. More detail at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails
One of the problems that humans living in cities have is that completely delusional beliefs are possible unlike a single individual living in a remote setting where such delusions lead to death from a very unforgiving and objective external reality. Matters aren’t helped any by deluded “academics” who preach that reality is a social creation. For the majority of people, reality is whatever the majority says is true. When I first did psychiatry electives in medical school, I was perturbed by the notion that what I thought to be clearly deluded beliefs were seen as “normal” if that is the way the population in which the individual holding those beliefs also thought.
For an individual who is a member of a particular social group, it is very possible that they are completely unable to imagine that someone would think differently from them. They’re in the position of a fish in the deep ocean being asked to imagine life on land. Those people who think objectively tend not to fit into social groups rather well and, unfortunately, true individualism is far less common than groupthink. For those who think that the notion of consensus is unscientific, in medicine consensus rules. This is a profession that considers itself to be scientifically based!
Aside from discovering that pointing out the obvious to most people is far harder than it would appear, I have no solutions to the problem of bringing objectivity to the majority of the population who is quite happy to be living in their delusional world regardless of how convoluted the attempts to utilize a wrong theory to explain reality become. Reason doesn’t work as most people don’t base their lives on logic.
“and the culture associated with Eugenics was loosely allied to right-wing politics in various countries”
Do you mean right wingers like Woodrow Wilson or John Maynard Keynes?
Andy West, you show yourself to be an ordinary leftist history rewriter.
Can we please shut down the whole eugenics/fascism/communism/socialism/liberal/conservative thing? The entire debate is based upon the false premise that all political philosophies can be mapped on a single linear dimension of “left” vs “right”. That’s like conflating all aspects of the personalities and leadership styles of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton merely because they were both extroverts. It is an invalid mapping that generates a great deal of emotional rhetoric but no useful information.
Mapping political philosophies on multiple dimensions gives a much better sense of how and why they are different. The Nolan Diagram at two dimensions is still a gross simplification of the true similarities and differences but it has vastly more explanatory power than the one-dimensional left/right.
This seems to be an example of the ‘relativists paradox’
I.e. the metaphysical problem that cultural relativism expresses by maintaining that what we conceive to be the truth is always relative to our cultural positions, never an absolute thing.
Ergo the truth can be whatever we say it is. Social consensus.
Of course it takes but a moment to point put that the *proposition* that truth is relative to culture, is a truth that is therefore relative to culture, and has no absolute basis in fact.. 😉
This seemingly trivial bit of sophistry is however a massive and fundamental flaw in something that lies at the heart of all post modern (so called) thinking.
And bear with me for a minute why I try and explain…
You might say that the 20th century was the century in which the certainties of material realism were swept away. One theorem after another was able to prove that certain things were unprovable. Or un measurable. Or incomputable.
Kants critique of pure reason, warning the 17th century scientists, that logic and reason had limits, came of age.
The One True Thing we could say was that we could never arrive at the One True Thing.
The effect of that on people who think about such matters was stark: science was deposed from being the Truth,. to become a ‘culturally relative’ truth, and the notion that by changing culture one could change the truth, emerged as a sort of godsend to the left, truth, they surmised was in fact simply what people believed it to be and if you changed their beliefs truth and reality would somehow follow the trend of the faithful.
AGW is in a sense a classic example of this. By getting enough people – especially scientists – to believe in it, it would become – well at least at a human level – the truth.
But in the end, this has been shown to be just another example of faith failing to move mountains as effectively as a chain of excavators. The truth, it seems, has some existence beyond our mere capacity to conceive of it.
As an avid student f modern phislophy, I would say that this conundrum has not been resolved yet. The neo idealists maintain that the truth cannot be arrived at except in the sense of pictures in our heads, the neo realists maintain that there must be something beyond ourselves creating -or at lest affecting – the pictures in our heads.
Consider if both were in fact correct. What then emerges is that there is a Truth, out there somewhere, but we can never gain more than a highly imperfect and possibly totally erroneous image of it, turned into human digestible concepts. Science is not characterised by truth content so much as its efficacy in constructing a coherent consistent logical predictable framework to connect the dots of such data points as we consider to represent pretty reasonable measurements of what is ‘out there’ rather than ‘in here’, in whatever way we conceive that to be..
