Why climate change communications is like 'Shaka, when the walls fell'

Considering one side is trying to talk science and the other is talking politics dishonestly disguised as science it’s no wonder they can’t communicate.

Oh, also this best argument I seen for the Star Trek Prime Directive.
Obviously these Tamarian should not be star faring people- there must
have been a violation of the Directive. Probably Klingons or whoever did
it.

The planet has warmed up six of my curry and Guinness farts…they are that powerful!

Gilgamesh at Uruk.

Which follows the theme that has been known for a long time.
1. Its not science.
2. It follows very closely aligned to some of the most extreme doomsday cults/faiths.
3. You can never prove them wrong scientifically in the views of the faithful because only they speak the language of the faith.
4. The easiest way to combat this problem is to cut the faith off from the money supply and like all extremest faiths they will either faith away or commit suicide.
This is one of the reasons why a purely science based argument has zero merit in winning the battle… because science is meaningless to them. The “let play nice and all get along” MUST STOP if we are to make true progress on this issue.

You’re giving the alarmists credit for goodwill which is not in evidence.

Zenda, his face black, his eyes red!

Piltdown, when the jaw dropped.
I propose: Cook’s Law of Metaphor Inflation, (something similar to Godwin’s) i.e. when you start expressing or (more specifically) measuring things in terms of a nuclear holocaust –you’ve already lost the argument.

Darmok is also one of my favourite episodes.
The key flaw with this post, as mentioned a bit earlier, the other side does not have the goodwill required.
They have their edicts and they want them obeyed. End of “conversation”.
That’s their concept of communication.

The whole thing with AGW was never about warming. It was about wealth redistribution. They want the income inequality to be lower. But in Margaret Thatcher famous words (when it was made clear that all levels of income were better off under her time in office), what the Left really wants is to make the poor poorer so long as the rich are less so.
Why would they want the poor poorer? Easy. It creates a dependent class. It’s how they get elected. It’s how they hand free stuff out. It’s how they demonize anyone that disagrees with them.
If this post is anything to go by, perhaps appealing to the emotional side wouldn’t be a bad idea when used with facts.

I envision the final outcome of CAGW as “Mudd meeting Stella 500”.

Here, let me translate for you:
Humans are a disease upon the skin of this planet. Since the death of God, sin against the planet is the most dreadful possible sin (Nietzsche, Thus spoke Zarathustra).
The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of the human population. The flourishing of nonhuman life requires such a decrease. Everyone who understands this has an obligation to implement these changes. (Arne Næss and George Sessions, Basic Principles of Deep Ecology)
Humans are not created by God in the image of God. Humans have no intrinsic value above any other mammalian species. Culling the human population is not only morally justifiable, but obligatory to the extent that it would serve the integrity of the biotic community.
Let me inform you about truth. Truth is what we say it is. This isn’t about “science” and it isn’t about communicating. You deny our truth. CAGW is true because we say it is true. It is our “self evident” truth. You fight this as if it were about science. It is about replacing anthropocentrism and embracing ecocentrism. And the means justify the end.

Hansen, with windows open.

McKibben at Washington’s Wall — with Boxes Full!

hunter says:
March 9, 2014 at 12:25 pm
What is a bit disturbing is that for at least some academics, SkS is a *good science based website*. Quadrillions of kitty sneezes do not make their perceived crisis any less unreal.
——————————————————-
John Cook (SkS) recently compared the Prime Minister of Australia Tony Abbott to former South African President Mbeki who refused to believe Aids was caused by a virus and let several thousands of people die as a result. It appeared in the Saturday Star (Toronto paper). A jump from the holocaust denial to Aids denial.

