Full Moon on Lewandowsky

Climate Psychologist with the Right Stuff

Stephan Lewandosky et al (including John Cook and Mike Marriott) published a paper called Recursive Fury, now retracted, psychoanalyzing climate skeptics’ opinions and categorizing them in psycho-babble terminology, such as:

(PV) Persecution Victimization

(NI) Nefarious Intention

(NS) Nihilistic Skepticism

…among others.

Now, Lew’s apologists will tell you he wasn’t simply “diagnosing” easily identified subjects as frothing lunatics, merely “categorizing” skeptics’ opinions in psychological terms and publishing them in a scientific psychology journal. So, by their thinking, no possible ethical breech occurred in publishing this information without the patients’ consent, nor in defaming named persons as “mentally imbalanced”.

That non-distinction between diagnosis and categorization sounds suspiciously like the old joke:

“I ain’t calling your mama a whore, I’m just say’n she has sex for money.”

We’ll leave it to the rational agent to decide whether the skeptics’ mommas are indeed skanky ‘ho’s or not. Just consider that the journal retracted the paper: probably merely an accidental or random retraction, nothing to do with questions of ethics or liability.

The oldest trick in the world is calling your ideological opponent crazy. The Soviet Union of old, blueprint for the new, increasingly Sovietized USSA, actually institutionalized dissenters–understandably so, because one would obviously have to be insane to disagree with the party line. It was a matter of settled science, comrades.

The Soviets also gave the world a new term, “Lysenkoism,” meaning manipulated and distorted science to conform with political objectives. The word derives from a fellow named Lysenko, who headed the Soviet Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Imagine an intrusive, spying, militarized, prison-happy, top-heavy, corrupt government with its thumb on the scientific scales, pushing a political agenda to serve the oligarchy…..

I know, that’s way beyond belief for us in the free West, who view 10,000 advertisements per day and get our news from unbiased billion dollar media corporations like the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. Swallowing multiple servings of lies and propaganda is part of a daily diet from recommend food groups for us.

These news sources even sometimes hire one or two “investigative reporters”: those are the special kind who actually investigate things, while the others just regurgitate government agency press releases about things like the global warming doomsday tipping point, which is perpetually about 10 years away, and sometimes only a matter of days.

So let’s just assume that believing everything you’re told by general and scientific news corporations is the very definition of sanity. Doubting and skepticism are plainly insane.

Never mind that history is a veritable litany of conspiracies, cover-ups and false flags, that the Gulf of Tonkin Incident was a sham, that The Maine exploded from within, that there were no WMD in Iraq: questioning minor things like committing a nation to war on false pretenses are the idle ravings of mad “conspiracy theorists,” until such time as the conspirators admit to them.

But it really takes a trained psychologist to recognize a conspiracy theorist.

While some criticize climate science as being somewhat “soft”–with its scattershot uncertain predictions resembling graphs of projectile vomited spaghetti, its uncertain, unfalsafiable time frames, its frequent failed prognostications, its models diverging from observation–still, on the spectrum of hard and soft sciences, psychology would have to be the most flaccid of them all.

Psychologists historically arbitrarily have divided the mind into unobservable entities and then proceeded in scholarly debate to argue how many “id’s” can dance on the head of a pin. Later some learned how to lie with statistics and rigged studies. (still others did compassionate work, healing the mentally infirm insofar as their only tools, talk, reason, blather, could effect)

So, just imagine the marriage of climate pseudo-science and soft psychology: it is a marriage made in comedy heaven. And while you might think it kidding, there is actually a specialty called “Climate Psychology.”

This fruitful new science must be the next Moon Shot. We will finally understand climate psychology! Let the taxpayer fund this vital scientific endeavor. We choose to do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.

Okay then, prepare to put on your climate psychologist helmet, three sizes too small, and join in the moon shot.

First we will psychoanalyze global warming alarmists. To do this, we shall take self-selected surveys from anonymous internet avatars with names like MonkeyJunk and TrollMaster–you know, quality data. These surveys will be given to our friends, with a wink and a nod, and given to our enemies under anonymous subterfuge. While the survey is in progress, let’s also prod and taunt our subjects, just for ethical, unbiased scientific chuckles. Specifically where we get the data, what we delete and how we massage it will be locked in a safe. Anyone asking for that metadata will get the patented warming monger’s reply:

“Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”

Next, we apply a thin veneer of statistics and biased interpretation to our survey of loaded questions and get the results we intended all along: scientific proof these alarmists are barking mad nutters.

For starters, these warming believers do a lot of “conspiracy ideation.” That’s psycho-babble for “thinking about stuff.” They think Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Kenji, and the Koch Brothers are out to destroy the planet, and “deniers” who write and comment on blogs are just Santa’s crazy little little helpers.  Their label, “conspiracy ideation” sounds much more pathological when you say it in Latin; conjurationis cognitionis, doesn’t it?

We categorized the following morbidities:

(LOL) Latent Obsessive Lamentation – Thinly disguised obsessive expression of sorrow over calamity caused by measly 0.8C temperature increase over entire last century.

(OMG) Omniscient Meglomaniacal Grandiosity – Grandiose delusions of unquestionable certainty and infallible prophetic vision regarding future climate. Grandiose delusions of being savior of the world.

(LMAO) Limbic Manic Alarmist Outrage – Anger at alarmist predictions being contradicted by observation or reason, stemming from the deep reptilian brain.

(STFU) Selective Transparency, Factually Unchallenged – Refusal to release source data and methodology to opponents. Refusal to debate or acknowledge contradictory viewpoints, “even if we have to redefine what peer-review means.”

(FUD) Fantasizing Ultimate Doom – Dogmatic paranoid belief that the sky is falling, even after 17-year average of major datasets shows no surface warming, after insignificant sea level rise, and Antarctic ice extent reaching 30-year record highs.

The list of climate alarmist pathologies is far too long to detail, while quite frankly the bit wasn’t exceedingly funny after the second repetition. And the true story of how our study actually was carried out in two parts with drive-by ethical rubber-stamp approval and “peer reviewed” by a journalism student (basket weaving students apparently being overqualified) is even more tedious still.

The take away is that you can find a psychologist or statistician to prove just about anything you want. In courtroom trials, expert witness testimony frequently involves dueling psychologists with contrary paid opinions. Likewise, sitting presidents invariably endure damming psychoanalysis from some pedigreed hack the opposition party hires. In truth, the entire human race is kinda bat-guano crazy, and it’s not all that hard to prove.

So go ahead and call this piece a shrill exercise in (NS) Nihilistic Skepticism, with (NI) Nefarious Intention, and let’s call it a day. But if here and now we have come to understand Climate Psychology infinitesimally better, shed light on the that new frontier of science and highest calling of the human craving for ultimate knowledge, then indeed it is one giant leap for mankind.