This works. And it shows the relativists paradox in a new light. What they can then be seen to be doing is to use the data sets of one set of cultural assumptions to redefine a new cultural assumption altogether. That cannot be done. So long as you are in fact interpreting global warming in terms of actual measurements with thermometers and so on, then you have already ‘bought into’ the whole paraphernalia of rational materialism in order to give those measurements any validity!
And if they fail to agree with your faith based predictions in the New Culture, you must actually abandon science and deny the validity of those measurement altogether. As being ‘just science practising its delusional arts’.. You will find this sort of doublethink pervading the whole theatre of New Age thinking.
And this brings me to the final point, and is about relative levels of delusion. And a way of understanding metaphysics.
There is in the final analysis, no way to distinguish an external reality from a complex self or other generated illusion, If we are doing reality to ourselves, and we might be, then its a part of ourselves we cant consciously reach and affect, or even subconsciously reach or affect, so it might as well be treated AS an externality with its own unfathomable rules and by noting the effect these rules seem to have on the illusion of external reality, we achieve exactly the same results as if we consider that there IS an external reality.
At this point idealism versus realism is resolved. It is irrelevant which it is, what matters is what control we can exert over it. How well and accurately we can posit mathematical or other relationships that describe it. And so on. Once we note that no matter how many impossible things we believe in before breakfast, THEY DO NOT COME TO PASS BY TEATIME, then the idealists assumptions are shown to be non pragmatic. And the realists assumptions to have some element of dominance. We can heave a sigh of relief, carry on practising science AS IF there were an external reality revealed to us via our senses and internally generated pictures. That these pictures are not the reality itself, is a given, as is that fact that we are constructing the pictures internally. In that the idealists are correct, but what they have forgotten is that we do not have total carte blanche in the construction. The elephant in the room completely hidden by cognitive dissonance, can still tread on your toes. And at a given point, it becomes harder to blame it on ingrowing toenails and you shift your assumption base in a new Occamian (or Kuhnian) moment of revelations and yell ‘my god, all this stuff that’s been happening is AN ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM, and this new simpler explanation then becomes the new orthodoxy.
We can understand science on a new way, with this.
Things that exist that do not reveal themselves to us in any way at all, might as well not exist for all practical purposes and there is no need top posit their existence except as objects of emotional impact that may be used to sway the way people act … Cf black magic, religion, marketing, etc etc.
Things that do reveal themselves that appear to display patterns of behaviour are valid subjects of rational analysis as we attempt to impose one pattern or another of our own construction on them, until we find a pattern – a new mathematical Law – that seems to explain what they do, and over a period of time often enough and predictably enough to be useful. These things we call laws of Nature, and presume on an ad hoc basis to be as close to ‘scientific fact’ as it is possible to get.
Things which display phenomenally complex patterns, that defy simple explanation, we have to shrug and say ‘there may be something causing it, but we are nowhere near any model that is accurate enough to be USEFUL’.
Always remembering that any study of OURSELVES by such rational analysis will be doomed to uncertainty, because the self that does the studying is irrevocably altered by the act of studying..too much self analysis leads to any conclusions at all. Seek and ye shall find. Social science, is not science, because the moment you publish the result, its changes the people you were studying in the first place!
In a study of sexual behaviour, 90% of males under 25 say they have sex at least once a night. When the results are published, 90% of males now feel totally sexually inadequate, because they are lucky to get it twice a week in fact. A new marketing campaign for a make deodorant is launched and is an overnight success. Statistical modelling then shows that if 90% of males were having sex twice a night, the actual birthrate reflects an appallingly low incidence of fertility in the populations. This is a Matter Of Concern. Government funds are directed into ‘incidence of male and female infertility in the populations at large post 2000’.
Years later an billions spent a new survey goes round and actually asks people to RECORD honestly, backed up with selfie videos, just how much sex they are actually getting, and it turns out to be once or twice a week. The survey is instantly suppressed by the makers of deodorants, and thousands of social scientists who have been studying infertility, and they are accused of fabricating evidence. Of being ‘Deniers of the true facts’
I hope this clarifies matters, rather than obfuscates..
My main points are that:
Rational Materialists who Believe In Externalities And the Evidence Of Their Senses should always bear in mind that there is a lot of hardware and software between them and the Real World (TM).
