Sigh, for some reason some people seem to think climate skeptics hate their children and grandchildren. I wonder if they’ve ever polled to compare with concerns for that other “pass on to the next generation” issue, our soaring national debt that our children and grandchildren have to pay for?
Climate Change, Narcissism, Denial, Apocalypse. The science is critical, but understanding why so many people are still in denial requires further explanation. Here’s an except from an Op Ed by Dr. Robert D. Stolorow at Psychology Today:
“On October 5, 2012, on the front page of the Huffington Post, appeared a terrifying image of melting arctic ice, accompanied by the chilling headline, “Arctic Ice Melt and Sea Level Rise May Be ‘Decades Ahead Of Schedule’” Why have the majority of Americans and American politicians been largely oblivious to this extreme threat? I believe there are two principal reasons.
The first is unbridled narcissism. Psychoanalytic developmental theorist Erik Erikson famously characterized an essential aim of adulthood as generativity—the caring for the well being of future generations. Climate change most likely will not be a threat for most of us, but it will leave our children, grandchildren, and future descendents with catastrophes of unimaginable proportions. In the deplorable obliviousness and indifference to the problem of climate change, any concern for the well being of future generations is being blatantly trumped by narrow self-interest and greed.”
The second is denial. What, precisely, is being denied? More than three decades ago I took my young son to a planetarium show at the New York Museum of Natural History. During that show it was predicted that a million years from now the sun will become a “red giant” that will engulf and destroy our entire solar system. This prospect filled me with intense horror. Why would a catastrophe predicted to occur in a million years evoke horror in me? Let me explain.
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A couple of points:
Here is the “terrifying” photo:
The good doctor probably does not get to see the other view of sea ice, when it is at maximum in March:
Perhaps he doesn’t realize that the ice regenerates every year, and maybe he thinks that it becomes a permanent condition? Maybe he never looks at the Antarctic either, where the majority of the ice is, and setting new records for the most ice this year.
And since he’s arguing from a position of authority, I should at least point out that he hasn’t even got his basic facts straight.
During that show it was predicted that a million years from now the sun will become a “red giant” that will engulf and destroy our entire solar system. This prospect filled me with intense horror. Why would a catastrophe predicted to occur in a million years evoke horror in me?
Maybe it will be less horrifying when you learn your horror timeline is off by 4.999 billion years? From NASA “Ask an Astrophysicist“:
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Question
(Submitted June 04, 2004) How long until the Sun becomes a red giant?
The Answer
The Sun will become a red giant in about 5 billion years, which is slightly more time than it has already been a star. There’s a lot of nice information about the Sun at
http://www.nineplanets.org/sol.html
Hope that helps.
-Kevin and Dirk,
for “Ask an Astrophysicist”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
It is difficult for me to take somebody like this seriously, especially one with a “PhD” attached to his name that can’t even get such basic facts they base their argument on right.
As for his diagnosis, perhaps the good doctor would benefit from reading this article in Reason magazine:
The Medicalization of RebellionThe long, shameful history of using science to stigmatize dissenthttp://reason.com/archives/2012/04/21/the-medicalization-of-rebellion
Or this one, about his cohort in slime, Dr. Stephan Lewandowsky which talks about the same topic.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/15/toodle-lew/
Its just more Political Abuse of Psychiatry, such as was practiced in the Soviet Union:
In the Soviet Union, systematic political abuse of psychiatry took place. Soviet psychiatric hospitals known as “psikhushkas” were used by the authorities as prisons in order to isolate hundreds or thousands of political prisoners from the rest of society, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally. This method was also employed against religious prisoners and most especially against well-educated former atheists who adopted a religion. In such cases their religious faith was determined to be a form of mental illness that needed to be cured. Formerly highly classified extant documents from “Special file” of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union published after the dissolution of the Soviet Union demonstrate that the authorities of the country quite consciously used psychiatry as a tool to suppress dissent.
