Richard North, of the EU Referendum, the only player in the map below to have three balls, points out that Profero has made an “update” on their website. But there’s no update to the hilariously flawed networking map they produced, at least that I can find.
A small group of dedicated people coming from a diverse range of positions and perspectives but working together as a loose federation held together by shared values and beliefs succeeded in accomplishing the most impressive PR coup of the 21st century.
“…by significantly influencing public perception of anthropogenic global warming by single-mindedly applying concerted and consistent pressure at critical junctures in the media ecology here in the UK and abroad.”
Update on the Oxfam online research project into climate change related conversation
Who we are & what we were commissioned by Oxfam to do
We are Unsimplify, a stand-alone company operating under the Profero umbrella, we’ve been working with Oxfam for a number of months on a project to assist them in helping to make sense of how the growth of online peer-to-peer news generation has and could in the future impact their campaigning activities.
We were commissioned by Oxfam to do this because they were looking for an approach that goes deeper than just monitoring and mapping online conversations – although this does form a part of what we do.
What we set out to do was to help Oxfam’s campaigns team make sense of key online conversations and news generators around climate change and international development issues and their dynamics in order that they might question, revise or support their existing mental models for campaigning and to support decision making and facilitate a culture of inquiry and curiosity amongst the campaign team.
If this sounds complex and challenging then that’s intentional because what Unsimplify does is complex, hence the name.
Putting The LeftFootForward piece into context
We’re really excited that people are taking an interest in what we do and hats off to LeftFootForward for getting the scoop on this piece of work but we’d like to clarify what’s being discussed (most of the conversations focus upon a visual representation of some of the key conversations in the form of a landscape map) as it should be understood in the context of an entire report (120 pages or so) which hasn’t been made public.
The report as a whole applies our own bespoke models and frameworks to both quantitative and qualitative data in order to bring to the surface complex dynamics and issues which would otherwise pass un-noticed if an automated technological monitoring solution had been used in isolation.
Why does this matter?
In a complex situation such as the one we were analysing, data alone won’t aid in making sense of what’s happening, but narratives, informed by data, mental models and assumptions, can.
For example, we didn’t examine the entire myriad of Facebook groups which have formed around climate change and international development issues because they were not significant in this context.
So, what’s the story then?
A small group of dedicated people coming from a diverse range of positions and perspectives but working together as a loose federation held together by shared values and beliefs succeeded in accomplishing the most impressive PR coup of the 21st century.
The climate change sceptics did this by significantly influencing public perception of anthropogenic global warming by single-mindedly applying concerted and consistent pressure at critical junctures in the media ecology here in the UK and abroad.
The map that’s being discussed outlines some of the key players and some of the dynamics at play in order to help create a meaningful narrative which captures the sense of what was happening and brings to the surface the key issues.
What happens next?
The ultimate goal of the project was to abstract from all the online noise a narrative and a working model for ‘next practice’ campaigning which would furnish Oxfam, and the progressive community in general, new insights and knowledge about how they might, in future, listen, respond and act into an increasingly complex and turbulent media ecology.
If you have any specific questions about the project please email Managing Director Stewart Conway on unsimplify@profero.com and we’ll do our best to answer them but please do bear in mind that we are really busy.
Alternatively you can visit the Wikipedia page on sense-making which outlines some of the key ideas which have inspired us and which inform our work and approach. The page has some great links to more extensive online resources about how organisations can make sense of, and act into, complex challenges and situations.
Has anyone tried questioning Oxfam directly over this? I have. They jumped onto it at first but now I have a question ‘awaiting moderation’ for three days. Anyone care to approach them and ask what I asked:
“And the purpose of spending Oxfam money on this, as opposed to further work in the field, was?”