Cultural Constructivists should bear in mind that if its all in the cultural mind, believing in fairies should bring them into palpable existence, but so far its not been demonstrated. However you can sell a lot of stuff based on invisible fairies that have no visible effect on the world at all, if people DO believe in them enough…
Post Post-Modern philosophers should bear in mind that regardless of the Absolute Truth (TM) it makes sense pragmatically to proceed AS IF there were Something Out There , bearing in mind the final impossibility of deciding what it is, or where out there actually is,…
And those sceptical of ‘climate science’ so called should understand it in terms perhaps of a broader struggle being waged by those who espouse one or other of the elementary positions delineated above.
What is not Logical, Captain, is to proceed on the basis that science and materialism has meaning when you are actually advancing the proposition that it does in the final analysis not.
That is real denial.
Boris Gimbarzevsky says: @ January 28, 2014 at 1:17 am
…One of the problems that humans living in cities have is that completely delusional beliefs are possible unlike a single individual living in a remote setting where such delusions lead to death from a very unforgiving and objective external reality. Matters aren’t helped any by deluded “academics” who preach that reality is a social creation. For the majority of people, reality is whatever the majority says is true…. Reason doesn’t work as most people don’t base their lives on logic.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Thank you for putting into words one of my observations.
Humans in advanced civilization are insulated from the reality. If you screw-up and go walking in the field with the bull and the bull puts you in a wheel chair for the rest of your life, why you sue the farmer. After all it is NOT YOUR FAULT you ignored the fence and trespassed in a field plastered with beware of the bull and no trespassing signs….
At least in the USA we have wrapped people especially children in cotton batting trying to remove all possible danger from their lives.
_Jim:
your post at January 27, 2014 at 5:15 pm
I could not care less “which side” you are on or “want to play”.
I will not contribute to derailing the thread. Read my post from which you quote.
Richard
The paper, discussion and comments made very worthwhile contribution to WUWT. Thanks; we need more of this and also open mindedness. I think we need to hear more about academic (research) funding and the wish of academe which has grown hugely to be appreciated as important and socially useful, and as looking towards the future. The alleged ‘environmental crisis’ acted as a major stimulant to research and was possibly encourahed by ‘power’ because it deflected concenrs away from human problems. Once environmental threats were adopted as
THE new issue for research, science debates about claims and assumption were largely ignored by ‘do-gooding science itelf, and even more so , by the social sciences. WWF /IPCC ‘science’ was believed as truth and few of us had any knowledge about the hisotry of sientific disputeds and even ‘wars’. The social sciences could and did base their new contributions to knowledge on the assumptions of an approaching climate catstrophe caused by carbon dioxide. I experienced all this in the UK from the mid 1990s onwards with specialists in environemnetla economics, sociology, international relations and even energy studies. By the end of the 1990s very few academic journals would accpet ‘sceptical’ papers and a very small group of geographers here even lost the battles over whether a new research group should be called climate research or climate change research… the changers won of course and teh term denier crept in. In the Uk this seems to have come from sociology, from people we memories of the holocaust. There is a long history here going back to the late 1980s, and also much more literature.
Friends:
At January 27, 2014 at 7:34 pm davidmhoffer wrote:
Repeated for emphasis and to help those who missed it.
Richard
Frederick Colbourne says: January 27, 2014 at 6:38 pm
Txomin says: January 27, 2014 at 10:07 pm
Thanks.
DirkH says: January 28, 2014 at 1:36 am
Well I’ve certainly no intention to rewrite history. And I hadn’t intended to spawn an entire sub-topic regarding Eugencis, was just using a couple of v brief summary 1-liners for other social narrative instances. While the detailed history of Eugenics is not an area of expertise for me, I was aware of more complex and varied detail beneath that summary line, and on reflection the precise snippet you quote is a rough approximation at best. I’ve probably still got someones else’s potentially incorrect summary I read floating about in my head, and confess I didn’t think at all deeply about that line, as no doubt I should have. Ah… the dangers of replicating narrative! I’m perfectly happy to stand corrected re a more varied history, and maybe it should read ‘loose alliance to various political affiliations’, which in fact are different flavoured in some different countries anyhow. Rather belatedly, I recall now info per Gail Combs mention of Fabian Society, which pricked my memory core. Lack of thought, not intent.
I am a life long SF reder and fan. It is astounding that academics who are claiming to be well informed ignore the decades long use of global cllimate apocalypse as a plot device in SF stories and novels.
The SF stories, to my knowledge, have seldom if ever used the climate apocalypse plot device as a way to show how scientists can be wrong. Except for one satire on climate apocalypse that I can recall, the story lines are always about how humans have destroyedthe climate and how people are more or less getting by.
