Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A group of climate researchers have made the shocking discovery, that telling people everyone is going to die from the apocalyptic effects of manmade climate change, and that the only hope is for them personally to join a local group of activists who hope to influence the direction of the Washington juggernaut, makes normal people feel depressed and unmotivated.
According to the Huffington Post;
Why Climate Change Rhetoric Simultaneously Succeeds and Fails
Despite mounting evidence about the threats posed by climate change, most Americans do not consider it to be a very important problem facing the country, nor are they engaged in large-scale advocacy efforts to address it.
What might be done? An increasingly common argument, backed both by intuition and social science research, is that rhetoric should highlight how climate change will personally affect Americans’ lives. Among the most common “personal relevance” frames are those that focus on how it might impact personal health or make it more difficult for people to obtain the food that they need.
It turns out that these personal relevance messages have the opposite effect from what we might expect: Although they do increase people’s concern about climate change, they actually reduce their willingness to advocate on the issue.
Framing climate change in terms of its effect on either personal health or food security reminds people that very important personal goals (staying healthy and eating well) will be difficult to achieve. It puts them in a bad mood, and when people are in a bad mood they are less willing to engage in collective advocacy efforts.
Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-seth-levine/why-climate-change-rhetor_b_8913694.html
A senior political campaign manager once explained the rules of negative campaigning to me. You don’t distribute negative leaflets to your supporters, you distribute negative leaflets in areas which vote for the opposition, to make them feel disengaged with the political process, and stop them from wanting to vote. The fact hardcore greens seem to have trouble grasping this obvious principle, of how normal people’s minds work, makes me really wonder what is happening inside their heads.
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Echoes?
What’s inside their head is similar to a doomsday cultist. You can give them all the logic and scientific evidence under the sun but the rhetoric will still be “mounting evidence”……..”the debate is over”…..”scientific consensus and 907% of scientists agree” ….”big oil is funding your denial”…
They make ‘normal’ people feel depressed and unmotivated because they know the alarmist propaganda is bullshit but, unlike most doomsday cultist rhetoric, in this case the government and some scientists are stood on the media highway with their “End Is Nigh” placards and in this case the public are the one’s who end up paying for their crap.
The end is Nye?
“907% of scientists agree”
907% and growing
Yes, its amazing that everyone laughs at that guy who predicted 7 of the last apocalypses, yet praise “scientists” whose accuracy is sometimes even less.
I guess the only good thing is that they aren’t asking us to, literally, drink the Kool-Aid. Yet.
Donna LaFramboise has posed the most relevant question:
http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2015/12/20/climate-question-of-the-year/
Why aren’t the Climate Catastrophists celebrating in the streets after Paris?
195 nations signed a piece of paper and declared “We’re finally getting really, really serious about climate change [trust us]”
Problem solved. [OOPS! Bad news for alarmists]
Now, let’s get the UN (and all gummints) out of our pockets so we can keep our own earnings to address issues we actually have a stake in and care about.
I’ve been asking for some time why environmental activists and other neo-Marxists are so negative and oblivious to the good around them. I can easily explain where the ideas come from in the history of ideas but haven’t been so sure about psychology. (I think people believe because of a problem with their individual psychology, but why so widespread?)
Recently I came across an interview with authors of a book covering Americans who spied for the USSR
Interviewer Jamie Glazov experienced the USSR’s tyranny. “Frontpage Interview: In Denial” can be found at:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1028504/posts or at
http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=15347
“Psychologically, the leftists you speak of see little of that. They see a Communist state that articulated their vision of the future and which sought to destroy the societies and institutions they hated. They cannot see the horror that communism actually created. They look on that horror and see something else because they cannot admit to themselves that their vision is beyond human grasp.”
The first quote at http://www.moralindividualism.com/newleft.htm illuminates another aspect, current activists’ motivation for trying to tear down our form of society that works for people, instead of working to improve it.
“I’ve been asking for some time why environmental activists and other neo-Marxists are so negative and oblivious to the good around them. I can easily explain where the ideas come from in the history of ideas but haven’t been so sure about psychology. (I think people believe because of a problem with their individual psychology, but why so widespread?)”
I’m not sure that it IS “widespread”. I want to be just as careful about not “stereotyping” all environmental activists and other neo-Marxists as I am any other group of people. Labels applied to groups cannot be logically applied to ALL individuals in that group.
Cognitive biases happen to ALL of us to some degree. Healthy, normal, rational people, when shown their biases, can SEE and accept and admit to them. Most will then attempt to correct and adjust them in the future. But if some other behavior is seen after someone is shown their CB(s), it usually indicates that there is something unhealthy, abnormal, or irrational going on. It could rooted in ego- stubborn, proud, etc, or it could be rooted in something deeper-mental disorders, mental illness, mental injury, or something else that affects the degree to which someone can even BE self-aware in the first place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anosognosia
The problem is, online, it’s impossible to discern between those who simply do not have the ability to be logical or reasonable and those who simply choose not to be logical or reasonable for some other reason.
