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Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A study by Daniel A. Chapman and Brian Lickel, of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst, claims that skeptics are less likely to contribute to a relief appeal for a natural disaster, if the appeal blames the disaster on climate change.
The abstract of the study;
This research examined whether framing a natural disaster as the product of climate change impacts attitudes toward disaster victims and humanitarian relief. Participants (n = 211) read an article about a famine caused by severe droughts, with one condition attributing the droughts to climate change and the other condition made no mention of climate change. All participants then responded to measures of justifications for or against providing aid, attitudes toward the possibility of donating, and climate change beliefs. As predicted, those high in climate change skepticism reported greater justifications for not helping the victims when the disaster was attributed to climate change. Additional moderated mediation analyses showed there was an indirect effect of climate change framing on attitudes toward donating through donation justifications.
Read more: http://spp.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/06/15/1948550615590448.abstract
It seems obvious to me why this is happening. Charity is a leap of faith – you give, because you want to help, and because you believe the person asking for your help is credible. Asking a skeptic to help victims of climate change, is a bit like asking someone to help victims of the tooth fairy. It undermines the credibility of your appeal.
Like earthquakes? And tsunamis?
And volcanoes. Don’t forget volcanoes.
I’m waiting for the tar sands to be blamed for solar flairs.
Excluding the earthquakes caused by naked coeds that seem to be localized to Malaysia.
Must be why we get so few earthquakes here in Indiana. Usually to cold for the coeds to get naked. >¿<
The earth moves here when my wife takes her bra off.
Her (.)(.) ‘s hit the floor
The tooth fairy has more integrity than AGW “scientists”
[Please do not insult the integrity and moral character of good, hard-working “tooth faeries” … by comparing them to AGW scientists. .mod]
Right. She makes a fair trade right up front and doesn’t try to scare you. Even though she’s sneaking around your room at night in the dark, it’s all very benign, unlike the monsters under the bed or in your anxiety closet. They’re alarmists.
You must have had a benevolent Tooth Fairy.
I spent my childhood in constant fear of an evil sprite who would come into my room at night and extract my teeth with a pair of Vise Grips.
Please! The tooth fairy was a “he”, not a “she”.
http://www.mommybknowsbest.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Toothfairy-Movie-Shots.jpg
Bruce, not Caitlyn?
Most of the money for supposed climate change disaster recovery is taxpayer fund transfers by government without consent anyway. That is why Jerry Brown attends disaster panel presentations at AGU. Each hour of attendance and press release on the topic is worth about $1 billion in high speed rail funds.
How about donating some of the grant funds instead of giving it to “Climate Scientists” or the IPCC?
It also makes it seem like a get-rich quick scheme, an Al Gore moment.
I have little sympathy if the disaster is a bunch of millionaires losing beach front property at Galveston when they ought not to have built those houses there in the first place.
On the other hand if it is a perfectly natural disaster happening to reasonably honorable people of modest means, then I am generous in charity regardless of what the media foolishly claims about the disaster.
In 1994 or 95 I went to a July 4 party in a brand-new $2mm house on Pensacola Beach. Three months later that house was gone.
I live in tornado alley, so some people say that I am no different that the people who build on Gulf of Mexico beaches. But tornadoes are actually very rare and very small. Even though hurricanes are far more rare, when they do come, they cut wide swaths. There is no comparison, IMO. I have lived in tornado alley most of my life and have seen 2 tornadoes. None of them were near my home.
However, the real key to settling the issue of risk management is to let the insurance industry decide on relative risk and to charge accordingly through premiums. In this way, I would not pay premiums for insurance on beachside properties, and the high premiums might dissuade building on beaches.
Except that flood insurance is subsidized heavily by the taxpayer:
“Or, consider the coastal areas in Florida. In a little less than two generations, the population living there increased fourfold, by 10 million people. Coastal exposure now represents 79 percent of all property exposure in the state, with insured value of $2.8 trillion. You’d think that frequent hurricanes would chill the rate of development, right? Not in the slightest: why should they, if insurance is filthy cheap? The path that Hurricane Andrew blazed along the Florida coast in 1992, at the time leaving $25 billion in losses, has been so lushly redeveloped that the same storm would now cause more than double the losses, estimated by a Congressional report at $55 billion. Prediction models of erosion rates expect that over the next 60 years erosion may claim one out of four houses within 500 feet of the U.S. shoreline.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/03/25/washington-is-encouraging-the-next-hurricane-sandy-by-creating-new-subsidies-for-flood-insurance/
However corruption in some less regulated portions of the insurance industry like with hurricane Sandy in New Jersey and New York may make some small difference:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/17/nyregion/hurricane-sandy-victims-say-damage-reports-were-altered.html?_r=0
http://www.ibtimes.com/fema-opens-review-every-single-hurricane-sandy-flood-insurance-claim-after-fraud-1844358
Insurance is fear based product , for you do not buy it for what you know it will happen , but because you fear what may happen.