I think the division of the language is not along the lines of emotion and science.
The ancient Greeks had a view of language and thinking in a division of Mythos and logos.
Religious or mythical language which could not be argued in terms of reason. What the gods were up to was unfathomable in not subject to logic.
Logos was the language of reason.
This disappeared from the western world in the fifth century when the christian church set down that logos was delivered by religion. It set in place non reasoning principles of thought and orthodoxy which was not set aside until the age of enlightenment.
For a brief time reason prevailed in the Islamic world until it was set aside by orthodoxy in the 11th century.
So the real threat in the global warming is that religious thinking will prevail over logical reasoning.
This is exacerbated by the increase in the power of the State. More and more research is under the power of Government and ideologues in academia.
So you have this toxic brew of academic theorists in the social “sciences” infecting politics with unreasoning. A media set on sensationalism full of advocating journalists reared in the halls of non impartial academia to the emotional tenets of left wing dreams of the apocalypse of capitalism. And politicians who can buy votes from the scared voters hustled into worries about a future they will not live in.
The problem is further added to by the observation of one of the astronauts that these religious greens did not arrive at their conclusions through logic and reason so logic and reason will not persuade them to any scientific point of view.
What will do it is reality. The trouble is it might take another twenty years of cooling before a grudging admission they might be wrong. And most will stick to the religion, it gives them such comfort as the world progresses to prosperity along a path their ideology and hatred of free markets and democracy says it should not.
More research in private hands, smaller government and less control over peoples lives and some rigor in academia would help. As for the media, well this internet that we are on will hopefully deal to them. The BBC is getting desperate as its duplicity and fall from standards gets starker everyday.
So I think its not the mode of communication interesting as the analogy is but rather the force of mythos versus that of logos.
The saving grace is that its logos that provides the airplanes, the trains, the energy the water the health systems.
So if these fanatics wish to beat us back to the miserable caves of “sustainability” resistance will appear as it has in Germany when the subsidies, the tithes to their religion are cancelled by the State and we revert to the tried and true.

LOL ok I imagined Anthony with a drinkie poo or 2 in hand when writing this LOL 🙂
but…it all came together and makes sense.
Thank you.

Sorry, you lost me at…’Next Generation Star Trek episode’.

9 Mar: Holmes Report: Americans Believe Humans Causing Climate Change, Doubt Corporate Claims
More than half (60 percent) of Americans believe that climate change is a result of human action such as deforestation and burning of fossil fuels, among other factors, according to the fifth annual Sense & Sustainability Study from Gibbs & Soell, the business communications firm with expertise in sustainability consulting.
Thirty percent of US adults are skeptical while 10 percent are unsure as to the impact of human activity on significant changes in temperature or precipitation over an extended period of time. Natural weather disasters are cited by more than half (57 percent) of Americans as highly influencing their opinions on climate change…
***“The results speak to the importance of making big issues like climate change more personal and relatable,” says Ron Loch, senior vice president and managing director, sustainability consulting, Gibbs & Soell. “Even for those people not affected by an extreme weather event, news of hurricanes, droughts and blizzards evoke fear, concern and empathy. That’s why storytelling is so important when discussing issues of sustainability and social responsibility. It makes the larger problem more relevant and helps gain the kind of attention that can lead to understanding and meaningful action.”
http://www.holmesreport.com/expertknowledge-info/14673/Americans-Believe-Humans-Causing-Climate-Change-Doubt-Corporate-Claims.aspx

Wow!
Kind of profound how what we say says more about us than the subject we address.
I am reminded of a very distinguished man, who in another field of research led the fight in critical battles that defended truth and enabled those who followed him to build healthy structures for his community.
After more than a decade of being at the front of several of those confrontations, he ‘inexplicably’ withdrew and went and formed a small community, dedicated to a positive development of his research and ideas. Many who looked to his leadership were profoundly upset; there were rumors of personal crisis and his betrayal of the cause. He however refused to respond.
In memoirs published many years later he reflected back on that time. I paraphrase his thoughts… “The horn is sounded and you rise up once again to go out and do battle to defend the truth… but there comes a time when you realize, that doing battle has subtly replaced the truth, where joy is not in the triumph of the truth; but in triumph. That is when, for me, I knew I must leave and find another way…”
May you guard your hearts.

Speaking of Cook’s ridiculous four bombs/second app. . . The obvious propaganda angle of trying to relate theoretical heat build-up to nuclear weapons is clear to a 7 year-old. Besides, the facts are that a nuke’s heat output is released as a short pulse and their energy output, in addition to heat, consists of of: blast (over pressure and shock), radiation and an electromagnetic pulse. His comparison to a “Big Ben” full of dynamite is just as transparent. Another pulse of some heat along with blast/shock and destruction.
I suggest a couple of alternative comparisons. One would be to have two graphs. One would be the chart as used in the current graph but overlaid with a second representation of the *total* amount of solar heat falling on Earth during the same time period. The current graph of so called *global warming heat* would disappear into the noise floor.
The other alternative could be a *per square meter chart*. To keep it as simple as possible, illustrate a graph using Christmas tree lights. In other words, a chart that shows the equivalent of current solar radiation in quarter Watt light bulbs and the additional heat of the past 50 years in a different color of bulbs.