For these academics to decline to look at the striking similarities bewtween SF climate plots and the modern AGW movement’s similarities is to miss an obvious area of study. For them to pretend that those who doubt the apocalypse claims of AGW are the ones engaging in science fictional thinking is their demonstration of either cynicism or ignorance.
davidmhoffer says: January 27, 2014 at 7:34 pm
Okay, if you’re arguing from the position of a minority of specific examples, of which LM2013 is one, then this is plausible and I see where you’re coming from. I guess we can never know for sure. However, my default would still be deep immersion of these folks in the orthodox CAGW frame as the main cause. Remember these folks don’t recognise the IPCC output as just another frame(s), to them it is ‘absolute truth’, along with the whole 9 yards of all the scientific societies and government departments and such as coat-tails. So to them sceptics are folks who inexplicably are contributing to harm of the planet in contradication to practically all ‘official’ info. I’m guessing they genuinely have no explanation for that (but cannot ‘see’ outside their frame to discover the truth). So they analyse the ‘hard core’, the petro-chemical industry, to try and analyse why these strange folks are ‘resistive’. Of course they find no revelation and hence travel down dubious lines like suspecting nefarious motives and that these sceptic folks are ‘not normal’, which the ‘denier’ term leads them easily into (and was not invented by them, they swallowed it with the narrative). This is all classic for folks who are deeply immersed (like those you see on TV who are pulled out of cults or extreme religions or racists groups, who are interviewed years later and are completely different, failing to even understand themselves at the time). You have the benefit of fishing all the many frames here that allows the shape of reality to be sensed, no doubt you fished in Consensus sites and papers too, as many here do. But many academic authors do not fish widely; in their ivory towers they are so blinded by CAGW that nefarious motives (enabled by ‘denier’ and ‘merchants of doubt’ memes) are all they can come up with to explain the otherwise inexplicable sceptics. .
I figure this is a subjective matter and not one that is ever likely to have proof. So assuming the above does not sway you, I guess we shall have to agree to disagree. I do appreciate your points and your iterative responses that helped me see your PoV better.
Boris Gimbarzevsky says: January 28, 2014 at 1:17 am
Nice contribution, thanks. About 30 years back I spent quite a lot of time programming in assembly language. 8085, Z80, some 80186/286; unforgiving mistresses all!
hunter says: January 28, 2014 at 8:37 am
That’s actually a neat point, which as I’m an SF author on the side has crossed my mind also.
If you are interested, I have a free-to-read very skeptical cli-fi / sci-fi novelette called ‘Truth’ available in various download formats here at Smashwords. No apocalypse! It featured in Judith Curry’s cli-fi review at Christmas 2012. If you like it you can find your way to more sci-fi (and a 3 book techo-thriller jointly written with UK author Ian Watson) from my website, though most of the rest is not free I’m afraid.
Good analysis, but wallows in buzz-word abstractions. To call it verbose and prolix would be an understatement. Needs to be edited down to about 1/3 its current bloated length.
Leo Smith, excellent exposition on the nature of reality. You note:
Rational Materialists who Believe In Externalities And the Evidence Of Their Senses should always bear in mind that there is a lot of hardware and software between them and the Real World (TM).
That paragraph is an understatement as the function of the brain is best viewed as a reality generating engine (RGE) which is just as able to produce an invalid reality as one which is based on a reasonable model of external reality. The brains RGE has been perfected over tens of millions of years of vertebrate evolution and, being rather conservative, nature has preserved the basic architecture of the brain in all vertebrate phyla. Prior to the massive enlargement of the human cortex, external reality served as a rigid selection mechanism for invalid RGE’s. Those RGE’s which failed to properly model external reality were eliminated and the RGE’s that faithfully modeled external reality survived.
Once modern civilization came about, selection pressure was greatly reduced and invalid RGE’s can survive and can reproduce to increase the proportion of the population with invalid RGE’s. The existence of modern civilization has resulted in an explosion of unique RGE’s which makes modern civilization so interesting, but it also is civilizations Achilles heel as memeplexes completely at variance with external reality can infect populations and cause their demise.
The statist memeplex is currently ascendant again and threatens to enslave humanity with a very distorted vision of reality from RGE’s that believe they have the right to mould the contents of other people’s RGE’s.
One book that does an excellent job of describing the neurologic underpinnings of reality generation is Noretrender’s The User Illusion which, ironically, I picked up from a pile of low cost computer books as presumably the bookseller assumed that the book had something to do with GUI design. Well worth reading.
