From Spiked-online.com
(h/t to Trevor Gunter)
NOTE FROM ANTHONY: this topic is rather contentious, even though temptation abounds and emotions will run high, please refrain from playing climate gutter ball. Comments will be snipped that stray far from decorum.
Wednesday 4 March 2009
Pathologising dissent? Now that’s Orwellian
Brendan O’Neill
A few months ago, for a joke, I set up a Facebook group called ‘Climate change denial is a mental disorder’. It’s a satirical campaigning hub for people who think that climate change denial should be recognised as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association, and that its sufferers – who probably engage in ‘regular chanting and intensive brainwashing sessions in cult-like surroundings’ – should be offered ‘eco-lobotomies’ to remove ‘the denying part of their brain’. The group now has 42 members. Yes, some have signed up because they get the joke, but others are serious subscribers to the denial-as-insanity idea. ‘Thank God I’ve found this group’, says one new member, who is sick of other Facebook groups being ‘hijacked’ by unhinged eco-sceptics.
The idea that ‘climate change denial’ is a psychological disorder – the product of a spiteful, wilful or simply in-built neural inability to face up to the catastrophe of global warming – is becoming more and more popular amongst green-leaning activists and academics. And nothing better sums up the elitism and authoritarianism of the environmentalist lobby than its psychologisation of dissent. The labelling of any criticism of the politics of global warming, first as ‘denial’, and now as evidence of mass psychological instability, is an attempt to write off all critics and sceptics as deranged, and to lay the ground for inevitable authoritarian solutions to the problem of climate change. Historically, only the most illiberal and misanthropic regimes have treated disagreement and debate as signs of mental ill-health.
This weekend, the University of West England is hosting a major conference on climate change denial. Strikingly, it’s being organised by the university’s Centre for Psycho-Social Studies. It will be a gathering of those from the top of society – ‘psychotherapists, social researchers, climate change activists, eco-psychologists’ – who will analyse those at the bottom of society, as if we were so many flitting, irrational amoeba under an eco-microscope. The organisers say the conference will explore how ‘denial’ is a product of both ‘addiction and consumption’ and is the ‘consequence of living in a perverse culture which encourages collusion, complacency and irresponsibility’ (1). It is a testament to the dumbed-down, debate-phobic nature of the modern academy that a conference is being held not to explore ideas – to interrogate, analyse and fight over them – but to tag them as perverse.
Leading green writers have welcomed the West England get-together to study the denying masses. One eco-columnist says the conference might generate ideas for dealing with those who are ‘pathologically’ opposed to the environmental movement (pathology, according to my OED, is the study of ‘morbid or abnormal mental or moral conditions’) (2). Environmentalists recognise the inherent elitism of saying that, while they brave few can see things clearly, the rest of us are somehow disordered (greens are the ‘watchful ones amongst the slaves’, according to one environmentalist writer); yet they seem unashamed. The eco-columnist says this weekend’s conference will be useful because where ‘mainstream politics now largely “gets” environmentalism’, there is still a sceptical mass, ‘a baying and growing crowd, largely consisting of people resistant to the prospect of ever having to alter their lifestyles’. Apparently this crowd ‘gathers to hurl invective’ at environmentalist ideas, such as recycling and low-energy lightbulbs (3).
In a sense, this vision of elite, brainy environmentalists on one side and a baying, insult-hurling crowd on the other speaks, however accidentally and however crudely, to an underlying truth: environmentalism remains a largely elitist project, beloved of politicians, priests and prudes keen to control people’s behaviour and curb our excessive lifestyles, and it rubs many ‘ordinary people’ up the wrong way. Of course much of the public goes along with the environmentalist ethos, bowing to the central idea that mankind is destructive and observing such rituals as sorting their rubbish, but they do so half-heartedly, recognising that, fundamentally, greens’ anti-consumerist, anti-reproduction, anti-travel arguments run counter to their own personal aspirations. Yet rather than recognise this frequently hidden divide between the green elite and the ‘baying crowd’ as one built on differences of opinion, on clashing aspirations, even on rational assessments by sections of the public that recycling is a waste of time, increasingly environmentalists pathologise it, turning it into evidence of their wisdom in contrast to the public’s mental instability.
