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.
Conservatives (and scientists) think, liberals feel. Or in Lakoff’s terms, believe. Right at the moment I believe the professor is pretty darn funny.
Jim Turner (10:56:31) :
How come people that believe in government control and regulation are called ‘liberals’?
Liberalism and its ideas of government control, centralized economy, etc. predated Marxism:
http://science.jrank.org/pages/8758/Communism-in-Europe-Karl-Marx-Origins-Modern-Communism.html
I find it amusing how “scholars” like Lakoff continually to try and make a it a partisan issue, which it should not be.
It should be about finding the truth.
Most people I talk to are a combination of the two [fiscally more conservative but socially more liberal]….and so they [we] are like….”who the hell is this guy talking about??
Regardless, CAGW skeptics run the full range of political persuasions, so it is a moot point.
Also, it would seem that this “study” is the big fat pot calling the kettle black if there ever was one.
Sure there is cognitive dissonance on all sides. It is endemic to the human condition, unfortunately.
However, it just so happens to be more manifest the on the “my mind is made up the science is settled – CAGW is real – we are all doomed” side of the debate!
When I hear people like Lakoff spouting off academic nonsense like this [or at least the nonsense part is the partisan political part] I just have to laugh and say out loud:
“How ——- stupid does he think we are??”
I don’t like to see anyone’s personal demise….but I personally will enjoy with GREAT pleasure watching the washed-up, tired, dishonest CAGW house of cards collapse over the next few years.
Next!
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Steve Goddard said:
“…polar sea ice hasn’t changed and is right at normal.”
Really Steve? And here we were all just debating the cause of the changes in arctic ice, with many AGW skeptics saying it is ALL the wind, and now, you’ve clarified it for us…there ARE no changes in polar ice! Wow, I guess decline in year-to-year arctic sea ice, where it hasn’t gone into a positive anomaly condition since 2004 is just an ilusion?
Of course, we must remember that AGW skeptics do have different ways of looking at the world (perhaps due to their brains) :), and so they need to just keep reminding those who think AGWT might just be correct that “these are not the droids you’re looking for…” and “polar sea ice hasn’t changed and is right at normal…”
I think they are just setting the scene for brainwashing/re-education of non-believers.
You know, the sort of thing that happened in China and Iran. The softly softly approach of trying to “influence” thinking through propraganda has obviously failed and now they need to condition us more directly. To do that we must be declared “abnormal” and “different” will do for a start. By the time tthey get through deciding who is “sane” and who is not legislation to adress the problem will be a cinch.
It isn’t all that hard a step to take. Just look back in history at the eugenics programs in, wait for it, California… the “re-education” of native populations in the US and Australia, the camps for “dissidents” in Russia and you’ll get the idea. We don’t have to go back to the middle ages, just a decade or two or three.
What’s the next step? Unenvironmntal activities committees?
Damn. I thought my opinions on scientific subjects were formed by a hard science education to PhD level and 30 years professional experience in Science and Technology. Thanks to Prof Fako I now realise that my distrust in AGW came not from gradual disillusion as learnt more about the subject while a volunteer for a Green organisation, but because I must be some kind of Nazi.
Sounds like junk science trying to back up junk science.
Oh, this is wonderful. What a relief! Since my brain is to blame for my doubts about catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, surely they can come up with a drug to help cure me of my mental illness. Hey, and since most of the people I know tend to agree with me on CAGW, maybe they could just put the medicine in our drinking water.
Blame it all on the brain. So, my lack of self-control, my anxieties, my addictions, my restlessness, my depression (none of which I really have), and now my conservatism are all blamed on the brain.
Veronica (England) (09:44:13) : “What if there was a left-wing, pinko bleeding-heart liberal who became a sceptic because she is a scientist and tends to try to understand the data rather than worry how she feels about global warming?
Does that person smash the paradigm or should she be committed to a mental insitution for some kind of split personality disorder? I need to know!”
In the Soviet Union, dissidents were committed to mental institutions, because only the “insane” would question “the system”. Talk about the inmates running the asylum! Kind of like UC Berkeley…
What a maroon.
Lakoff has probably read half a dozen warmist books and the Wikipedia site, read several “How to Talk to a Skeptic” compilations, followed RC’s strawman knockdowns and Romm’s blog, attended several warmist lectures, talked to several warmist colleagues, and swallowed the smears of the warmists (as being cranks or hired guns). I.e., he’s read material where the warmists get the last word. I doubt that he’s spent much time looking deeply into what the skeptics say, but mostly at what the warmists say the skeptics say.
This condescension reminds me of the way that liberals treated critics of fluoridation, etc. back when.
They usually begin by using gold to buy….and, as history shows, end by using lead for convincing the non believers
So much vitriol, so much emotion, this comments thread itself is an argument supporting Lakoff.
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.
Being a cognitive conservative and a geologist and therefore a real scientist as opposed to being a ‘cognitive scientist’, whatever that might mean, I prefer:
A full bottle in front of me, to
A full frontal lobotomy.