Heads?
This is not rocket science.
Reducing this to matters more common to the majority: how many of you have secured a date with a member of the sex you desire to date with by telling them to lose a few pounds, get a better haircut and stop working for a bozo?!
Well, I know for sure that doesn’t work.
Honest truth, the “health and safety” angle of fear-based advertising has now been hammered to death for SO long the public has turned away with the mental equivalent of “adrenal fatigue.” In exactly the same way that “evidence” of CAGW is lacking, there isn’t much “evidence” that living a life of constant anxiety, running on a treadmill while ingesting organic kale, much extends the lifespan, let alone its quality. Some of these memes have simply run their course–notwithstanding that more media-savvy folks are doing the fact-checking for themselves, and dismissing the BS with a raspberry . . .
Right …
I think I see where I’ve been going wrong now!
Probably works on goths and greens… 🙂
The fact hardcore greens seem to have trouble grasping this obvious principle, of how normal people’s minds work, makes me really wonder what is happening inside their heads.
Seriously, you think anything is going on there at all?
Inside green’s head: “Corporations are evil, I better get out my smartphone and get on Facepage and let everyone know!”
“on Facepage” – is that like Farcebook?
Occupational hazard of academics everywhere! Since they don’t LIVE in “the real world,” all they know about how it works is what they read in Huff Po and the NYT!
+1!
+1 too:)
Is Captain Obvious green?
No, Captain Obvious wears a red coat
I wonder how much of our tax dollars went to fund this nonsense? I also wonder if these so called climate researchers realize that their butchery of scientific methodology make normal people feel nauseous?
kamikazedave,
That’s the trick. They’re NOT climate researchers. One is a professor in the Department of Government (at Cornell) and the other is a professor in the Department of Political Science (at Stoney Brook). Not a lick of expertise on climate or climate science, but a whole lot of postmodern discursive social psychology (with a mix of government policy and liberal/progressive self-importance and condescention). To call these two “climate researchers” is disingenuous at best, if not downright Fr@udu1ent.
Well put, old trout!
Further proof:
http://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/01/04/american-academics-have-moved-to-the-left/
This is certainly my experience. I had high school teachers who wouldn’t get a whiff of a job these days. All were qualified to teach their subjects, cut they weren’t liberal.
Roger that, Phil R. That’s why I called them “so called” climate scientists.
Talk about perverse incentives – they’re wired so thoughts of doom, gloom, and disaster that ONLY THEIR activism can help stop makes them happy.
It’s the environmental equivalent of being a hardcore masochist – they’re only happy when they’re hurting.
I figure they’re only happy when everyone else is hurting.
AD
I knew a lady like that once . . . .
Auto, still feeling . . .
Auto, I don’t think that one was a lady… 🙂
It’s like the old saying we had about the motto of the FAA.
“We’re not happy until you’re not happy”.
Daily Caller News Foundation
Gold King Mine Disaster Cause May Never Be Known, Thanks To EPA
Photo of Ethan Barton
Ethan Barton
http://dailycaller.com/2016/01/04/gold-king-mine-disaster-cause-may-never-be-known-thanks-to-epa/
Gold King Mine: if they do target someone as responsible, it will be a fall guy who is getting something out of the whole deal to be the fall guy.
I think it’s more likely that people are disengaged because most of them know that claims of climate change are exaggerated by the media and the Left.
Personally, I was extremely interested in and positive about renewable energy from the age of about nine years old – back in the late seventies. Now I find myself feeling heavily critical and dismissive.
The change in my attitude was brought about by the intervening years in which renewables were hijacked and used as a weapon to implement socialist state-control, market manipulation, raising of energy prices, cronyism, rent seeking by depts. of voodoo science in every academic institution everywhere PLUS the idiotic FIT subsidy system in which subsidies seem to be specifically designed to most reward the most expensive technologies available.
To be honest I sometimes wish that I was blissfully ignorant about this entire heap of bullcrap.
Apologies – I drifted into thinking about what the greens had done to my attitude towards renewables.
But the same can also be said about the shift in my attitude towards climate science – brought about by the constant bombardment with transparently idiotic alarmist junk.
I feel and share your pain.
Me too.
Oh hey! Are we feeling froggies stuff? Me next! 😛
This is hilarious. Their desperation to explain why people don’t take “climate change” seriously is in jump-the-shark mode.
Someone needs to go over to one of Furry Maximums threads and get him to read this study. He doesn’t understand people either. 🙂
The increasing lack of trust in the so-called “mounting evidence about the threats posed by climate change” is the essential cause of failure of activists. There might be a new era we have entered, an era with an ascending culture of cleansing reason of activism.
