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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Most warmists, minus a very tiny but vocal hard core group, are not interested in the science anyway. This is quite secondary to their moral interest in the ‘problem’. If the science is ultimately largely dismissed, they will have moved on by then, to other topics of moral interest to them.
Most warmists are probably recycled Club of Romists. Cheap energy is not running off fast enough, and pollution isn’t killing people fast enough (esp. in developed countries), so they needed another scare story.
“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.”
The understatement to end all understatement. The climate doomsayers, which includes all climate scientists with the exception of Dr. Curry and a handful of others, have done incredible harm to the children born after 1975 or so. Too bad that the media will not report that harm. The only report of harm of which I am aware is the action of a British judge to require that showings of “An Inconvenient Truth” must be accompanied by an explanation of the ten or more falsehoods that it purveys.
I agree with those who hold that telling children they have no future is a form of psychological child abuse. I was born in 1950. Those of you in my age bracket may remember all the doomsday talk of nuclear war, nuclear school drills of crouching under our desks, constant stream of disaster movies, neighbors building fall-out shelters, etc. That may explain why I like having a small stockpile of emergency stores. But I shrugged it off and did what I could to live a good life.
In the 1980s, sometime after Reagan was elected President, a neighbor and his family came over for a pool party. As they were leaving I made some comment to their 9 year old son about doing his homework. He very seriously said, “Why bother. We’re all going to die soon in a nuclear war anyway.”
My reply was to laugh and say, “That’s the same thing I was told when I was your age. If I had listen to them I wouldn’t have this nice house with a swimming pool today.” I don’t know how the child grew up, or whether he paid heed to my comment, but if he didn’t, the gloom and doom crowd is responsible for his not reaching his full potential.
Wow, this is an unexpected turn of events. I can only hope that it hasn’t afflicted 97% of us. Thinking back on Weepy Billm the sKs jugend, explodiing children videos, Greenpeace’s santa looking rather like a dungeon-incarcerated maniac ….. It’s one thing for our elected officials to have been scammed by UN CAGW ideol_ogues planning des-truction of civil_ization aided by their useful and well compensated idiots, but if it turns out to have been rather a product of mass pathological hysteria, that is really scary. European and US governments should resign en masse and seek therapy before it is too late. Man, there has never been a riper situation for Republicans to to take advantage of it all if there are any left with the guts to go for it.
The global warming alarmists are admitting they are crazy.
A warning should have been issued about reading that SMH article: “Could induce vomiting.”
In my opinion these people are insane and delusional from birth.
Cheers
Roger http://www.rogerfromnewzealand.wordpress.com
tteclod:
Your post at August 15, 2014 at 8:54 pm you write in total
Yes, I “Comprende”.
Your words I have quoted proclaim you to be an ignorant fool who knows nothing – and understands less than nothing – about Christianity, and who is so stupid that he is willing to display his ignorance and misunderstanding in words, but is not so stupid as to put his name to those words.
What is interesting is that you are an anonymous blogger who claims “anonymous bloggers have jumped on the apologist bandwagon” so it can be concluded that you are a troll whose ignorant and untrue post was intended to start a flame war.
Richard
Got lucky with the timing occurred the same month as Bradley Manning,Julian Assange and Wilki leaks.
If the pause does not go away, there is a real danger that the cult members will commit mass suicide a la Jim Jones.
A climate skeptic should know better than believing in ridiculous claims that “Bin Laden” tried to recruit anyone in 2010. All evidence suggest he was dead since almost a decade by 2010. A notion reinforced by the stupid Abbottasbad fairy-tale. But I understand it is tmpting to suspend belief to ling AGW-belivers to terrorists. But it is not intellectually or morally honest. AGW believers are not terrorists, and AGW sceptics are not funded by big oil.
Jtom says:
August 15, 2014 at 4:53 pm
I agree with those who hold that telling children they have no future is a form of psychological child abuse. … (trim) … I don’t know how the child grew up, or whether he paid heed to my comment, but if he didn’t, the gloom and doom crowd is responsible for his not reaching his full potential.
—
Nailed it. This is not so much about people not being able to covert others to AGW or greenery, but the debilitating feeling of believing it’s all true (data shows only a-causal variability that has occurred numerous times before), and that nothing is even being done about it. The people who taught them to believe that something must be done, rather that taught them to evaluate honestly to see if there really is anything needing to be done, is what’s created this grip of doom-abuse in the minds of people who trusted the hockey schtick toting experts and swallowed it all – hook, line and sinker.
Skepticism is a necessary evil from a young age, because the alternative of feverish ignorant idealism followed by dawning morbid pessimism, followed by doomiersh bleakness cripples people, and completely unnecessarily. None of the ‘outlooks on life’ we are feed are valid, they’re all illusions that we’re lead into unawares early on, which then play out predictably in horrible ways for years. It’s not only child abuse, its abuse of society as a whole.