University departments, serious authors, think-tanks and radical activists are embracing the ‘psychological disorder’ view of climate change scepticism. At Columbia University in New York, the Global Roundtable on Public Attitudes to Climate Change studies the ‘completely baffling’ response of the public to the threat of climate change, exploring why the public has been ‘so slow to act’ despite the ‘extraordinary information’ provided by scientists. Apparently, our slack response is partly a result of our brain’s inability to assess ‘pallid statistical information’ in the face of fear (4). The Ecologist magazine also talks about the ‘psychology of climate change denial’ and says the majority of people (excluding those ‘handfuls of people who have already decided to stop being passive bystanders’: the green elite again) have responded to warnings of global warming by sinking into ‘self-deception and mass denial’ (5). An online magazine called Climate Change Denial is dedicated to analysing the public’s ‘weird and disturbed’ response to climate change (6).
John Naish, the celebrated author of the anti-consumerism treatise Enough!, says our consumerist behaviour, with its promise of ‘ecological disaster’, ultimately springs from the fact that we’re all using the ‘wrong brain’. Our culture, all those flashy ads and temptations to buy, buy, buy and be fat and happy, is aimed at stimulating our ‘primordial instinct’, our ‘reptilian brain, which is responsible for arousal, basic life functions and sex’, says Naish. It neglects and makes lazy our ‘neocortex, the intelligent brain we evolved in the Pleicestocene era’. In short, we’re behaving like animals rather than intelligent beings; indeed, says Naish, our consumer culture is sending us ‘knuckle-dragging into ecological disaster’ (7). In a less hysterical and monkey-obsessed fashion, Al Gore, the king of climate change activism, says the media are warping people’s minds and actively encouraging thoughtlessness and climate change denial, giving rise to a public response to ecological disaster that is not ‘modulated by logic, reason or reflective thought’ (8).
The labelling of those who question certain scientific ideas or green ways of life as ‘deniers’, ‘addicts’ and ‘reptiles’ with a ‘baffling’ inability to understand The Science and act accordingly has a deeply censorious bent. If ‘climate change denial’ is a form of mass denial and self-deception, a fundamentally psychological disorder, then there is no need to engage in a meaningful public debate; instead people just need to be treated. Thus the Ecologist says ‘denial cannot simply be countered with information’; indeed there is apparently ‘plentiful historical evidence that increased information may even intensify denial’ (9). The respected British think-tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research, goes so far as to insist that ‘the task of climate change agencies is not to persuade by rational argument but in effect to develop and nurture a new “common sense”’ (10). This is the logical conclusion to treating disagreement as ‘denial’ and dissent as a ‘disorder’: no debate, no real information, just an insidious demand to change The Culture in order to relax the wrong side of our brains or to inject us with a new commonsensical outlook.
The psychologisation of climate change denial – even the very use of that term: denial – reveals how utterly aloof and cut off are the environmental elitists from mass society. They cannot comprehend, indeed are ‘baffled’ by, our everyday behaviour, our desire to have families, our resistance to hectoring, our dream of being wealthier, better travelled, our hopes of living life to the full. For them, such behaviour is irresponsible and it runs counter to the ‘extraordinary information’ provided by scientists. They seriously expect people to make life decisions on the basis of pie charts and graphs drawn up in laboratories in Switzerland, rather than on the basis of what they and their families need and, yes, what they want. That the green lobby is so perturbed by our failure to act in accordance with scientific findings shows the extent to which, for them, The Science is a new gospel truth and religious-style guide to life, and anyone who disobeys it is a sinner, heretic or deranged individual, a moral leper of the twenty-first century.