Professors of dubious science concepts from left leaning centres of learning presumably prefer the latter.
I smell bullshit!
I could be wrong, but I thought one aspect of the original “liberal” philosophers thinking was the liberty of the individual. What I see going on in the community that calls themselves “liberal” today seems to care not a whit for individuals having the right or the ability to think, evaluate and decide for themselves.
Chad Woodburn (11:45:19) : All the symptoms you just mentioned seem those of lack of kool-aid drinking. ☺
Uhuh … is this the kind of ‘Liberal open mindedness’ that makes people want to be controlled by an all-powerful state machine? That open, eh?
Funny, as soon as I heard a decade or more ago that the ‘global warming’ models could not account for ice ages, or the Viking settlements in Greenland, I guessed they were on the wrong track. Then when it became clear that the all this ‘climate change’ hype was being put to the service of a political agenda of tax and control, I knew the science was being skewed by an agenda. And when I found out that graduate students in the sciences were afraid to express skepticism, I knew for certain that ‘global warming’ had become the focus of a dangerous ideological orthodoxy.
Lakoff says we should “Look seriously at the science.” And indeed we should, particularly when that science is being subsumed to a political ideology and demanding unquestioning belief of its adherents. Lakoff’s claim that ‘liberals’ are more ‘open-minded’ is absurd on its face.
/Mr Lynn
I used to be a fan of Lakoff. I think he doesn’t realize he’s making himself look stupid and probably hasn’t looked into the details of the issue much. There are many people in this category who should learn to keep their mouths shut until they know more about what they are talking about.
To paraphase: I am right, and people like me are really cool People that disagree with me are wrong, and must be mentally deranged. I am a scientist, therefore everything I say is science. Therefore if you disagree with me you must not be a scientist. With logic like that, is he a fellow of the Royal Society? He could have lead the science review. “A few crazy people have suggested the science is not up to scratch. I have reviewed my thoughts on the subject, and have come to the conclusion that they must be mad. Science is what I say it is, I say this is science.” As far as the calibre of the most eminent scientists is concerned, it really is worse than we thought. Politicians in white coats seems like a more appropriate description.
As one who has been the victim of a Dunning-Kruger social science attack (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect) which purports to demonstrate that skeptics like me increase their sense of certainty the less they know about something, I have to say I find this man’s arguments idiotic.
Equally idiotic are the responses by many of the commenters who take a page from their opponents and isist that the divide here is a political one: liberals are close-minded numbskulls; they, conservatives, are wise.
Speaking as a skeptical and open-minded liberal, I have to say that the problem with this man is not his politics, but that he is an example of the worst that Academe has to offer.
A professor from Berkeley is lecturing on open-mindedness? That’s funny.
Do you think he’d sit down with this bubba from Texas and listen to me for more than a minute before interrupting and telling me I’m wrong (the subject doesn’t matter)? 30 seconds?
@ur momisugly HeavyD (11:26:02) : Clearly earthquakes are caused by oil drilling. So we have anthropogenic earthquakes. I’m sure there’s a suitable graph to demonstrate that earthquakes have sharply risen in the 20th and 21st century. We must stop drilling for oil lest the plates shift back to their original position and we are all forced to live in close proximity with one another. Algore again brings us the inconvenient whatever:
http://www.algore.org/blog/ldavis48413_hotmail_com/oil_drilling_causing_more_earthquakes_and_possible_increase_plate_tecto
actuator (11:53:56) :
“I could be wrong, but I thought one aspect of the original “liberal” philosophers thinking was the liberty of the individual. What I see going on in the community that calls themselves “liberal” today seems to care not a whit for individuals having the right or the ability to think, evaluate and decide for themselves.”
No, actuator, you are not wrong. Classical Liberalism was a late 18th early 19th Century movement based on the philososphy of Utilitarianism (“the greatest good for the greatest number”) which held that people were quite capable of deciding for themselves what was good for them. They were much more akin to modern conservatives and libertarians than anything else. Oddly enough, John Stuart Mill, a staunch advocate of free market capitalism, and Robert Owen, the “Father of Modern Socialism”, both emerged from the movement.
The exploitation or distortion of psychological concepts for political propaganda has generally favored the left. Conservatives are slandered as dogmatists, anal, infantile, racists, etc. Now, there is at least some academic pushback, as the book by Lyle Rossiter shows:
http://www.amazon.com/Liberal-Mind-Psychological-Political-Madness/dp/097795630X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1269366729&sr=8-1
Probably the simple ‘follow-the-money’ aspects explains most of the AGW politics. Still, the more extreme ideas and opinions that are collected at the green-agenda website, which is ‘up’ at the moment, probably do reflect psychological effects. If there is a generation of Dalton or Maunder cooling, as now seems likely, it will be fun to see how long they hold out, and how long the US liberal media maintains the party line.