Psychological Problems faced by disappointed alarmists
Story submitted by Eric Worrall
The Sydney Morning Herald has published an article describing the psychological problems alarmists are experiencing, in the wake of their Copenhagen 2009 disappointment.
Ask most alarmists and they will insist they are winning the debate – that the world is about to embrace green orthodoxy, that carbon trading schemes are rising, that “deniers” are more marginalised than ever before.
The article in the SMH tells a very different story – rising despair, despondency, disengagement, and in some cases delusional behaviour, in the wake of serial climate disappointments.
According to environmental scientist Nicole Thornton;
““It’s strange. Sometimes you just don’t feel you’re making headway in the time you’ve got, before it’s too late for the planet,” Thornton says. “All these little things weigh you down, and then the big stuff breaks you.”
The article goes on to describe more serious cases – for example, “Six years ago, a dehydrated 17-year-old boy was brought into the Royal Children’s Hospital, refusing to drink water. He believed having a drink would somehow contribute to the global shortage of potable water, and became the first diagnosed case of “climate change delusion”.
Personally I’ve always wondered if their is a correspondence between promotion of green ideas, and poor life choices made by far too many of our children – if you tell a child they have no future, that the world is about to be destroyed, that its all their parent’s fault, and that there is nothing they can do about it, don’t expect them to be enthusiastic about doing their homework.
However there is an even darker side to green despair. A while ago, Osama Bin Laden attempted to recruit frustrated environmentalists into his global Jihad – http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/29/strange-but-true-bin-laden-on-global-warming/
Bin Laden ultimately failed in his effort to recruit frustrated greens to his campaign of mass murder, but if we don’t find a way to pull back from this green brink of societal self hatred, next time we might not be so lucky.
h/t WUWT reader “berniel” for the SMH article
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the article is a wordy “woe is me” human interest story – a desperate bid for sympathy could be the propaganda technique of last resort
The thing that amazed me most about climategate was the absolute refusal of warmists to acknowledge even that any particular part was shady. What says “science” better than shredding data rather than let another person have it? What says “science” better than “hiding behind” things. What says “science” better than publicly saying the end is nigh, but privately saying that it is a travesty. What says “science” better than…hey, let’s change the data for the 1940s mmmkay. Can “science” be better said by going to town on other manuscript submissions? What says unbiased science better than hiding the decline.
Imagine that all those same things had happened, except it wasn’t Trenberth and Mann and Jones, but instead Exxon-Mobil, Halliburton, and Wal-Mart.
Warmists response: oh, I can’t notice that Phil Jones said “if this lack of warming continues” over the deafening sound of my cognitive dissonance.
If these Psychologists were on the up & up they would have long ago classified Climate Alarmism as a phobia. An unreasoned fear describes it exactly.
“except it wasn’t Trenberth and Mann and Jones, but instead Exxon-Mobil, Halliburton, and Wal-Mart”
monsanta/to/satan
“Climate Alarmism as a phobia”
coming soon in DSM VI.
(They are already rebranding some old drug for that.)
I have stated before that environmentalists have it exactly backwards. It is civilization that is tenuous, not the environment. Blinded by emotion, they cannot step back and understand humanity’s place in history and on the earth.
What could open their eyes to this perspective?
klem says:
August 15, 2014 at 10:14 am
“I’m trying to keep them from becoming depressed self-loathers, and to see a bright and prosperous future. Is this too much to ask?”
I pre-empted the need for recurrent debriefings by informing my kid that his teachers are idiots and that he should answer them whatever they wanted to hear. I actually didn’t know whether his particular teachers would be idiots, but it’s the Null hypothesis in Germany – they’re mostly watermelons.
In Australia much of the very early scary propaganda was marketed directly to schoolchildren and reinforced with television energy adverts showing dramatic black balloons escaping from houses with the connotation that this black pollution was increasing so rapidly that the whole sky became filled with black balloons. It worked so well that children were gravely pointing out to their parents that they were wasters and polluters bent on killing the planet and the combination of school programs aimed at children re-educating their parents, the creation of Eco warriors to fight climate and environmental devastation. The politicians carefully annunciating “dirty black carbon” when describing C02, imprinted a lie on those children’s minds.
No wonder that vulnerable minds suffered from these mental assaults and later we noticed the withdrawal of the worse and most scary of adverts as the propagandists became aware that this mind harnessing could backfire on the alarmists when children realised that they had been lied to by our then leaders, their teachers and lost their warm trust in parents.
Many of those lied too as students in primary school are now young adults graduating from higher education and about to enter the workforce, where people can be brutally honest in their assessment of scams and scammers.
When you are lied to and frightened for most of your growing years and then find that the planet hasn’t been warming for that whole traumatic period, it is reasonable that the liars and promoters of CAGW can expect a backlash as the realisation of being conned by those you were told you could trust, actually sinks in, and if things become colder as some think it may, then expect angry reaction. Be warned they won’t be conned so easily in the future!!
It wont be easy as even now the same propagandists are typecasting Budget job cuts in the C.S.I.R.O science, citing research into combatting Ebola as the most likely effect of budget cuts, when it is the propagandists themselves that should have their jobs threatened, not the Ebola researchers – sack a few of the so called “scientists” who went with the Greens and Tim Flannery climate Commissioner line that it wasn’t going to rain any more due to rapid climate change, therefore don’t build cheap dams as they wont fill. Sack them and the top echelon that permitted that political use of propaganda.