This was a fun read and I guess I can appreciate the attempt at sort of sanitizing the fanatical efforts of the libcult and their glo-bull warming chic crusade, but two things immediately don’t add up.
First, the idea that you could have a sophisticated tech savy culture/society that communicates primarily through emotive imagery and metaphor is just plain silly. It ain’t gonna happen. Similarly, climate change (aka AGW glo-bull warming) isn’t really science in the sense that it is based on the scientific method and rigorous standards of evidence and an honest appraisal of that evidence, Libcult “science” is steeped in the mythos of the libcult whose accolytes imagine themselves as grand and glorious saviours of the planet and pretty much everything else is manufactured/manicured/mythicological in nature, certainly NOT science.
Second, The entire article seems to be an attempt to understand and forgive those poor souls who are simply emotive in nature and (as I thought it implied) not culpable for their messy but honorable efforts. Nothing could be further from the truth. I believe a large majority of the libcultists involved in the climate change crusade know full well that their claims are not truthful and their “science” is fundamentally unscientific. I also believe they do not care. They are fanatics who are fully invested in their crusade and they wrap their entire personal lives up into that crusade, so they cannot retreat one whit or their view of the world and their place in it is at threat.

Lets say, for arguments sake, that CAGW is a religion. Also, that since it takes the side of lies, that it is a devilish religion. So, one way to understand how the people, that is, the great mass of brainwashed (of a sort) people who blindly follow it, think, is to ask a devil how they got them to think that way (if it can be called thinking). So let us ask our old friend Screwtape how he did it:
It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy’s clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning. But what with the weekly press and other such weapons we have largely altered that. Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily “true” of “false”, but as “academic” or “practical”, “outworn” or “contemporary”, “conventional” or “ruthless”. Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about.
The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle onto the Enemy’s own ground. He can argue too; whereas in really practical propaganda of the kind I am suggesting He has been shown for centuries to be greatly the inferior of Our Father Below. By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result?
So, what are “other such weapons” that got people to think like this? One of the biggest is television, and advertisers, who, since they are the ones who pay for the show, want the viewers to have a certain mindset. Examples, a show, the star has a choice between reason or “follow your heart”. You know how this one turns out, and if you think like an advertiser, you will understand why. Do you think an advertiser really wants people to use reason when they make their pitch? Yes, there is a sucker born every minute, but why wait when you can train masses of people to become suckers and to think that they have done the right thing to become so? There have even been entire shows dedicated to this type of training, look up “Oprahfication”, which can be explained as “maybe two plus two equals four, but how do you FEEL about that?”
Has this been successful? Think about car ads, do they usually say “our car is better, here’s why”? No, instead, they try to associate that car with purely emotional images, a car sliding in slow motion sideways through smoke, a car associated with classy British supervilliens, that sort of thing. Once you understand that, you will come to a realization, the age of reason is over. And once you understand that, two things become apparent. One is that many believe in CAGW not because of reason, but because it makes them feel good. They can feel good because they can say “I am saving the planet”, or “I am apposing THEM” (evil corporate greed types, ignorant hillbilly anti science types, and other caricatures). They can also feel like part of a group, the side of right, us versus them, and other slogans (Jargon, not argument, is your best ally).
So what to do? Well, you can use the truth, but in the same way that they do. Associate CAGW with corporate greed types, say, by showing that AlGore is one (it’s better as one word, try it!). Use humor to make fun of them when they screw up (as they usually do), thus making people not want to be associated with something so laughable. Expose lies and greed in emotional ways also works for the same reason. Couch the contest in different ways, the evil large envirobusiness versus the plucky underdog (basically, this site, with it’s nonfunding by big oil, versus the billion dollar a day CAGW funding).
And, of course, lots of images. Images work on the right, emotional side of the brain, which they are used to using. Examples: One could follow AlGore around to one of his speeches, associate it with especially obnoxious religious (of a sort) shysters (which is basically what it is, it uses the exact same tricks), with one corner of the screen showing his two SUV’s and a towncar running their engines for two hours spewing out all that evil CO2 while he tells you in ridiculous ways how evil, that is. And polar bears, lots of cute, cuddly polar bears, too many polar bears since there are now at least 4 or 5 times as many as there used to be (and they may not be as cute and cuddly as you thought close up). How about some dead birds around all those wind farms, or should I say, collection of death towers (make it a nice emotional slogan, which happens to be true), start with birds, nice, singing birds, then go to the towers, now dead birds, lots of them, end with a silent, empty sky.
Basically, you get the idea, associate the “skeptics” with the plucky underdog, with good images, with “stand up to the man” (which happens to be true, since government is so behind CAGW), with protest against injustice, that sort of thing. If 350.org can do it, so can you. One the other hand, associate the CAGW side with bad images and slogans, greed (true!), hypocrisy, lies (one could make some of their lies visual, for instance, like the polar bears, the “ice free” arctic, etc), and all that sort.
In short, realize that the age of reason is over for most people, and act accordingly. Some few can be educated, but for most, jargon, advertising tricks, sloganeering, and other ways to appeal, to emotions will work better.

““Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra””
I think you might have made a major misinterpretation here. This could be a valid call in Star Trek Cluedo.

You’ve hit upon something that I’ve noticed with left/liberal thinking. If you notice with liberal/progressive protests marches the participants are all about drum circles, puppetry, costumes, and guerrilla street theater. Facts are irrelevant and only used to support their ideological agenda. Hiroshimas per second, coal trains of death, and so on. Emotional content is everything and facts that don’t support those emotions are not only ignored but attacked. If someone could prove categorically that free market capitalism was the only way to stop CAGW, do you really think the alarmists would support it? No, because their belief system is based on anti-capitalism and anti-science. CAGW is just a lever to accomplish their real goals, which some of them can’t even articulate (remember they’re driven by emotion not rationalism).

Legatus says:
March 9, 2014 at 3:56 pm
In short, realize that the age of reason is over for most people, and act accordingly. Some few can be educated, but for most, jargon, advertising tricks, sloganeering, and other ways to appeal, to emotions will work better.
Legatus, would you please write a book about this (maybe you already have)? This short post is the most cogent, thoughtful and insightful summation of the battle for the mind that is going on I have ever read. Other posters on this blog fondly hope that the warming hiatus, or coming cooling, will convince the warmists. They dream fondly of an idle fantasy. The warmists will just start saying that CO2 causes ice ages and try to reduce Earth’s population in the name of cooling instead. The point is to kill people, to save the planet from humans, not to find truth. I suggest another visual meme – ask the AlGore: how many have to die for your dream to become reality? How many birds, how many people?

Hilarious, Foolship, when the Ice embraced. Tobacco Son vanished, hiding.

“Shaka, when the walls fell…” is an appropriate metaphor for this post but the rest of the ‘Next Generation – Star Trek analogy fails.
In the Star Trek episode Darmok, the Tamarians risked everything to achieve understanding. Dathon, their emissary, died trying to achieve mutual understanding.
Our opponents (Hansen, mann, Gleik, Cook, Gore, et.al.) are not the Tamarians. They are the Ferengi! They do not seek shared understanding or experience! They will tell any lie, any deceit, any half truth necessary to promote their agenda. They are the worst form of rent and grant seeking parasites, determined at all costs to promote themselves to adjudicators of global resource use. They want to be The Nagus. Don’t be mistaken. These ‘Ferengi’ are not capitalists. They are crony socialists who, as a result of their superior minds and efforts to save the entity Gaia while converting the ignorant masses to their Rules of Environmentalism, will reward themselves quite handsomely for ‘saving the planet’. Who will ultimately be The Grand Nagus remains to be seen….. but mutual understanding is not required. Their position is “The Science Is Settled and The Debate Is Over, you damn Deeniers!” Anything less is analogous to Bush ‘looking into Puti-Putin’s eyes and seeing peace’ before he invaded Georgia or Obama ‘pressing the reset button (mislabeled in russian “overcharge”) only to have Putin invade the Ukraine and threaten to shut off Europe’s natural gas supply.
“Shaka – when the walls fell…” means failure. Mistakenly believing our opponents have any desire for mutual understanding is self delusion… and ends in failure as well.

…Al Gore, with his palms outstretched….
Great post, Anthony! “Darmok” is also a favorite of mine. STNG was a great show!

AW transcends the final frontier, to boldly go where no man has gone before.
Communicating with aliens is problematic. Even if a communications channel could be established there is no reasoning entity at the other end just a nebulous undifferentiated neural network plugged into belief, greed, corruption and stupidity.

semiotics. it’s subverbal. words are not required.
basically, the only thing it can communicate is affection or hostility; approval or disapproval.
logic requres words; critical thinking requires logic.
there is no intersection of these separate domains.

If the greenies really believed that overpopulation was the problem, they would prove it by committing suicide. They do not, so we know what they really believe. They do not believe that there are too many people, they believe that there are too many other people.

Institutional paradise, when they ate the competition.
Shaka , no brotha.
Thanks for the interesting articles and comments.

David Ross says: March 9, 2014 at 12:01 pm
Piltdown, when the jaw dropped.

ROFL!! Good one! All sorts of innuendo tied to that doozy.

The Desire for the Dire seems dominant; Drastic Warming which unleashes floods and rising seas would make CAGWers ecstatic.