John
It would seem that there is mounting evidence that climate change is benign and therefore not ‘a problem’ but a benefit.
It would seem that this is yet another case of the ‘greens’ being desperately concerned that nothing is going wrong. It is difficult to be an activist against good news.
I actually read the article. What an idiotic waste of electrons.
I believe they are trying for a Lew prize for the biggest piece of Lew paper to wipe out the biggest piece of Lew sh*t.
“Mounting evidence”? We haven’t seen any yet. Oh wait, they mean weather. Any weather will do. Never mind.
+ 1
The problem may lie in the definition of “Mounting evidence”. You see, the phrase is syntactically ambiguous, like “flying planes”–(1) the occupation of a pilot, or (2) a number of winged vehicles aloft. In the present instance, we have either “a growing mass of evidence”, which they cannot mean, because that conflicts with the real world; the alternative reading is “evidence of a mounting”. Well, we’ve all been —ed by them, so I say they are spot on!
They’re like a three-legged mongrel that shows up for a greyhound race. Deaf, blind in one eye . . .
Or in realville, most people recognize when they’re being bullshitted. That’s the real cause of apathy.
And the hundreds of failed “predictions”.
Do you know the difference between empathy and apathy?
***I don’t know and I don’t care”.
Golden nuggets from mom…
Or was it the difference between ignorance and apathy?
Why Climate Change Rhetoric Simultaneously Succeeds and Fails: It’s obvious. it simultaneously succeeds and fails because it is linked to the impacts of climate change which simultaneously cause more/less snow, droughts/floods, more/fewer hurricanes etc. It’s sort of like a push me/pull you thing (I think). It’s all things to all people, so it has to be good/bad, up/down, black/white. You get the picture.
From Wikipedia:
Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, not necessarily determining the truth.
Why Climate Change Rhetoric Simultaneously Succeeds and Fails:
It succeeds with the CAGW believers and activists because it supports their preconceived beliefs.
It fails with the sceptics because the science, the empirical data, just isn’t there. Unfortunately, people like these authors (and Lew “paper” endowsky) assume as their initial premise that CAGW is absolutely true (as proved by a consensus of 97% of “climate scientists”) and, therefore, if they can just send the right message they can magically convince everyone of the impending doom.
Quite so Phil R
Unfortunately almost all world governments, NGO’s, government agencies and bureaucratic actions start with the unshakable certainty that CAGW is absolutely true. No need to consider that this “certainty” is based on a failed 30 year old hypothesis, which is conveniently ignored. EG. COP 21 or 40,000 Clowns on Paris 21??
Many people see that corrupt politics is using corrupt science to achieve it’s Marxist political agenda which is in lock-step with an equally corrupt MSM.
Hopefully the cAGW boy who cried wolf will be recognised in the 21st century, but turning this entrenched monstrosity around seems most unlikely given the massive forces promoting it.
What’s that saying…
You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.
You’d think they’d eventually run out of fools….
Schools are pumping out a constant stream of new fools.
One of the corollaries to Murphy’s Law: If you make something foolproof, a more talented fool will appear.
My guess is that warning labels, nanny state dictates, schools that think self esteem is granted and not earned, etc are providing us with an ever increasing supply of fools.
The damage they have done to the integrity of science is criminal !!!
Yes, indeed!
The effects will be with me for the rest of my life. I will never forgive them either.
@indefatigablefrog
Yup. You start of being vaguely interested, and mildly supportive, because on the face of it it seems sort of reasonable, then they start making outrageous claims, and scepticism starts to build, then you start being called names for being mildly sceptical, and that makes you do the heavy lifting of actual real research and evaluation,. and then the one thing they didn’t want you to do – make up your own mind – happens.
Perhaps its all a way of identifying who in fact is capable of independent thought so we can all be sent to the Gulags, or shot, in due course.
However, I keep a finger on the pulse of what I consider to be mainstream propaganda, and there is a perceptible change at the moment. And the whole thing is losing traction.
Whilst chaps are still wheeled out to promote the on message green line. they are not doing it of their own free will – there is a feeling that favours are being called in, or pressure applied.
The Emperor’s new green clothes are non existent, but everyone is too polite to say so, outside of the little ‘denialist’ blogs.
After all, the Emperor will still be there when he’s back in a wool suit.
It looks like whoever has some influence behind the scenes is looking for a new climate of fear to hang their oppressive but profitable behaviour on.
Radical Islam and terrorism again chaps?
Leo,
“Radical Islam and terrorism again chaps?”
Seems to me that’s going to be a hard sell too now, after the “open borders” campaign . . Folks will put two and two together and wonder how come the tearless leaders didn’t . . Gonna need different “terrorists” (Saints deniers perhaps ; )
It doesn’t help them that almost all of the prominent alarmists that remain vocal, seem to look more and more mentally ill with each day that passes.