You can get to the UK Oxfam ‘Climate blog’ here:
http://www.oxfam.org.uk/applications/blogs/pressoffice/?p=11453&v=campaigns
This whole episode has shocked me. I thought Oxfam were a bit wet but that they were well-intentioned folk dedicated to helping starving people in third world countries. You know, dishing out aid when necessary and providing help with basic infrastructure to give those people a chance to get out of poverty. It’s only when I started going through their website that the Socialist revolutionary zeal became apparent. They are extremist agitators; neo-Marxists bent on a new world order. Those who blithely put their hands in their pockets when a can is waved in front of their noses in the High Street don’t know this. They would do anything to protect the alarmist notion of climate change. They need to be challenged. Make sure to tell everyone you know NOT to donate.
Monboit has a ball? Huh, by his actions I don’t see him having any.
Mike D. (18:35:03),
Here’s your template: click
We have been short changed, they left off some significant blogs such as:
SEPP – http://sepp.org/ run by Fred Singer, Father of the US Weather Satellite program – he’s not worth mentioning?????
NIPCC – http://www.heartland.org/ sponsored by the Heartland Institute
Greenie Watch – http://antigreen.blogspot.com/ run by John Ray
ICECAP – http://icecap.us/ run by Joe D’Aleo, a former giant in weather forecasting from Intellicast.com
SPPI – http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/ Science & Public Policy Institute
Here’s a bunch more: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/links_&_resources.html
And let’s not forget Junk Science who has been exposing this nonsense for years: http://www.junkscience.com/ run by Steven Milloy
Just look at Dr. Pielke Jr. just sitting there on the fence like that!
Also, fancy being the only conduit between WUWT and RealClimate and being aligned with the IPCC and Rajendra Pachauri. (Tongue planted firmly in cheek as this is being written).
Smokey, it’s been done for postmodern literary deconstruction:
http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/
What we need now is a robot text generator for post-normal science. Teach the computer to spew gibberish that sounds like it make sense, but really doesn’t. What fun!!!
PS — Maybe Unsimplified has already done that, and is toying with Oxfam, churning out clever crapola with a computer program and charging big bucks for it. If so, hats off to them!
There is a far more interesting and revealing Spider-Mann web that you can see here:
http://img14.imageshack.us/img14/7949/mannweb.jpg
(Adapted from the Wegman Report by A.W. Montford in his excellent book the hockey stick illusion)
@JJB
‘neither the LeftFootForward article or the diagram specifically mention big-oil funding or top-down organisation of a sceptical movement.’
Actually the article did. What it was the supposedly good side that didn’t have any real interconnection. The sceptic side on the other hand apparently has their networks, i.e. indicating several.
And about the funding one is supposed to point out the dirt of the sceptics’ funding.
“However responses to them here are more likely force of habit than any attempt to set up a ’straw man’. ”
Most of the straw men visible seem to come from the supposedly “good clean green guys”. And besides you made a ‘straw man’ yourself with the whole trying to paint the illusion of no straw man fallacy in Left Foot Forward’s article when there was plenty of them, as usual, which, on the other hand, is to be expected from an extremist activist group.
Missing Players.
WWF.
Big Companies.
Royal Families and Governments.
It might be interesting to see each site color-coded by prevailing attitude in something like what I see to be the five general positions on this subject:
1. Proponents of the AGW Hypothesis.
2. Acceptors of the AGW Hypothesis.
3. AGW Hypothesis Neutral.
4. Skeptics of the AGW Hypothesis.
5. Antagonists of the AGW Hypothesis.
@AndrewSouthofLondon:
““Why is Oxfam so interested in this “narrative” of climate change? Why? WHY??”
I think the reason for this is that the old “loony left” which found itself deeply unpopular after the Thatcher years had no home to go to. direct political action was obviously not going to be succesful because it could not win any votes on the basis of Marxist principles. So it turned its attention instead to political lobbying. Charities like Oxfam became infested with radical left-wingers, along with parts of the National Trust, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, NSPCC and Barnardos. At the same time, the Labour Party, realising that these charities were now essentially radical left-wing lobbying entities decided to engage with them. Sometimes it did this directly (by employing Jonathon Porrit of Friends of the Earth, for instance) and sometimes indirectly (by bunging the key charities with large sums of taxpayer cash). In response the charities then bang the drum for various mantras that supported whatever government policy was fashionable at the time and with an in-built criticism of those that opposed them. This left the Conservative Party with a problem. If they tackle certain Labour Party policies head-on then they find the whole of the charitable world (and a big part of the media) turned against them. Therefore they have found it expedient to simply go along with whatever the charities claim as being true.