Psychologising dissent, and refusing to recognise, much less engage with, the substance of people’s disagreements – their political objections, their rational criticisms, their desire to do things differently – is the hallmark of authoritarian regimes. In the Soviet Union, outspoken critics of the ruling party were frequently tagged as mentally disordered and faced, as one Soviet dissident described it, ‘political exile to mental institutions’ (11). There they would be treated with narcotics, tranquillisers and even electric shock therapy. In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, O’Brien, the torturer in Room 101, offers to cure our hero Winston Smith of his anti-party thinking. ‘You are mentally deranged!’ he tells him. Today the word ‘Orwellian’ is massively overused, to describe everything from fingerprint library cards to supermarket loyalty cards, but treating your dissenters as deranged? That really is Orwellian, and we should declare permanent war against it.
Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked. Visit his website here. His satire on the green movement – Can I Recycle My Granny and 39 Other Eco-Dilemmas – is published by Hodder & Stoughton in October. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).)
“The idea that ‘climate change denial’ is a psychological disorder…”
The press release from the University of West England doesn’t actually label climate change denial as a mental disorder, rather as a subject for discussion.
That aside, I’m confused. Just a couple of weeks ago, the thread “The madness is about to begin” contained a number of claims about the madness and insanity of AGW and AGWers.
If it’s OK to label AGWers as mad, why is it not OK to label AGW sceptics as mad?
Also, I don’t believe that this casting of people who don’t “believe in” global warming is meant so much as an insult to “skeptics” so much as it is meant as a mechanism for keeping their “believers” in the fold. It is basically saying that if you change your mind and “question the models” then you are going crazy.
I think this is so because calling people who aren’t drinking your kool-aid “crazy” is generally dismissed by those people. It doesn’t carry any weight with anyone except the “believers” who will respond with vigorous head nodding at the notion that those other people are nuts. So I believe it is more aimed at getting an affirmative reaction from fellow believers than in getting any kind of results from people on the opposite side of the debate as comments like that would likely be dismissed immediately by the other side as childish mudslinging.
I get upset when I am accused of denying climate change. Naturally we ALL (here) accept climate change.
The frustrating irony is that the warmers can’t accept that it is has always changed and always will change. THEY are the deniers. They deny the MWP. They deny there was unimaginable warming and melting when the Laurentide and Cordilleran Ice Sheets melted in a mere 90 centuries. They deny that the slight warming of the past century is rather unremarkable. They deny warmer periods clearly proven 7000 years ago.
I worry a LOT about my grandkids and their future. I worry they are being brainwashed in the school system. God forbid it will indeed take a mini ice age (at our peril) to get the attention of the masses. Right now that does seem to be the only solution to the maddness that had befallen the Earth.
These are sad times. I take solace that there are sane people and many post here. ☺
“Conference labels skeptics as having mental disorder” That’s okay- the feeling is mutual. But at least I don’t go around believing that I can control the weather.
Ye stubborn deniers remember this!:
“The dictator State has one great advantage over bourgeois reason: along with the individual it swallows up his religious forces. The State has taken the place of God; that is why, seen from this angle, the socialist dictatorships are religions and State slavery is a form of worship. But the religious function cannot be dislocated and falsified in this way without giving rise to secret doubts, which are immediately repressed so as to avoid conflict with the prevailing trend towards mass-mindedness. The result, as always in such cases, is overcompensation in the form of fanaticism, which in its turn is used as a weapon for stamping out the least flicker of opposition. Free opinion is stifled and moral decision ruthlessly suppressed, on the plea that the end justifies the means, even the vilest. The policy of the State is exalted to a creed, the leader or party boss becomes a demigod beyond good and evil, and his votaries are honored as heroes, martyrs, apostles, missionaries. There is only one truth and beside it no other. It is sacrosanct and above criticism. Anyone who thinks differently is a heretic, who, as we know from history, is threatened with all manner of unpleasant things. Only the party boss, who holds the political power in his hands, can interpret the State doctrine authentically, and he does so just as suits him.”
C.G.Jung: “The Undiscovered Self”
I find it odd that Jeremiah Wright , Obama’s former minister, is sounding like the sane person lately:
Speaking in a brief interview with The Associated Press before giving a speech at a civil rights landmark, Wright smiled at the mention of the name of the nation’s first black president.