As Gail Comb’s noted, modern western civilization insulates people from external reality and in doing so, infantalizes them. Much of what I did as a child would now bring a swat team down on my house as in the 1960’s making explosives, playing with dynamite and building gunpowder rockets were considered to be part of a normal childhood (at least in Northern Alberta where I grew up). In a rural environment, one can’t escape external reality for long whereas in a large city it’s possible. Statists utilize the power of fear to steer people away from realities which threaten the state which is likely one of the reasons that research into psychedelic drugs has been effectively banned by the state.
A fundamental tenet of RGE’s is that there exists an objective reality which, while the RGE cannot model precisely, must be modeled sufficiently well to ensure the survival of the RGE long enough to pass its genes on to another generation. WRT this underlying physical reality which we think we know but can never know in detail, there is no denying its validity. However, what has happened with the development of large conglomerations of people is that social reality is what people perceive to be the fundamental reality. One of my interests is in eating disorders and I find it bizarre but fascinating how young women with eating disorders inhabit a reality where all that seems to exist for them is their bodily appearance, interactions among their peers, current fads as well as the ubiquitous dependance on cell phone technology. Dropped off in a wilderness setting they wouldn’t survive very long at all. They’re trapped in their dysfunctional realities and haven’t a clue that other things exist in life.
For most individuals, their social reality is far more meaningful to them than external reality as they can’t conceive of anything outside of the social reality. Thus, in order to convince individuals that their RGE is defective, it is first necessary to educate them that what they perceive as reality is a brain generated illusion and that controlling individuals are very aware of defects in the wetware of most people to ensure that their RGE’s conform to the RGE of the individuals who believe that they have a right to determine other individuals realities.
The current selling point for such control is “safety” which is being used as the rationalization for more and more repressive legislation. If one has to create a binary distinction for the political philosophies of individuals, it would be as those who believe in spontaneous organization of groups of individuals to perform a task vs those who believe that only centralized hierarchical control is valid. All other elaborations on the reasons for stating that only a hierarchical system of government is valid are irrelevant and thus National Socialist and Communism are isomorphic under this metric.
Those who are believers in CAGW inhabit a social reality in which all of the people they know are convinced that technologic civilization is going to lead to the destruction of the planet. One cannot argue with them when the argument is based on basic physical principles which demonstrate that their model is incongruent with the external physical reality. These individuals, for the majority of their lives, don’t inhabit physical reality. In order to interact with these individuals in a manner designed to get them to question their weltanschauung, one needs to utilize the laws which apply to social realities. There are simple principles which one can use to influence people’s perceptions which were gathered by Cialdini in his book Influence.
What I’ve noticed is that there’s quite a divide between individuals who seek understand nature and thus become chemists and physicists and those for whom their RGE is entirely geared to modelling social realities. The gap is as wide as that between programmers who still do assembly language programming and those who know little beyond javascript. The latter is a high level language that any purist would consider to be obscenely inefficient, but given the power of modern computers, it allows for the easy manipulation of complex objects without having to know the dirty underlying details of how its done.
We have lots of people who are skilled with interacting with reality on a low level, but to make a difference in peoples perceptions, it’s necessary to move up to a higher level and operate at the level of social reality where completely new paradigms are needed. The level of social reality is a system that functions according to rules which politicians instinctively seem to figure out and what is needed is to use the same rules to fight the warmists in this higher order battlefield.
Looking up the BS artist known as Derrida explains all of Mosher’s behavior. Mosher really believes he is being philosophically brilliant.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/205550/i-derrida-i-derrida-etc/mark-goldblatt
Mosher believes that fantasy is a frame of comparison that we use to define reality, when in fact fantasy tells us nothing about reality. of course we hear a lot of that ‘you make up your own truths’ crap these days. mainly from those who have no argument to offer.
eg we now have more than enough evidence to say conclusively, without personal opinion, that Cagw is false. the condition cannot exist, and is fantasy. of course there is a similar level of evidence that agw must exist, just not to that level.
when considering the frame we talk from re agw, we dont include mickey mouses big air con, so why the hell should we give any consideration to the like fantasy of Cagw? its just nonsense to consider the non-position of being sceptical, a position. it is NOT! Mosher tries to frame that argument that maybe I have not considered all the possibilities of HIS fantasy, well i probably have not because it is his, and his fellow alarmists fantasy. he should learn that people have a mind of their own and not all will be dictated to.