Sound familiar when looking at what is being written about climate skeptics today?
I wonder who will be the first to propose that Gitmo have a section added for “climate deniers”?
Alarmism is such a lazy philosophy. With a basis of non-realism, and no desire for fact verification, he might as well have attempted to validate his point with: being fill the horror of waking up to find a dragon in his living room, instead our sun going supernova.
And when Alarmism reaches religious proportions, well, who’s gonna double-check their ‘god’?
He has a PhD in Clinical Psychology from an accredited school, and has a California psychology license. This evidence is not too difficult to find. He is a licensed healthcare provider, just the same as any licensed nurse, PA, pharmacist, or physical therapist.
That doesn’t make him an expert on global warming. It does totally legitimize him as a healthcare professional, even if no one sees the M.D. after his name that they believe they should see, being ignorant of the degree to be expected of a psychologist.
We would be in bad shape if the only healthcare provider we perceived as legitimate were those with M.D. after their name.
Dr. Robert D. Stolorow said:
If you really believed the sun would engulf the entire earth in about a million years, then the only rational response is to support continued technological development so we have the means to get off this planet sometime in the next 999,000 years. If we accept a return to 18th century technology to satisfy some people’s phobia about global warming, then our great * 10^5 grandchildren are doomed.
But as others hear have pointed out, the real timescale is about 5 billion years from now, which means either the people putting together the planetarium show were incompetent, or your 30+ year ago self was not paying proper attention and you have never in the intervening decades improved your understanding of what you thought you heard. This is rather like admitting you’re still afraid of the ghost stories you heard around the campfire at Cub Scouts.
However if you are just naturally prone to worry, the odds are we will experience a large asteroid strike long before even a million years have run out, so we need to develop the capability to survive that even sooner. And the odds are pretty good that before a major asteroid impact comes we will be in the depths of another ice age. Wind turbines, solar farms, and biofuels are not going to help us with either of these virtually certain catastrophies.
I think there must be a word in psychology for people who obsess about distant and improbable disasters while ignoring much closer and more likely ones.
Here’s an except from an Op Ed by Dr. Robert D. Stolorow at Psychology Today:
“On October 5, 2012, on the front page of the Huffington Post, appeared a terrifying image of melting arctic ice, accompanied by the chilling headline, “Arctic Ice Melt and Sea Level Rise May Be ‘Decades Ahead Of Schedule’” Why have the majority of Americans and American politicians been largely oblivious to this extreme threat?”
=======================================================
My first impression: Dr. Robert D. Stolorow urgently needs to consult a psychiatrist, as a patient, of course.
His using the expressions “terrifying image”, “chilling headline” and “extreme threat” is a strong indication of a paranoia.
rw says: October 8, 2012 at 11:30 am
“From another angle, it’s almost as if someone had invented an extraordinary aerosol that causes all these creatures now ensconsed within the sinews of society to pause from gnawing at the foundations and connections and to crawl out into the sunlight and reveal their presence.”
That is an exquisite observation! Thanks rw.
Stolorow isn’t a psychiatrist. He’s ****** psychologist who teaches psychoanalysis. This isn’t to say you’re wrong about psychiatry, but keeping things straight helps the discussion. A psychiatrist has an MD and generally deals with what are called “organic disorders.” Psychologist -> words, psychiatrist -> drugs.
So, someone who demonstrably knows bugger all about something feels “an extreme form of existential anxiety” and it’s supposed to be our fault? The frightening thing is that it’s people like him who will influence the shower in power. (Shudder)
@ur momisuglyOwen in GA – those “billions”. It was you guys who bent the meaning. The higher “-illions” were invented (late 19th / early 20th century) by scientists who were fed up with having to repeat “million million million million …” (etc.) in lectures, mostly in astronomy or atomic physics. So they coined the “bi-million”, or billion, to mean “million million”, the “tri-million” or trillion, to mean “million million million” and so on up. A sextillion or septillion covers most scales you need up or down from unity (i.e. a factor of 10^36 or 10^42).
