From CNSNews.com – Proponents of human-caused global warming claim that “cognitive” brain function prevents conservatives from accepting the science that says “climate change” is an imminent threat to planet Earth and its inhabitants.
George Lakoff, a professor of cognitive science and linguistics at the University of California-Berkeley and author of the book “The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist’s Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics,” says his scientific research shows that how one perceives the world depends on one’s bodily experience and how one functions in the everyday world. Reason is shaped by the body, he says.
Lakoff told CNSNews.com that “metaphors” shape a person’s understanding of the world, along with one’s values and political beliefs — including what they think about global warming.
“It relates directly (to global warming) because conservatives tend to feel that the free market should be unregulated and (that) environmental regulations are immoral and wrong,” Lakoff said.
“And what they try to do is show that the science is wrong and that the argument is wrong, based on the science. So when it comes back to science, they try to debunk the science,” Lakoff said.
On the other hand, he added, liberals’ cognitive process allows them to be “open-minded.”
“Liberals say, ‘Look seriously at the science and look at whether people are going to be harmed or not and whether the world is going to be harmed,’” Lakoff said.
In a Feb. 23 report on National Public Radio, reporter Christopher Joyce began his story by stating that recent polls show that fewer Americans believe humans are making the planet dangerously warmer, despite “a raft” of contradictory reports.
“This puzzles many climate scientists, but not social scientists, whose research suggests that facts may not be as important as one’s beliefs,” Joyce said.
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Read the entire piece here
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The explanations are getting desperate. I wonder then how Dr. Lakoff explains people like myself, who once accepted the scientific arguments presented on global warming, but who now reject most of the hype and urgency attached to it? Believe it or not, in the early 90’s I used to be a global warming activist. But that’s another story.
Maybe the opposite is true. The agenders are just too “stoopid” to understand reality?
Here are left-leaning climate dissenters:
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=PressRoom.Speeches&ContentRecord_id=B87E3AAD-802A-23AD-4FC0-8E02C7BB8284
And here is Judith Curry known to be a believer in AGW:
“If you go back to the 1930s and ’40s, you see a similar bump in the temperature records. That was the bump that some of those climate scientists were trying to get rid of [in the temperature data], but it was a real bump, and I think it was associated with these ocean oscillation” – Judith Curry head of Georgia Tech – School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
http://discovermagazine.com/2010/apr/10-it.s-gettin-hot-in-here-big-battle-over-climate-science/
The explanations are getting desperate. I wonder then how Dr. Lakoff explains people like myself, who once accepted the scientific arguments presented on global warming, but who now reject most of the hype and urgency attached to it? Believe it or not, in the early 90’s I used to be a global warming activist. But that’s another story.
How anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of thermodynamics could believe the global warming “science” defies the imagination.
I was born and raised a liberal Democrat. I believed Paul Ehrlich. I planned my day around listening to NPRs Morning Edition and All Things Considered. I am probably one of the four people in the western world that voted for Jimmy Carter TWICE. (The second time it was just Jimmy, Rosalind, Jimmy’s Mother and me!)
First, I had a nagging feeling about liberals who would glorify Socialism/Communism. Advocates of those systems have murdered 10 to 20 times as many people as Adolph Hitler and the Nazis. I guess I’m old fashioned, but genocide is not excusable even if you are trying to make an omelet. http://www.conservapedia.com/Walter_Duranty
Then I caught NPR lying to me in a consistent way over several weeks. It was propaganda. So….I started reading more history and alternate sources of current news.
And the more I read, the more I found that I had been lied to. For example, my family came from California. (My Great Grandfather moved to the Santa Rosa area in 1849.) My mother hated Ronald Reagan because he closed the mental hospitals and put all of those unfortunate people on the street. (My aunt had problems and was one of those put out.) That caused the Homeless Problem. It was a cherished liberal shibboleth that Ronald Reagan was EVIL!
Some five years ago, someone repeated that trope to me. In context, it made me think: RR hadn’t been Governor for some 30 years at that point. If it was so horrible, why hadn’t the Democrats fixed it?? So, doing a little research, I found that that the ACLU had won a “Land Mark Case” for the mentally disadvantaged. The bottom line was that if a person had a mental disability that was treatable with chemicals, you couldn’t keep them in a hospital. Since some 80% to 90% were treatable, the ACLU forced the state to push them out on the street. RR only closed empty hospitals!
It is well that my mother passed on. It would have broken her heart to know that it was her support for liberal causes that put her sister on the street.
Now, I try to determine if something is only an opinion or is it actually based in fact. As the liberals are quick to say: “Question authority” (Only not theirs!).
Regards,
Steamboat Jack
Maybe well-respected members of the inner party can befriend each of us and eventually haul us in to be trained in doublethink with a machine attached to a dial so that our eyes can truly see 2+2=5.
Wait, that could never happen, right? 1984 was more than 15 years ago.
-Happy to be an Crimethink Person
++good to the WUWT team for all of your work getting the word out
Oh, I see. Environmentalists are equal to Übermensch. We all know the consequences.
Nothing is being said about what the real problem is. Many people have something called a mosaic mind. This means that the person divides their mind into an area for each subject. For that subject they apply a form of logic that only applies to that subject. The logic could be emotional or it could be real logic based on facts and history, This is how you can have a computer programmer that believes in global warming or that a genie will pop up and grant all their wishes.