If it therefore very much in its own interest to ‘up the fear factor ‘ and CAGW fits that bill very well, with the added advantage that it is highly unlikely they will ever have to pay out, unlike other areas where there is some risk they may have to.
Trusting the insurance industry over CAGW is like trusting ‘snake oil shipping co’ over the effectiveness of snake oil.
If a charity that’s trying to raise funds to help victims of a natural disaster trots out “global warming” as having caused the disaster or made it worse, I’d have grave doubts about that charity and its administration. If they wave the flag of unproven global warming, how can I be sure they’re not just claiming the funds raised will help the victims of the natural disaster. I’d have to take their word for it, and linking their cause to global warming undermines their credibility. So of course I wouldn’t donate to that charity.
Yep.
Did they study the opposite side? Do those who believe in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) donate more when it is mentioned and less when climate is not mentioned at all in the call for disaster help? Just another study to make skeptics demons and believers saints?
As may have happened with the Red Cross and the Haiti earthquake? They appeared to have kept trolling for donations well after they met their goal.
Read the paper. I don’t see anywhere that they even considered checking to see if climate faithful are MORE likely to give if the disaster is blamed on climate change.
So they also never even considered whether a skeptic might reject a request for aid made in the name of climate change because they don’t trust those who are trying to collect that aid, rather then that the disaster victims don’t actually need it.
Sorry. I read the paper. Wasn’t trying to tell anyone else they need to read it.
Actually just the opposite. DON’T read the paper. It’s a waste of your time >¿<
Or New Jersey. There’s the beach and a couple of feet above it are houses that are worth a fortune. The taxpayers are also footing the bill for beach replenishment for people who could pay for it themselves. Bottom line is they shouldn’t have built there in the first place. Before politicians became so greedy, there was no building on the ocean side of Rt. 9 and few if any lived at the shore year round. Almost all had a house somewhere else.
Damn skippy !
I recently was incited to write to the trustees of Boston University regarding the public statements of one of the faculty. I am sure I was not alone as the issue was then put to rest. Don’t spit in my face if you want me to make a donation seems to me to be comically facile.
It’s called marketing. If a relief effort wants to appeal to a broader market, it should leave the political drivel out. Besides, I already give plenty to relief from AGW through my Federal Income Taxes and through the interest I pay (along with the rest of you) on the skyrocketing national debt.
How I decide what charities I give to is my business.
How can people base their careers on such crap?
Because they can
t worked for Gore, didn’t it?
And isn’t there a shedload of this – ‘because they can’ – career building.
The Climate religion.
But also the governance tribe;
the regulator clade
the Helf n Safety brigade;
[I work in H&S. ALARP is my goal).
ALARP
As
Low
As
Reasonably
Practicable
Hey – folks – see the fourth word: Reasonably
Vitally important – and omitted by some Taliban H&S Freaks, who seek Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
As Low As Possible – which = zero.
Equals no-one does anything (except pay their wage, their bonus, and health insurance . . . . . . . .)
Auto
I’ll tell you one thing— if these G*dam*d pop-up advertisements in the middle of the text don’t go away soon, I will.
It is getting seriously obnoxious.
John: Possibly you should consider one of the browser pop-up blockers available. I use them and don’t seem to have the problem(s) you are experiencing.
Suggest ‘ADBlock Plus’. With Firefox browser, go to Mozilla to add it, not to the AD Block site.
+1
I installed it a couple of weeks ago after someone recommending it here, and it’s brought back the joy of web surfing of ALL sites!
I just read it on my phone. No popups here ^¿^
Stephen;
Probably me. I’ve expressed puzzlement at remarks about ads, traced the difference to AdBlocker Plus which I’ve used for years, and recommended it a few times. I’ve limited the comments, though, because the site needs to be paid for somehow, and my modest pensioner donations don’t necessarily carry the freight.
What, you’re not in the market for an IUD or a new Hyundai?
Some of these ads make me want to reach for the nearest IED.
If you are using an iMac, I use AdBlock and it cleans up all sites I visit.
If it is a reputable product I click on the link. After all, our host get a couple of microbucks per click. If you use adblocker, you get rid of a bit of aggravation, but you deprive our host of a tiny bit of revenue to keep this operation running. Of course if that makes you feel the least bit guilty, there is always the fling funds link to cut out the middle man.
Asking a skeptic to help victims of Global Warming.
There, fixed it for you.
+1 My thoughts exactly, make them own it.
TonyL…a year ago I sent an email to Heartland after their conference and stated why they should use Global Warming and not Climate Change. Joe Bastardi advocates the same position. Never had a reply from Heartland.
One man’s climate refugee is another man’s dumbass who shouldn’t have built a house on a flood plain.
Ohhhh, maybe THAT’S why we haven’t seen all the millions of climate refugees. They can’t afford to flee from the climate.
‘For just a dollar a day, you too can help a stranded climate refugee resettle to Siberia.’