One can only speculate what might happen when the Conservatives return to power. Logically one would expect them to have a long list of their “enemies” that they will turn on over the following 5 years.
“to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies”
In other words, to be old enough to realise that our local climate has not changed significantly in your lifetime, and at the same time proclaim it has simply because someone in authority told you it has.
1DandyTroll:
Thanks for your reply. Maybe I didn’t make myself very clear – my point was that there is not even any need for the article to make direct reference to ‘big oil’ funding of a sceptics movement- the general tone of the article and diagram and the manner in which they paint the Sceptic vs AGW proponent side as an organised political confrontation rather than a bunch of people questioning the ‘consensus’ is enough to keep the AGW community’s unfair characterisation of sceptics going for the exact reasons you point out. In other words I completely agree with you!
“the manner in which they paint the Sceptic vs AGW proponent side as an organised political confrontation”
It screams false dichotomy. Some of those that denounced the “Climategate” letters were in Team-AGW, and didn’t want Team-AGW discredited by Team-CRU and their dodgy communications.
**********************
Roger Knights (12:06:48) :
Jim (09:10:32) :
Where is CNN, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, ABC, and Bill Maher? Where are the comedians, musicians, writers, and artists? Where are Obama and the Dems? They left out most of the whole Left.
That’s because their chart refers only to Climategate. It’s not talking about the whole war, just about one battle. This was explicit (IIRC) in the predecessor to this thread, and implicit in their statement:
******************************
They SHOULD be included because they helped cover up climategate by not reporting on it. Choosing to ignore it is an action they took to help the liberal cause, but they did help cover up climategate in particular, so they were still participants in the climategate scandal.
Jim (10:12:35) :
Don’t neglect PBS, Charlie Rose, NPR, AP, Reuters….
They show The Telegraph on the left and Geoffrey Lean on the right, but isn’t Geoffrey the pompous old fart that The Telegraph employs to fill a page every week with sanctimonious green platitudes?
Joking apart, it is obvious that a lot of AGW activists have worked hard to get to the top of these organisations, and essentially hijacked them to be centres of narrow focussed AGW centric policies.
The next question is to what extent have they been able to use this base to extend their influence. It is not obvious to me why the chairman of the UK Met Office should have come from WWF-UK. How many others have moved to positions of more direct influence?
Despite Climategate, the revelations about IPCC AR4, increasingly severe winters and even Phil Jones admitting there has been no significant warming since 1995, the politicians are even more intent on promoting damaging anti-AGW policies, seemingly totally oblivious.
In the UK all three main political parties are fighting to see who can inflict the most damage on the economy by pursuing ‘green’ energy policies. The projected quadrupling of energy prices will mean that most people will not be able to afford to heat their homes in winter, possibly leading to the deaths of tens of thousands of the elderly during cold winters, as well as making it impossible for what is left of our manufacturing industry to compete.
The EU has increased the target in saving CO2 depite being in the middle of a recession and with several countries close to bankruptcy. Spain and Portugal are probably the two countries which have made the biggest efforts to install renewable energy, but I do not know how much this has contributed to their current position.
Obama is still mad keen to implement cap-and-trade, despite the doubts over AGW and the potential impact on what is already a badly damaged economy.
This speaks of a lot of influence from somewhere.
The biggest influence is of course from the media, especially TV news [and Wikipedia]. We are social animals who want to fit in so if ‘everybody says so’ then we will tend to accept it. I am sure that many of us on this website once believed in AGW, and it is important that sites like this exist to let us know about alternate viewpoints, but it still depends on individuals actively searching these sites out rather than passively watching TV.
There is a long way to go, and cap-and-trade in the US is the key battleground.