The rest of us try to use one system of logic that applies to all the things we deal with in life.
Is a fragmented mind a more powerful mind or is it just schizophrenia.
Cognitively speaking, if we are 18 thousand years into an interglacial that typically lasts 15 to 20 thousand years pending a 100 thousand year ice age, then yes climate change is clearly a threat. But it ain’t global warming that’s going to be the problem in the long run. In fact, maybe we better slow down on the stuff that might cool us down no matter how insignificant.
This guy must be a conservative then, because he clearly has never looked at the science of global warming.
It sounds like, the way the article has been written, that it is the liberal mind that is open to and able to ask probing questions about the science and it is the conservative that has a mind set to not question and instead, believe. Am I the only one that sees the irony in this?
I’m a liberal (well, a socialist, if I’m honest) engineer.
I don’t see how that has anything to do with not trusting scientists who hide their data and methods from inspection.
Speaking of metaphors; isn’t “open-minded” a figure of speech sometimes meaning suggestible, unskeptical, or just plain gullible?
“Reason is shaped by the body”, he says.
OK.
I think Arnold Swarznegger (may his tribe increase) was once “Mr Universe”…
…whereas Steven Hawkings cannot, with all kindness be even considered as a candidate in such a contest.
Who has the best brain?
Who would present the best reasoned argument on just about anything?
“It relates directly (to global warming) because conservatives tend to feel that the free market should be unregulated and (that) environmental regulations are immoral and wrong,” Lakoff said.
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Yes, people committed to an ideology will tend to deny or dismiss information that suggests the ideology is flawed.
But this is nothing new.
The funny part is that most of the conservatives/ libertarians that I know are concerned about the enviroment. Emmission controls on vehicles, smokestacks, etc. are a good thing. Water and wastewater projects are important, and the quality standards of both of these has never been better. No one wants to live in/ breathe/ drink garbage.
My big concern, and what I believe should be our focus, is plate tectonics. It is a settled science, and earthquakes can be really destructive. Couple that with the fact that Los Angeles will be in Alaska in a million years or so and we face some serious trouble. Where is the geologic Al Gore who can rescue us from this potential disaster? Congress, in conjunction with the worlds best scientists, should figure out a way to mitigate this catastrophe.
“We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all before us, and with just as much apparent reason … On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us.”
Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1830 – Edinburgh Review.
I think Evan Sayet explained the problem with liberals very eloquently. How Liberals Think
Dr. Lackoff, tum podem extulit horridulum!
I am not a professor, but Lakoff’s presumption that man-made warming is 99.9999% proven and that disagreement with this theory belies a certain type of upbringing by an authoritarian father confirms my theory that liberal academics that accept every cocktail party theory as unassailable fact are without question victims of too early toilet training.
Don’t you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don’t you believe in telepathy? — in ancient astronauts? — in the Bermuda triangle? — in life after death?
No, I reply. No, no, no, no, and again no.
One person recently, goaded into desperation by the litany of unrelieved negation, burst out “Don’t you believe in anything?”
“Yes”, I said. “I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I’ll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.”
— Isaac Asimov
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Global Warming Crowd: I believe that a divinity school dropout and a man who got C’s in business school is a profound climate scientist.
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I think we have done a sufficient exposition on the brains of those who are open to the singularity of the naked assertion.
“liberals’ cognitive process allows them to be “open-minded.”
Funny, I’ve never met an open-minded liberal. That’s why, with a straight face, they’ll tell you that “climate change” will cause droughts and flooding all at the same time. Or, when they tell you they are absolutely sure there are no absolutes.
A blown toke from a chronic inhaler.
Slabadang (10:44:05) :
Lakoff hahahaha!
Hes is in person another proof of what happens with science when left wings becomes Professors.
I wonder what diagnos he gives.
Lindzen
Spencer
Singer
Pielke
Ball
Carter
Armstrong
McIntyre
Mcitirick
Christy
The man is an embarrassment for science! [snip]
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That’s not many people.
Do any scientific societies of standing dismiss the threat of CAGW?
As others have remarked, this guy says some fantastically stupid things. This one for a start:
“99.999 percent of the science is final” on global warming.
Clearly, no one can claim to be a scientist who says that. He has completely lost the plot. But, hey, this all comes out of his cranky ideas, such as the ’embodied mind’. He doesn’t believe in the empirical scientific method, nor the possibility of falsification. He teaches that falsifiability can never be established by any reasonable method that does not rely on human bias. He teaches that logic and mathematics is completely subjective and exists only in the flesh, that its only foundation is ‘meat’.
He teaches that liberals should change the way they use expressions so that they mean something different. For example, the concept of ‘tax relief’ should be semantically re-branded because it implies explicitly that taxes are something someone would want “relief” from.
Yeah, well in his Orwellian New World Order, I’d certainly want relief from the monstrosities he’d foist on society. The more I read about this guy, the more dangerous he appears. His views are a cancer in our society
If this is a brain disorder wouldn’t skeptics be covered by ADA? In addition, skeptics cannot be discriminated against and must be provided special accommodations in jobs and all other activities in society. We must stand up for our rights!