“He’s like any other president,” Wright said. “He’s a politician and he’s got to do what politicians do.”
“Barack’s name ain’t Jesus. Barack ain’t gonna improve your child’s reading score. There are things we’ve got to do on our own,” he said.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hCbWpXDiB0qYHS35YsaG4Ar1KAmQD96OA2180
Wait a second here. The author of the blog sets up a joke blog about skeptics being nuts, then when a few fanatic AGW people join it all AGW believers are tarred with the same brush.
I’m a skeptic and really resent the AGWers denilist are flat earthers accusations, etc… But this seems to me stooping to at least their level.
Does anybody here actually believe that many? most? more that a tiny few? AGW believers think skeptics are nuts?
Kind of on this topic, I had my own musings over at WhenWeAreQueen, about the similarities between psychiatry and climate science.
After a decade spent in the company of neurologists and psychiatrists and a briefer, but equally intense inquiry into climate science, I’ve decided I can safely make this sweepingingly general analogy: climate is like the human mind. And to the extent that we can claim to know anything about either, we should make our assertions with a hefty dose of humility.
If all you data-driven, detail-oriented, anal-retentive types here can stand it, please visit. I’d love your scientists’ view of my perceptions. :+)
This topic reminds me of this segment from the Warm Words document, the product of a UK think tank friendly to the current government.
http://www.ippr.org.uk/ecomm/files/warm_words.pdf
Ultimately, positive climate behaviours need to be approached in the same way as marketeers approach acts of buying and consuming. This is the relevant context for climate change communications in the UK today – not the increasingly residual models of public service or campaigning communications. It amounts to treating climate-friendly activity as a brand that can be sold. This is, we believe, the route to mass behaviour change.
And those that cannot be suckered by such methods will be labelled using pejorative terms and described as suffering from mental disorders.
The text sample can be found on page nine of the document, plenty of other gems and insights into the organisation behind the MSM portrayal of AGW.
JohnK,
I look at the results of the joke blog more as a symptom of what’s happening to scientific debate, rather than something typical of all AGW believers.
Of course the AGW side doesn’t all think like that. But the fact that accusations of mental derangement have often been used in the past by dictators to silence their opposition gives one pause, don’t you think?
I haven’t noticed the pro-AGW side telling their more extreme brethren that they are crossing the line. Have you? Silence is often concurrence.
Craig Loehle (10:26:32) said :
I believe part of the problem is the increased isolation of urban populations from nature. They imagine that food comes from grocery stores, and gasoline from the gas station, and don’t see how dirty and dusty and smelly any true natural resource extraction is. Thus people say we should just stop cutting trees, as if this would have no consequences. Or try to stop all oil extraction activities, as if it was something we don’t really need.
YES YES YES
I have been in oil & gas for almost 30 years (just got my 16th U S Patent, so I am only middling-creative in this field), and EVERY year for the last 30, woosie urbanites on both left and right coasts have excoriated me and my colleagues as cirminals, nazis, and worse. NOBODY I mean NOBODY bothers to learn the truth about this business. Not doctors, not lawyers, not indian chiefs, NOBODY.
Here are the QUICK facts: in the last decade, the US oil & gas industry has, mostly through 2 relatively new techniques (horizontal drilling and staged fracturing) figured-out how to unlock natural gas from “tight shales” which are ABUNDANT in this country. Please Google “tight shales” or “Barnett shale” or “Haynesville shale” or even “Marcellus shale”. We won’t mention the Bakken shale, as it is largely an oil province, and mostly because I’m never sure how to spell it.
Ironically this set of techniques has brought so much nat gas to market so quickly that the price has PLUMMETED; enough that it’s generally not economical to bring LNG tankers to the US (unless it’s otherwise “stranded gas” like from Trinidad).
You want to know the secret to (a) reducing carbon emissions (b) reducing foreign oil imports (c) expanding blue color jobs like crazy and (d) not killing a bunch or birds, bats, and Teddy Kennedy’s ocean view? Drill like crazy for tight shale gas.