Björn from Sweden
A climate skeptic should know better than believing in ridiculous claims that “Bin Laden” tried to recruit anyone in 2010. All evidence suggest he was dead since almost a decade by 2010. A notion reinforced by the stupid Abbottasbad fairy-tale. But I understand it is tmpting to suspend belief to ling AGW-belivers to terrorists. But it is not intellectually or morally honest. AGW believers are not terrorists, and AGW sceptics are not funded by big oil.
Al Jazeera says it was Bin Laden. I mean anything is possible – Bin Laden might have died 10 years ago, Obama might have been lying when he claimed to have killed Bin Laden. But thats a pretty way out conspiracy theory – not impossible, but I’d like to see some more evidence.
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2010/01/20101277383676587.html
I never said environmentalists in general are terrorists – I specifically said Bin Laden failed to recruit deep greens to his cause. But as every tyrant the world has even known has demonstrated, people who feel utterly frustrated and powerless are easy pickings for those who offer them a false path to hope.
ya, I could have drafted that better
for further comedy..on abc radio national science show sat 16th aug first up was..
naomi orestes touting her new book a fantasy of the world in 2040/50
this “effort”
follows airings on Big Ideas of Clive hamilton earlier in the week
they seem to be having yet another push on to try and scare more people and keep the fear levels raised in the gullible
With the level of corruption demonstrated by Lew and gang that was acceptable to his peers, I don’t really think much if anything produced by his peers is worth a glass of war spit.
In a rational belief system climategate would have been cause to pause and ponder if the path of cliamte catastrophism was the right one. Instead at every opportunity most climate obsessed people have doubled down, denied there are any problems, fabricated more studies, demanded more laws, and sought to silence those few voices that have dared to question their collective delusion.
This study is more of the sort of moral hazard/rent seeking tripe that characterizes the strange mix between soft science and fanatical belief in a non-falsifiable theory. No introspection. No consideration of “could they be wrong?”. Only how these true believers are suffering because they did not get their way.
Truly when fanatical belief trumps ethics and morals these sort of papers pop up like weeds.
“No introspection. No consideration of “could they be wrong?”.”
It’s like there was an horrible accident (manipulation of data, science for sale), with victims on the floor (“homogenized” data), people running away from the crime scene (NASA, IPCC…) with many people watching (the “scientific community”) and nobody (no scientist) calls the police, or does anything.
It is not surprising that trolls are so desperate to derail this thread.
I hope that the one thing that works- ignoring them can continue here.
Do Not Feed The Trolls.
philjourdan
August 15, 2014 at 12:47 pm
I raise a glass of happiness to toast your good fortune. You are a lucky man.
Björn from Sweden says:
August 16, 2014 at 3:15 am
“AGW believers are not terrorists, and AGW sceptics are not funded by big oil.”
As AGW believers are the governments, they don’t need to be terrorists. They can use the taxpayer money they steal to fund terrorism if need be; in all other cases they can use police force and regular military to force the population to worship them.
tteclod says:
August 15, 2014 at 8:54 pm
“Let’s slip down the slippery slope into religion for just a moment, and attempt an analogy. I’ll use Christianity, because that’s easy and won’t result in calls for my head.
¿Comprende?”
Now show us that you have some COJONES and do it again for the OTHER religion, coward.
People like Gore, Flannery et al. are simply the sales team. The Board of Directors are locked in tight and out of range.
They tell us that global warming is the biggest threat that faces mankind.
And yet the one thing they really, really want is for global warming to resume with a vengeance.
You couldn’t make this up….
Chris
Klem: “Whenever my kids tell me about this, I have to sit them down with world maps and climate records to ‘debrief’ my children. I have to do this multiple times per year.”
Maybe not such a good idea. They won’t remember what you say, just that it’s different from what the teachers tell them. They will decide that their Dad is a nut who won’t leave them alone with his crazy ideas.
On the other hand, leave things alone and it will all go out of fashion. Believe me, by the time they are thirty they won’t be able to remember what they believed when they were ten, or why they believed it.
It’s like the video game manufacturers. Certainly, they are trying to turn your kids into a generation of psychopaths, just like the preachers say they are! Do they succeed? Like heck they do.
She was friendly-interviewed on NPR about a week ago.
James the Elder says:
August 15, 2014 at 7:58 am
How long before a Pied Piper arrives on the scene and convinces the flock that Guyana is a nice place to get away from it all?
I say the sooner the better. Being rid of these yahoos once and for all would be a wonderful and prosperous thing for all humankind.