Chris Mooney has come up with new book to explain why people like you and I are “abby-normal” for not unthinkingly and uncritically accepting all aspects of global warming climate change climate disruption. I haven’t read it, though the cover itself speaks volumes. I won’t commit the same dumb mistake that Igor Peter Gleick committed when he wrote his bogus non-review of Donna LaFramboise’s IPCC book, so I’ll let somebody who has reviewed it speak about it. Dr. Roger Pielke Jr.
He writes: 
Chris Mooney, the author and blogger who once alleged a Republican “war” on science, is going back to that well one more time with a new book (above). In it he “explores brain scans, polls, and psychology experiments to explain why conservatives today believe more wrong things.”
Mooney writes:
“[T]here might be a combination of genes acting together that somehow predispose us to have particular politics, presumably through their role in influencing our brains and thus our personalities or social behaviors ..,”
Mooney promises to explain:
“[T]he real, scientific reasons why Republicans reject the widely accepted findings of mainstream science, economics, and history—as well as many undeniable policy facts.”
…
Roger adds:
I wonder how well telling half the American populace that they are genetically/psychologically/mentally inferior will communicate?
=========================================================
Next I suppose we’ll hear why we need selective breeding programs to weed out this “genetic scourge”.
Turnabout is fair play:
I’m sure Josh could do a better satire, but hey, this is the best I can do on one cup of coffee.
Some inspiring levity from Mel Brooks:
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I am glad my Ph.D. review board did not read this book, or they never would have awarded me my Ph.D. in engineering, thinking I was genetically incapable of actually understanding science.
Jay Davis says:
November 9, 2011 at 10:41 am
I’m one of those people who believes liberalism/progressiveism is a mental disorder. Those that suffer from this disorder, who we label “liberals” or “progressives”, do not have a grasp on reality. They live in a fantasy world where they know better than everyone else and therefore are best qualified to rule over us all – telling us how we should live, what we should eat, what we should read and so on.
If you go to the archives of this site
http://drsanity.blogspot.com/
you will find quite a number of compelling dissections the good Doctor (MD/Psychiatry) has done on the subject of Liberalism as a psychological disorder.
Perhaps there is another parallel. Mr Mooney doesn’t realise it, his claims are something like Diedrik Stapel’s research! 😉
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diederik_Stapel
via Luboš
http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/11/diederik-stapel-liberalism-codified-as.html
This book is an obvious attempt to project a political stereotype. I do not think that this is healthy. One might just as well have a book entitled “The Democratic Brain: Why he does not Believe in America.” This sort of thing does not do anyone any good. Perhaps it would be beneficial for Chris Mooney if he had a dream where he walks into a bathroom and sees Herman Cain’s face looking back at him through the mirror.
Could be that the genetic difference is the ownership of a brain.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/11/09/solyndra-emails-claim-bidens-staff-about-had-orgasm-about-energy-loans-to-firm/
So how does Mooney explain me?
Socially lefty, pale green (cos I can’t standing wasting things).
Old fashioned in my approach and thinking.
Don’t like spending money needlessly.
Thinks there should be a welfare state and system (up to a point).
Believes in markets and free enterprise economies and the spirit of entrepreneurship.
Thinks governments should provide some essential services (eg water, sewerage, and [horrors] electricity) as a social service not as a profit center.
Does not like rabid greenies, WWF, Greenpeace or other extremist nutters of any shape or size.
Does not BELIEVE in the religion of CAGW – but used to and changed my mind after doing a lot of reading.
Perhaps I have some other special gene Mooney has not yet identified.
Trouble with generalising and trying to apply your pet theory to others: its damn hard to be 100% right. In this case, he’s just a nutcase.
DocMartyn says:
November 9, 2011 at 1:22 pm
“In any tested mental skill the variance within female POPULATIONS is much smaller than in male POPULATIONS; women, as a population, cling to the mean and men have more individuals at the left and right hand sides.”
Males have only one X chromosome, women have two. This forces the male organism to use ALL genes on the one copy of the X chromosome whereas female organisms switch off one copy in each body cell, but not always the same. Many genes that code for intelligence reside on the X chromosome. This results in a large intelligence variance in males, and less in females because they mix the performance of the two copies of the X chromosome. In other words: 15% of males are idiots, 15 % are geniusses. For women, only 1% are idiots (less female prison population is the result) and only 1% are geniusses (less engineers etc.).