Mandate all public vehicles (buses, postal vehicles, even taxis) be phased onto CNG (as is reguired in Alberta) ASAP,
Remove restrictions on nat gas drilling and laying pipelines to get it to market. (especially restrict TORT lawsuits to reasonable amounts so producers can quantify the “sovereign risk”), and
DROP subsidies on corn ethanol like a hot potato(e) (apologies to Dan Quail), and invest the same money in Nat Gas filling station credits.
Don’t think we got enough tight shale gas to pull this off? The CEO of Chesapeake thinks that the Haynesville shale may be the largest natural gas field EVER discovered [that includes Bahrain; google Bahrain gas while you’re at it]. And we haven’t even well delineated the Marcellus yet; my belief is that it may be bigger still; AND right down the road from the biggest gas market in the country.
Know all those tool-and-die makers in and around Detroit? Make natural gas development a top priority in this country, and we can use EVERY ONE OF THEM.
They may have to reacquainted to busting their butts (Texas is a “right to work” state; we don’t care what color or religion or where you came from, as long as you’re a “good hand” who works his butt off), but we COULD fix all these issues at once, provided Washington takes it’s collective head out of wherever it’s been stuck for the last 30 years.
There, now you know. Go Google Tight Shale.
You WILL NOT hear this from “environmentalists” or “greens” because (a) they aren’t mechanical or chemical or petroleum engineers, and emphatically don’t “get” thermodynamics and (b) fundamentally, they just want fewer people around, all with less money; a return to a natural utopia that never existed (which is why, parenthetically, I hate Renaissance Festivals; where’s the cholera? The graveyards full of mothers who died in childbirth?? Remember “nasty, brutish and short?” It SUCKED to be alive then, but I guess folks don’t want to hear, like, true stuff.)
One more parenthetical comment: has anyone ever wondered why the Federal government (even Bush’s administration) doesn’t consult the Energy business about “The Energy Crisis”, such as it is?? Wouldn’t that make sense?.
And a little aperatif: (one more Thing to Chew On): Every single petroleum engineer I have met in the last 30 years favors nuclear power. Every single one. Period.
Glen Beck said that it might be time for the central US to wall off the east and west coast and let the real America take over the center. I think he was joking but…..
Holy-moley !!!!
I am nuts!!!! lol
sarc/off
hareynolds
To support you practical reality, please see:
Matt Simmons’ Video on Oil and Gas Markets http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5130
A major portion of the oil and gas skilled labor will be retiring in the near future – right when needed to manage the massive increase needed to provide alternative fuels needed to manage Peak Oil.
Matthew R. Simmons speeches & Papers
http://www.simmonsco-intl.com/research.aspx?Type=msspeeches
The Oil And Gas System Is Sick The Commercial Club of Boston, February 11, 2009
In other words, the present economy is doing very well right now, compared to what is coming!
““He’s like any other president,” Wright said. “He’s a politician and he’s got to do what politicians do.”
Politicians are liars, liars are schmucks, therefore…Obama is a schmuck.
Why did I feel uncomfortable calling him that? Is something subliminal being done to me?
Here’s a tip to retain your sanity when the medical institutions have decalred your thoughts an illness:
Repeat the mantra over and over:
Coal is 100% natural
Coal is 100% organic
Coal produces plant food
The definition of fundamentalism is “having your conclusions set in concrete before entering the dialogue”
hareynolds @15:14:03
I love your rant. Excellent; I am in total agreement with you on many things. Not so sure about using CNG for driving cars.
BTW Do you work for T Boone Pickens? Just joking. He’s all in favor of Al Gore and climate hysteria as, for some reason, NG, but not LNG, has got a free pass from the enviro-fascists, … and he’s ready to produce gazillions of dollars of it.
‘Rhys Jaggar (08:00:17) :
The problem with this whole issue is that you have two sides who each have ulterior motives – the same one actually. The acquisition and maintenance of power.