However, you will perhaps be reassured to hear that the British use of the word has also now been warped with the ongoing Americanisation of our language, as I had to explain a few years ago to a German friend (the Germans still use the words as originally intended, since they don’t speak “almost the same” language as Americans, as we Brits do). The depressing result of this was seeing Prof. Jim al-Khalili on a TV programme recently, talking about so many “million trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion …” – thereby neatly rendering the entire process of trying to tidy up big numbers completely irrelevant.
I just use powers, myself, now, as there’s no arguing with those. Yet.
Duster says:
October 8, 2012 at 11:07 am
correct. Psychiatry is Med school
Psychology today is a super market tabloid. Before doing clinical work in Psychology, My School Dean said the difference between the psychologists and the patients is that the patients do NOT carry a set of keys.to the facility.
I think I get it now. The people who do NOT believe in imminent catastrophe are the ones who believe in conspiracies. But those who think, contrary to all evidence, (including the Gleick affair) that their opponents are all funded by BiG OiL, are not.
And the ones exaggerating their results, being prima donnas, and in the paper all the time saying the world is going to end if we don’t listen to them are NOT narcicists. Ok, got it.
Oh yeah, and skeptics are fascists at heart or something, but it’s always those on the CAGW side that are implying that people they disagree with may end up in prison or a looney bin some day.
A fine article by Brendan O’Neill of Spiked: Pathologising Dissent:
http://www.spiked-online.com/site/printable/6320/
Several commenters have asked variants of “Who could possibly get worked up about something a million years away?”
The reason is engineering. Because the sun is about 5 billion years old, a million years would be 1/5000th of the sun’s life. In probabilistic terms, it means the sun as likely to explode tomorrow as it is a million years from now. When I read his statement above, I myself was immediately worried, then I figured the guy was an idiot and remembered the number was in the billions, then I read further into the thread and saw the correct estimates.
In the meantime we have the prospect of the sun getting dimmer in the short term (decades) as well as next few billion years. The former used to worry me before I found out that CO2 will offset some or all of the solar cooling.
The sun becoming a red giant in a million years would be like glaciers covering the northern hemisphere overnight. If the sun was to become a red giant in a million years it would already well be on its way to that stage and we wouldn’t be here talking about it.
I just wonder how a Psychiatry professional might know what is or isn’t correct about climate science?
In the USA there’s a lot of “denial” and the social scientists and other assorted history challenged lefties go crazy trying to explain it. Perhaps the simple answer is that in the US the entire purpose of the bill of rights is to protect the individual from the government, so there’s natural anipathy to any and all attempts to invoke government power and controls. Climate alarm advocates of course require top down governmental control in their argument, so there exists plenty of “denial” on that basis alone.
Good heavens, the PhD author of this could have simple consulted a couple of Eagle scounts and saved a great deal of time and angst.
Problem is that one assumes that the US taxpayer is on the hook for this crap.
That means if you disagree with someone’s opinion you are a nut case!
I dunno, I’ve been pretty sure of some sort of mass delusion in the scientific community for a few years now. But this effort to make denialism into a specific psycological disorder that requires explanation, and possibly treatment, just smacks of the USSR.
Bob Diaz @ur momisugly October 8, 2012 at 3:22 pm
I just wonder how a Psychiatry professional might know what is or isn’t correct about climate science?
Bob, he doesn’t give Fart. For him, he is enjoining a collective, a cabal, that issues money and distributes favors to those who toe the
partyLysenkoist line. He will be awarded.And, he can assuage any pangs of guilt, nor respect for the scientific enterprise, should he be so feeble to have any, with the IPCC fig leaf, as do most politicians. That’s the purpose of the IPCC.
Looks like he also has a phd in philosophy… https://sites.google.com/site/robertdstolorow/curriculumvitae
Since psychologists know nothing about climate change this is just very impolite. I suggest they look at their messiah complex.