Sadly, what Chris Mooney suffers from is a lack of character. It is not at all likely that this due to genetics, but rather his personal choices.
This book of his is not only an idiocratic flat out wrong waste of paper and ink. It is more importantly a damning self-indictment of the author and those who enabled him to do this pitifulhack work.
Mr Mooney is probably one of those cheery easy going green lefties who mean so very well telling the autistic person he’s sorry for him suffer autism. 😉
When I come across the type of warped and twisted mentality exhibited by Chris Mooney for some reason i am reminded of that quote from John Wanamaker, [ 1838 ; 1922 ] Department Store owner and one time US Postmaster General.
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.
The principle seems applicable here!
In Soviet Union (1922-1991), dissidents were mentally ill…
This is a case of “There is nothing new under the sun.” Mooney’s basic premiss is simply that our beliefs are caused. They can be caused by any among the usual suspects such as “environment,” capitalist oppression of the proletariat, “our paradigm,” or you name it. Apparently, Mooney does not have the knowledge or courage to return to the modern source of the basic premiss in the writings of Karl Marx. There has never been a genuine communist who did not believe that our beliefs are caused. There has never been one who believes that our beliefs are caused who is not disposed to be a communist.
Skeptic jeans are blue!
He’s not writing to the general population, he’s writing to those fanatics who need reaffirmation about their superiority.
Chris Mooney, a self proclaimed Climate Expert, and Psychologist.
That’s quite a stretch for an English major.
Perhaps he can write. Alas I will never know.
@ur momisugly Rhoda Ramirez
To be more exact: self proclaming moral superiority. Oh yeah!
Wonder how Mooney explains Rick Perry. He was involved with Al Gore’s political campaign – the Presidential one, not the Carbon Trading one – and a Democrat. Now he’s a Republican who laughs at the AGW scam.
So what happened to his brain? Or was it a genetic mutation?
Comrade Mooney’s theories are childish, simplistic, moronic, but convenient. He is a useful idiot as Lenin called such people. A joke. But this kind of stuff is what totalitarian states find toooo helpful and that trend is not funny at all.
Ishtar Babilu Dingir says:
November 9, 2011 at 8:13 am
Most of us in the West are born into a consensual reality which is underpinned, psychologically, by archetypal themes and motifs that are derived from a Judaic religion. I’m not anti-Semitic and I think the Jews have many things going for them but, in my opinion, their religion is not one of them, not least because it has caused us to always Fall for the line of being the Fall guy for whatever happens.
After the account of the Creation of the Earth in Genesis, the very next story we come to is about how man sinned by eating the apple from the Tree of Knowledge and so was banished from the Garden of Eden.
No-one has ever managed to explain sufficiently why eating such a tasty and health-giving fruit should be wrong, and I don’t know anyone who’s ever seen a Tree of Knowledge or even why partaking of the fruits of knowledge would be considered “a bad thing”. Yet the illogic of the story doesn’t matter, and might even serve its purpose better. Our subconscious resonates much more willingly with irrationality and it works hard to construct metaphors with such motifs which make sense to it and which override all conscious rationale.
It’s a story about the emergence of self-reflection, rationality, responsibility and creativity in the human animal, referring back to Genesis I, ‘made in the image of God, male and female with free will’. It’s not a tree of ‘knowledge as amount of information/omniscence’, but “the tree of Life and the tree of learning the knowledge of good and evil” which is knowledge as in Wisdom, “Happy is the man who finds Wisdom.. Her ways are the ways of pleasantness, and all Her paths are peace. She is a Tree of Life to those who take hold of Her, and happy are all who retain Her.”