The ‘greens’ were all untrained in science or scientists living off an ever-growing gravy train.
The ‘deniers’ were initially in the oil camp, who saw a threat to their profits and power base….’
Could I just say that I’ve always been a ‘denier’ but it has nothing to do with oil and everything to do with reason. I’m old enough to remember the global cooling scare of the 1970s as well as the never-ending series of moral panics that have characterised the past 20 years – AIDS, SARS, Bird Flu, Y2K, Human Variant CJD , BSE etc. I’ve also lived long enough to have been told that almost everything I eat and drink is either good for me or killing me according to whoever is paying the research budget. For years, I’ve been told that my safe alcohol consumption is 21 units per week only to find out 12 months ago that there was no scientific basis for the figure – it had been plucked out of the air.
In short, I’ve learned not to automatically believe everything I’m told – I’m naturally sceptical especially where politicians are involved. I’m particularly sceptical when the evidence is missing or unsubstantiated as it is for AGW. I know a lot less about science than many who contribute to this site but I do know that the only useful science is evidence-based, naturally sceptical and never settled. So please don’t tell me that I’m motivated by profits or power (if only..).
I certainly agree with you about the need to diversify on energy sources but that’s a political rather than an environmental argument. It’s also an argument for well-funded, good science because it’s pretty obvious that it’s not going to happen otherwise.
Indeed, I fail to understand why, on the present evidence, the green movement is so happy to see scant resources being wasted on propagating the AGW myth instead of being used to develop new energy technologies. And they think I’m deranged…
Brendan H. wrote:
“If it’s OK to label AGWers as mad, why is it not OK to label AGW sceptics as mad?”
Go right ahead–that’s half the fun of these intellectual dust-ups: gazing intently with ones X-ray eyes into the other blockhead’s noggin and reporting ones findings to ones allies. If a bunch of greenies want to hold a conference devoted to knowingly tapping their temples and rolling their eyes while pointing at a cartoon-figure villain, I’m OK with it. Personally, I would actually encourage this sort of conference, because video-snips from it can be obtained to use as mockery of the movement’s scientistic pretensions five or ten years down the road.
But I can understand why some posters on this site object more strenuously to what’s going on. I suspect they don’t–unlike me–view the social sciences that are involved in sponsoring the conference as 80% baloney and dismissible from the get-go, and they’re upset that their reputations for seriousness is being tainted by the enviros’ craziness. And/or they’re aggravated at the warmers for seeking to obtain a semi-official Diagnosis (from sciences they respect) that cool-headedness = craziness, in order to marginalize those who scoff at CAGW in the eyes of the polished pebbles in the MSM. This attempt to manipulate public perception and evade debate is obviously what Brendan O’Neill was getting at in the article atop this thread:
“Nothing better sums up the elitism and authoritarianism of the environmentalist lobby than its psychologisation of dissent. The labelling of any criticism of the politics of global warming, first as ‘denial’, and now as evidence of mass psychological instability, is an attempt to write off all critics and sceptics as deranged, and to lay the ground for inevitable authoritarian solutions to the problem of climate change. Historically, only the most illiberal and misanthropic regimes have treated disagreement and debate as signs of mental ill-health.
“This weekend, the University of West England is hosting a major conference on climate change denial. Strikingly, it’s being organised by the university’s Centre for Psycho-Social Studies. It will be a gathering of those from the top of society – ‘psychotherapists, social researchers, climate change activists, eco-psychologists’ – who will analyse those at the bottom of society, as if we were so many flitting, irrational amoeba under an eco-microscope. … Leading green writers have welcomed the West England get-together to study the denying masses.”
hareynolds (15:14:03) :
I was with you all the way up until the last, where nuclear power was endorsed. Sorry, that power source is too expensive, and creates a lasting legacy of toxics.
See This Link and
See This Link
Any U.S. utility that builds a new nuclear power plant will undergo the death spiral in power rates: Build a nuke, increase the power rates, customers go off-line by building cogen, PUC allows another rate hike to increase revenue to utility, more customers go off-line as their cogen projects become attractive. The ones hurt the most in the nuclear death spiral are the poor, and elderly on fixed incomes who cannot afford to install their own cogen power.