Spector (07:06:37) :
It might be interesting to see each site color-coded by prevailing attitude in something like what I see to be the five general positions on this subject:
1. Proponents of the AGW Hypothesis.
2. Acceptors of the AGW Hypothesis.
3. AGW Hypothesis Neutral.
4. Skeptics of the AGW Hypothesis.
5. Antagonists of the AGW Hypothesis.
———————————————————-
I’ve started making such a list, but including any important individuals whose opinions reach the media. I imagine I will have hundreds of names. I want to rank them regularly according to the extremes of their opinions. I’d like to give extra credit to sites that allow opposing opinions. Recent opinions will get a higher weighting than their opinions some years ago. e.g.if the BBC start publishing sceptic articles they will move down the list!
A fascinating and funny commentary on Profero on Lucia’s Blackboard (23March) from some of WUWT posters, especially Mosher, Chuckles, Layman Lurker on the OODA LOOP. I luuuved it!
Given the virtually impenetrable convolution of the prose that it employs, one could wonder if this company, suspiciously calling itself “Unsimplify”, might actually be secretly mocking the gullibility of its customers. In fact, I’m reminded more than a little of the tailoring firm that succeeded in selling the Emperor his new clothes (you know, the invisible ones).
I might be persuaded to relinquish these suspicions if anyone can convince me that “act into” is a phrase with a genuine meaning that cannot be expressed using normal vocabulary.
Maybe OT, but this comment does also very much relate to the politics of the AGW debate.
First, if you have ever thought that the phrase “eco-fascism” was just rhetorical hyperbole, think again:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/mar/29/james-lovelock-climate-change
“One of the main obstructions to meaningful action is “modern democracy”, he [James Lovelock] added. “Even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.””
Before reading the above article, I had dismissed the next article as being a highly overblown product of journalistic alarmism. Now I am maybe not quite so sure.
http://express.co.uk/posts/view/165256/New-EU-gestapo-spies-on-Britons
“It is understood the agency [a newly empowered Europol] will concentrate on anyone thought “xenophobic” or likely to commit a crime involving the environment, computers or motor vehicles.
This could include covert monitoring of people who deny the existence of climate change or speak out on controversial issues.”
Finally, getting back to Lovelock, I would suggest that the most likely reason that the British Science Museum decided to go “neutral” with its climate exhibit is that Lovelock gives frequent talks at the museum alongside its director, Chris Rapley, and it seems to me that Lovelock has recently been maneuvering himself towards the fence between the two sides of the the AGW debate, because he now knows (thanks to the sceptics) that catastrophic AGW is not a certainty and he doesn’t want to be judged by posterity to have been on the wrong side of the argument. His recent utterances on climate change have actually made him sound quite schizophrenic about it all, for example:
http://www.thegwpf.org/news/663-james-lovelock-warms-to-eco-sceptics.html
““I think you have to accept that the sceptics have kept us sane — some of them, anyway,” he said. “They have been a breath of fresh air. They have kept us from regarding the science of climate change as a religion. It had gone too far that way. There is a role for sceptics in science. They shouldn’t be brushed aside. It is clear that the angel side wasn’t without sin.””
http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/162506/How-carbon-gases-have-saved-us-from-a-new-ice-age-
“He [James Lovelock] said: “We’re just fiddling around. It is worth thinking that what we are doing in creating all these carbon emissions, far from being something frightful, is stopping the onset of a new ice age.
“If we hadn’t appeared on the earth, it would be due to go through another ice age and we can look at our part as holding that up.”
At any rate, I reckon it would have been impossible for the museum not to have changed tack to a more neutral AGW position so as not to seem to be at odds with their “star” performer.
Digsby, re Lovelock;
His attribution of ice-age prevention capacity to early humans is actually just more back-and-fill, pushing the meme that humans significantly affect the atmosphere and climate. Mind you, those natural primitive stewards of Nature did manage quite a bit of deforestation … as have droughts and ice sheets, of course.
Remember, Lovelock invented the anthropmorphic deity Gaia out of a biosphere. His imagination always triumphs over his judgment — it’s so much funner that way!