Not that some in Jewish teaching didn’t use these verses to debase man’s human condition, with the added bonus of expressing misogyny, but the West’s particular reading of it with biases consolidated came out of the mind of Augustine, the originator of the dogma of Original Sin. He misread
as ‘but in whatsoever day ye eat of it, I shall kill you’. He went on to bolster this view by mangling Paul and so on. His dogma begins with the premises that man does not have free will and that Adam (male and female) was male, and that Adam and Eve were immortal in the Garden. The original sin therefore was not obeying God and loss of immortality. This has never been the ‘standard’ classic teaching which reads instead of a demand for obedience and punishment by death for violation, a warning of consequence, don’t put your fingers in the electric socket.. In the standard teaching they were not immortal, neither mortal nor immortal, their choice was eating of the Tree of Life and learning the knowledge of good and evil which entailed experiencing death, that is being fully of this world, or not, (not really alive, it is the tree of life and so not eating would be not fully realised which is the potential from ‘becoming gods like Us’ in knowing what is good and what evil). In standard Orthodox (Eastern Christian) teaching, God is uncreated energy, love, grace and getting back to Eden, is to become fully realised in the image of God through the learning of the knowledge good and evil, by bringing good out of ourselves and not evil (God became man so man could become God). Not a relationship of man as created creature as object lesser other created with no free will, but man as created creature of God uncreated, manifest in the world. The difference in will is between the Augustinian Original Sin with no free will having to obey a superior and Orthodox free will in image and likeness in synergistic relationship, in which the aim is like creativity, image as in reflection, (so Orthodox can never be Augustinians, because free will means that God cannot ever impose his will so there is nobody to obey).
It’s been a while since I discussed such things, hope I’ve made it clear, or at least not too confusing. Jewish teaching on the subject includes such explanations as Adam (male and female in the one body) as they split into two halves by separating out from the side (i.e. Eve not created out of a rib, but of one body becoming two), having no backs, nothing behind them.
What we are is what we can create ourselves to be, and we’re still stuck with mankind in the control of the 6% sociopaths able to utilise our natural bent for creative co-operation by manipulating our basic trust.
..
The UAH lower troposphere temperatures are currently at about -0.1C.
So today, temperatures are below the average of 1979 to 2010 (the last 31 years). That is, without a big volcano dropping temperatures as has happened twice in this period.
http://img210.imageshack.us/img210/7721/dailyuahtempsoctober201.png
What exactly should a rational person conclude about global warming given that? Does one have to be Left-wing person to see this is consistent with the theory? Does one have to not understand numbers and graphs to get it? Why is the evidence so solid that only a biased person would not see the global warming?
Why don’t we believe? Facts is facts – it is not happening. Emotional reasoning has a problem with facts. Logical people use evidence first.
Eugenics, pure and simple. Disgustingly so.
This has been a great night for hiilarity. I’m LMAO at a quote I just read. While looking for the Yale study that correlates skepticism and scientific literacy, this article stated, regarding that study that Mooney “must have needed CPR after he read this paper….Mooney, whose chest must still hurt from the defibrillator, is deep-sixing this until he can spin it:”
http://egnorance.blogspot.com/2011/07/yale-study-global-warming-skepticism.html
Forgive me if I think there is more to ‘it’ (being a ‘lefty’) than that, such as the propensity for “taking other people’s money and spreading it around” because at some point federal ‘force’ becomes involved (read that as: taxing authorities who resort to force to ‘take’ at some point because the lefties have ‘written law’ that created a ‘federal’ program of some sort that requires paying for). This is a far cry from asking someone for help, or seeking help for a charitable organization.
Even – I – can’t stand wasting things …
.
“Spector says: November 9, 2011 at 11:28 am
Perhaps this might better be called ‘fear-forced science.”
So that is what FFS stands for. I always wondered about that 🙂
If that was intentional then well done if not you are an accidental genius.
First of all I cannot comment anymore at DeSmogBlog as the admins will not approve the account I made. Likely because I exposed the hypocrisy of their site,
The Truth about DeSmogBlog
“DeSmogBlog is a smear site founded by a scientifically unqualified public relations man, James Hoggan and funded by a convicted money launderer, John Lefebvre. The irony here is their favorite tactic is to attempt to smear those they disagree with as funded by “dirty money”. Since it’s creation in 2006 the site has done nothing but post poorly researched propaganda with a clear intent to smear respected scientists, policy analysts or groups who dares oppose an alarmist position on global warming. Their articles frequently reference unreliable sources such as Wikipedia and Sourcewatch since they are unable to find any fact based criticisms of those they criticize in respected news sources.”
I would like to respond to some of the comments directed at me here since they will not allow me to respond at DeSmogBlog,
I have no idea what he is referring to “Papers with conclusions unrelated to their thesis” as he fails to mention a specific paper. There is nothing called “Energy and Climate”. I assume he is referring to “Energy and Environment” of which all that nonsense he mentioned is corrected here,
Correcting misinformation about the journal Energy & Environment