Pluc ca change…
It makes a change from the Mutually Assured Destruction meme that dominated Western paranoia from the 1950s to the end of the 1980s, especially the Cuban missile crisis of November 1982 when we were within 20 minutes of WWIII.
Some people have short memories, it seems.
My last landed in moderation, would appreciate a check please..
Many great articles and threads on using children as “climate pawns”;
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/30/the-worst-kind-of-ugly-propaganda-david-suzuki-targets-kids-at-christmas-in-the-name-of-climate-chnage/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/12/20/more-hot-propaganda/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/22/obamas-for-the-children-climate-change-video-announcement-only-a-few-hundred-views/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/05/10/failing-to-make-his-case-james-hansen-uses-children-as-legal-pawns/
I remember that bit of hysteria about potable water. There was a posting on Facebook from some guy saying, “A latte bought in Brooklyn takes up to two gallons of drinkable water to produce! It’s all your fault that people are dying of thirst in the Sudan!” And I was thinking, “How daft does he think people are?”
Well now we know…
Some enviro in France repeat that nuclear plant “consomment de l’eau potable”: nuclear plants use DRINKABLE WATER for cooling according to them. How they came up with this crazy idea I don’t know…
Never mind a few of these are built on the Atlantic ocean, which last time I checked was not so fine for drinking.
These guys cannot get trivial stuff right.
Self-sacrifice to pre-scientific ideology is designed to depress the participants.
John
I feel really sorry for these alarmists who seem to be affected psychologically by the results of their studies. Get another job, forget about environmentalism, actually do some productive work. Become a plumber or an electrician – we need more of them!
P@ur momisugly Dolan says:
August 15, 2014 at 10:47 am
“was th first case of dellusion related to Global Warming aka climate change.: that would have to be Stephen Schneider, right?”
Schneider was in my opinion the guy who held the warmist movement together – the chief strategist (see his “honest or effective” quote). If there was ever a career opportunist it must have been Schneider. Goes back to the 70ies – he was at the Our Endangered Atmosphere conference in Stanford, with Lovelock, Mead, and that Ecoscience guy John Holdren. HE didn’t care whether it was warming or cooling – they chose CO2 as the villain in 1975 and stuck with it. (Anyone who thinks Lovelock has ever been honest should have his brain checked.)
…”Bin Laden ultimately failed in his effort to recruit frustrated greens to his campaign of mass murder, but if we don’t find a way to pull back from this green brink of societal self hatred, next time we might not be so lucky.”
============
You’re starting to scare me 🙂
The work may be turning – a faint glimmer of light ahead:
“U.S. wildlife officials are withdrawing proposed protections for the snow-loving wolverine in a course reversal announced Tuesday that highlights lingering uncertainties over what a warming climate means for some temperature-sensitive species. … U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe said in an interview with The Associated Press that predictions about climate change’s localized impacts remain ambiguous. Rejecting the conclusions of most outside experts and some of the agency’s own scientists, Ashe said the uncertainty made it impossible to determine whether less snow cover would put wolverines in danger of extinction in coming decades.”
http://timesfreepress.com/news/2014/aug/12/feds-withdrawing-proposed-protection-wolverines/?breakingnews
The “worm” may be turning …
Personally I’ve always wondered if their is a correspondence
==========
typo their there
Climate of despair makes sense to me.
You have to be emotionally unstable to accept the concept of CAGW without demanding evidence.
The tactics of the self proclaimed “Alarmed Ones” have always been emotional knee jerk stuff.
Or attempts at emotional blackmail.
A willingness to ignore history, refuse to check ones “facts’, it all fits.
When your entire self worth is invested in an illusion, you are not going to willingly disillusion yourself.
More evidence the worm is slowly turning: Tom Steyer’s reality check:
http://online.wsj.com/articles/kim-strassel-a-climate-crusaders-comeuppance-1408057542
People give $$ because of the fear of going to hell.
============
legalized extortion.
RobRoy says:
August 15, 2014 at 10:28 am
The problem with misanthropy is that eventually the hatred of mankind … is reciprocated.
FIFY
Shoshin says: “Therefore, the religion markets hell. A religion based on ‘don’t worry, all is fine’ would be broke.”
Slightly O.T. but perhaps worth mentioning as it does relate to “climatism” (dogmatic set of beliefs) and associated money demands distinct from the purity and abstraction of the science of climatology. Needless to say, the purveyors of climatism suggest each that he is an authority on the science, just as a preacher will assert authority on the religion.
But *science* doesn’t need an authority. You can do science. I do science. When properly done you will get the same results as I, and when that’s the case, we nod our heads and agree that we have both done science. Consequently, while consensus is irrelevant to “science”, it is certainly important to whether I am willing to let you spend my money.
So it is with a “religion”. Religion is just a word for a set of beliefs. Your mileage will vary. There can be no “authority” for a religion. Who is permitted to say what is a Christian? Nobody in particular, or everyone each for himself.
But if you set yourself up as an authority, and organize yourself at law as such, now you are a “church” not a religion, and you can demand money from your followers in exchange for whatever benefit accrues to accepting that dogma and taking that name.
So it is with climatism. The benefits of subscribing, at least in public, to the dogmas of climatism include employment at universities, the making of movies such as “A really inconvenient truth” or polar bears falling from the sky, and you get a license to ridicule deniers. You might even get someone to pay for your legal defense for ridiculing deniers.
Underneath all that is the science of climatology, proceeding in whatever direction discovery and truth takes it. It has no authority, it makes no demands, it has no agenda. It is there and it is waiting to be discovered.
“Practical politics …safety from hobgoblins … imaginary,” Mencken, condensed