The oil and gas industry is partly to blame for their bad reputation by not doing more to educate and counter the mass media’s reports.
The people may learn, someday, when the lights go out and it gets cold. Or, when the lights go out and the A/C does not work.
Smokey wrote:
“I haven’t noticed the pro-AGW side telling their more extreme brethren that they are crossing the line. Have you? Silence is often concurrence.”
Well actually there was that woman from the Met Office about whom there was a thread a few weeks ago, plus another Warmer chimed in similarly about a week later.
JohnK (14:59:45) :
“Does anybody here actually believe that many? most? more that a tiny few? AGW believers think skeptics are nuts?:
AGW has actually become almost like a religion. There are believers who understand little about the science but accept it as a matter of faith. As with all religions, only the extremists or fundamentalists become problems. They are extremely intolerant of other views, as are the religious extremists on the christian right. Not everyone on the christian right is an extremist, just as not all AGW believers are extremists or fundamentalists on the issue. Most just have not questioned what they are told or do not have the time or education to look into it for themselves, and besides, it makes people feel good about giving up some stuff (sacrifice) for the greater good (which they assume to be true).
In Germany, before WW I, the Jewish people were well tolerated. After a big war, financial turmoil, a guy like Hitler was able to rally the people against a common enemy, Communists and Jews. That is an extreme example, but do not overlook peoples innate desire to have a common enemy to unite them, especially in times of distress, rational or not, and the political leaders exploit this.
AGW is a tool of a religous movement disguised as science where man is the enemy (sinner) and must be controlled to save Mother Earth (Goddess). Those who question the high priests (scientists) of this religion have chosen to be on the dark side (traditional religions would say we have chosen Satan) and must be punished. As Gorbachev said, there is a new 10 commandments out there .
This is not about science for the strongest supporters of AGW. This is not to say there is not a serious and honest scientific debate about CO2, especially feedbacks and climate sensitivity, but like Galileo, you have to watch out for those who say the science is settled, and scientists who seek government funding for research funding knows what is popular, and what is not.
There have even been calls to make skepticism illegal and lump it with holocaust denial.
And psychiatrists, given their dependence on government and the foundations who make research grants and provide endowments are not immune to pressures. Calling skepticism a mental disease also profits their profession since the Mental Health Parity Act passed last year means there are more dollars available for mental health professionals.
Of course, it’s not all about greed and power/control. There is an argument that our financial system needs a war subtitute to survive, or we need to have more wars, one or the other. So we fight an imaginary war with Climate Change, much less bloody than another World War. Unfortunately, this prevents discussion of the other option, which is changing to a financial system that does not depend on wars (imaginary or otherwise) to survive.
Fred Gams (21:19:34) :
I have to pinch myself these days to make sure I’m not having a nightmare. Really, WTF is going on with these people?
Well… Carl Gustav Jung (nice quote by the way Adolfo, Reich was one of Jung’s students) would have said it was to do with the psychology of transference.
By projecting the discomfort of the bad fit of their preferred theory/dogma to reality onto the discord of those holding the skeptical view, the hotheads feel empowered to cast them in the role of social misfits who must be cut asunder from the risk of tainting the perception of the unaware public. Formerly, the label of heretic was useful, but nowadays, a caring patrimony towards the mentally unstable is far more PC.
:Alan (05:26:18) said:
Misanthropy is the new racism. Just insert ‘brown’ in front of the ‘people’ word in some of those quotes above.
Quite the opposite. It’s the Europeans and North Americans, that are the worst carbon sinners and whose procreation is therefore the most damaging in the eyes of green Neomalthusians.
Didn’t you read about the official admonishing of Britons to think of Gaia first before deciding on the number of their children? Didn’t you read about the huuuuge carbon footprint of European babies and how it would be better for the planet when Europeans would assuage their parental instincts by adopting Third World orphans instead having their own lil’uns?