The fellow is likely to be a proof of Smurphy’s Law:
“(In the case of psychology, the meanderings of the human mind leads to the conclusion humans are utterly unpredictable, unless they are psychologists, in which case they obey Smurphy’s Law, which states a psychologist will succumb to whatever ailment he is expert in.)”
Such fellows are laughable, but dangerous. Should they gain power over our lives, we are in deep doo-doo.
Dr. Bob ? Wasnt he on The Muppets………. Apologies to the Muppets. Many years ago my best friend was committed to a psychiatric hospital. He told me 2 weeks later that he had problems that can be dealt with. All good so far. He carried on, I have problems that can be dealt with,but not here, most of the senior staff dont know they themselves are nuts. He has been fine ever since.
I may be a bit ahead of the curve here…. but, just in case, I’ve already started ‘self-medicating’!
It makes stories like this soooooooo much funnier!!! };>)
Cheers!!! MtK
So, I’m in denial if I believe that a man who is wildly wrong in predicting the future of our sun can’t possibly predict the future of our climate? I can live with that.
As for having “unbridled narcissism” for not caring about future generations, he’s got it completely backwards. Even if he is right that a warming world will be a bad thing, it will be far cheaper to adapt to the warming than to try to prevent it. If we do what he wants and cut out the use of fossil fuels, the next generation will not survive long enough to have to worry about a warming world.
A lot of us Skeptics used to believe in Global Warming. Does the good doctor believe we turned into Narcissist ?
“For decades psychiatrists and psychologists have claimed a monopoly over the field of mental health. Governments and private health insurance companies have provided them with billions of dollars every year to treat “mental illness,” only to face industry demands for even more funds to improve the supposed, ever–worsening state of mental health. No other industry can afford to fail consistently and expect to get more funding.” (Except CAGW)
“A significant portion of these appropriations and insurance reimbursements has been lost due to financial fraud within the mental health industry, an international problem estimated to cost more than a hundred billion dollars every year. The United States loses approximately $100 billion to health care fraud each year, with up to $40 billion of this due to fraudulent practices in the mental health industry.”
http://www.cchrstl.org/fraud.shtml?utm_source=CCHR+STL&utm_campaign=bb1036963c-FL_Medicare_Fraud9_19_2011&utm_medium=email#
“Crime in the mental health industry is far from limited to money matters. A review of more than 800 convictions of psychiatrists, psychologists and psychotherapists, between 1998 and 2004 reveals that 43% of the convictions were for fraud, theft and embezzlement; 32% for sex crimes; 7% for patient assault and violent crime; 6% for drug offences and another 6% for manslaughter and murder.
“Dr Thomas Dorman, member of the Royal college of Physicians of the UK and Canada, sums it up: “In short the whole business of creating psychiatric categories of ‘disease’, formalising them with consensus, and subsequently ascribing diagnostic codes to them, which in turn leads to their use for insurance billing, is nothing but an extended racket furnishing psychiatry a pseudo-scientific aura. The perpetrators are of course feeding at the public trough.”
http://www.cchrstl.org/documents/fraud.pdf
Many a true word….
“Psychiatrists tend to believe that they have a special understanding both of the minds of others, and of the nature of reality in general. They typically will believe that they know what is going through the minds of other (“Thought Decryption”), and, more importantly, what should be going through the minds of others. Often, it is believed that the thoughts or feelings of others are wrong, and that the persons mind must be fixed (“cured”) to match what the psychiatrist thinks should be in the patient’s mind.
“Any disagreement with the psychiatrist’s views or refusal of treatment is likely to be taken as a sign of just how “disturbed” (thinking incorrectly) the “patient” is. In addition, psychiatrists often believe that their own view of reality is absolutely correct, or at least close enough to judge other views as wrong, defective, or delusional. Views of patients that conflict with those of the psychiatrist are taken as signs of severe disease, and as needing to be “cured.”
http://isnt.autistics.org/dsn-psy.html