Plus – who the hell are these prominent alarmists? Suzuki, Oreskes, Cook, Lewandowsky, Gore, Klein, Hansen, Mann – off the top of my head.
Then here in the U.K. we had a journalist/zoologist called Monbiot, but he seems to have blown a fuse and retreated partially. Only to be replaced by Dana Nuticelli.
And only two or three hard-science grads in that bunch.
People are right to judge this lot on first impressions!!!
I wouldn’t want them on my side!!!
Leo Smith writes:
…I keep a finger on the pulse of what I consider to be mainstream propaganda, and there is a perceptible change at the moment. And the whole thing is losing traction.
I agree with Leo. There’s a sea change happening. I think the public is finally becoming aware of the fact that CO2 just doesn’t do what they’ve been claiming.
It takes a long time for something like this to happen. And it doesn’t always happen. But when it does, it’s more of a step change. An inflection point. We’re seeing it now.
I think.
It’s probably basic marketing to accentuate the positives when selling a product where there are unpleasant associations – eg:
– toilet bleach leaves the bowl clean and sparkly, children playing smiling vs removes dried out s**t
– anti-wrinkle creams used by young models who clearly have no need vs wrinkly old people
– life insurance shows grateful family vs house repossessed for defaulting on mortgage
Applying these simple lessons to communicating climate change agenda:
– electric cars are quiet, smooth, cheap to run, make your children smile vs petrol/diesel causes diseases
– windmills are a traditional technology with up to date engineering, bucolic scene – farmer and food vs monstrosities we have to live with to avoid environmental armageddon
– using fossil fuels more carefully will ensure there will still be some left for our grandchildren to enjoy vs ocean acidification
– etc etc
For heaven’s sake Terry, do NOT tell them how to make their propaganda almost believable. Let them get on with trying to scare us – we can see through that.
Sending reasonable messages to us could perhaps even convince some people who have not already been immunized by their scares.
Dudley…..
ROFL!! Like they listen to anything we say! Are they even capable of creating a reasonable message any more? If Terry stops now and doesn’t sound out the big words, we should be fine.
I think they are so deeply into doom-and-gloom that it would be impossible for them to open their mouths without spouting it. They wouldn’t know how to package a positive message. Misery is all they know and all they want us to know, and they will cling to that until they run out of funding.
Dudley,
So, I take it you don’t think depicting “climate change” skeptics being exploded, with raining down blood and guts, was a good sales pitch?
So, lie more skillfully in other words.
Malthusian doomsday belief is a vicious circle. Radical deep ecologist Pentti Linkola opposes medication, but is on antidepressants.
What you just said reminded me of a video my kids used to watch all the time. You don’t have to watch much of it, I think it starts with the”Angst, Angst Angst” thing. Every time someone here gets stressed out, we chant that to them and laugh. (It doesn’t help them at all!)
This shows that research that can be tied to climate gets funded.
“collective advocacy efforts”. Comrades, awake!
The damage they have done to the integrity of science is criminal !!!
I am afraid that was probably always going to happen. Every single social movement that has arisen spontaneously because it could, and because it worked, and because it was useful is in the end bent to the will of those who have to control dominate and pervert, and the net result is that the thing itself is destroyed.
The Internet is too important and powerful to be left to tekkies. Science is too important and powerful to be left to scientists. Religion is too important and too powerful to be left to believers.
The ridiculous hypocrisy is that it is te self appointed moral arbiters who preach freedom and liberty, but exert the control.
+ 1,000
This shows that research that can be tied to climate gets funded.
is it me or do I detect a change from the ‘evidence is overwhelming and everyone agrees’ to “mounting evidence.” Seems like the language is diluting or is that just a rare moment of optimism from me?
Their cognitive dissonance is mounting, so the change in rhetoric may be a sign of that.
I felt a disturbance in the farce. As if thousands of activists have all suddenly, given up.
MarkW this makes me laugh and shake my head every time I scroll past it. 🙂
By design rhetoric is usually only seen as persuasive by the orator.
Whereas data and the scientific method reaches all, eventually.
Green Sand,
I saw this definition a while ago, and think it is apropos. Would love to give attribution, but don’t remember where I saw it.
Phil R
That will do! Thanks.
Disappointing.
They failed to mention the obligatory conclusion ‘more research is needed’.
We obviously need to provide millions of dollars in a grant to analyze ‘messaging’ with an eye toward developing more effecting means of imbuing the public with the motivation to follow our ‘suggestions’ and willingness to serve the cause. Perhaps a Journal of Practical Propaganda could be established for collecting and educating the media in the latest and most effective techniques for public motivation.
/sarc