If a dollar a day would get the bleeding hearts of the world to STFU, I’d probably be willing to pay it.
Things being what they are, I say that if the economics of one’s life make it a resonable choice to settle in a shanty on the beach, then there should be no real impediment to heading upslope in the event of a succession of unusually high tides.
I used to be a member of the Nature Conservancy. I liked the way they did things. Instead of complaining about pollution, trying to get BS laws passed, or staging protests, they would use their money to buy land to protect it. I first encountered this when I went fly fishing on the McCloud River. They had bought the land to keep it from being developed but they still allowed people to fish it.
However, years after I joined, they jumped onto the AGW bandwagon and their monthly magazine soon became all AGW, all the time. “Help us protect this piece of land from the ravages of global warming. Send money!”
I sent their president a resignation letter explaining why I was terminating my membership.
If more people knew and followed your course, it would help to change the political advocacy.
It is happening, albeit slowly. And eventually we’ll get to a point that the number of voters they loose will exceed the number they gain from climate faithful.
At which point they’ll all be loudly declaring that THEY never fell for the scam. Just look at their voting record. THEY never voted for carbon taxes or prices or whatever. Hell, it’ll even be true for most of them. ^¿^
They are likely receiving more than 10,000x your subscription fees to keep the “advertising for GW” coming, We know there are huge sums of money spreading the gospel, this is only one of many ways..
Maybe, but they aren’t getting my $$. I can’t control what others do, but I can control what I do.
Not an easy choice.
For the Nature Conservancy, the issue is getting the land. My guess is that they found the CAGW pitch to be popular with governments and effective with the public. It must be, judging by the way the National Audubon Society in the US has similarly tied itself to the CAGW meme. So the question is whether to support a good process because its leadership and voice is supporting bad causes.
“For the Nature Conservancy, the issue is getting the land.”
So, if a lie works better, you lie? I think that’s a recipe for disaster. It is also the “Ends justify the means”, “If you want to make an omlet you have to crack a few eggs” recipe of the Left.
You cannot support truth with lies, and trying to do so weakens the argument past redemption to anyone who knows the truth.
I left my last church over the pastor’s insistence on using discredited facts to support the existence of creation instead of evolution. Whether God exists of not, pulling up the chance of an amino acid randomly forming whole cloth from constituent atoms isn’t evidence, it’s ignorance.
Exactly the same for me. When the Nature Conservancy first started I was a regular donor. It seemed like a good idea. Instead of protesting or collecting government grants they were using private money to buy and preserve sensitive lands. But then their tone changed into the same old typical environmental exaggerations, lies, and false guilt. I dropped my membership and stopped sending them money.
211 participants? The article is pay-walled so I have not read any more than the abstract. My guess is that this is a student sample and that these results mean absolutely nothing. If someone has access to the Social Psychological and Personality Science Journal I would be interested in the details of the sample of participants.
I’m franky surprised that they could find any skeptics among the student population at UMass Amherst.
Actually, they couldn’t find one. They used the results of a sophisticated skeptic model for their predictions.
Ah… that explains it. Modeling a skeptic as evil would have the intended result.
LeeHarvey: That was my first reaction. Still it is better to be specific rather than assume the make-up of the sample.
@ur momisugly bernie –
If the academics can go off half-cocked, why can’t we?
Could it be a skeptic is anyone who think Humans cause 3 K or less warming per century?
The skeptics were probably from the engineering department.
I’m betting on there being 6 skeptics in their whole sample, who donated MORE then average to ALL aid requests, but slightly higher for those without CC then those with it.
Then, thanks to the miracle of Lew-paper surveying adjustments, they were able to get the results the expected at the start.
@ur momisugly benofhouston –
But, really… are there many skeptics who didn’t come from engneering or the hard sciences?
I think that the degree of charity towards the victims of natural disasters is not a credible divide between “skeptics” and “believers”.
In my opinion the correct divide is represented by the degree of rationality adopted to approach real questions. By this point of view you can retrieve a prototipe of the skeptical thinking in the introduction to the treaty “De re rustica” of Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella (the main agronomist of the ancient Rome) written in the first years after the birth of Christ:
“Again and again I hear leading men of our state condemning now the unfruitfulness of the soil, now the inclemency of the climate for some seasons past, as harmful to crops; and some I hear reconciling the aforesaid complaints, as if on well-founded reasoning, on the ground that, in their opinion, the soil was worn out and exhausted by the over-production of earlier days and can no longer furnish sustenance to mortals with its old-time benevolence.Such reasons, Publius Silvinus, I am convinced are far from the truth;” (http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Columella/de_Re_Rustica/Praefatio*.html). All the book of Columella was devoted to show that a rational approach to crop production is able to overcome these pre-concepts that unfortunately are also prevalent today.
The entire field of social sciences and behavioral psychology has been tainted by the recent [LaCour paper,] just retracted by Science.
Basically, Mr. LeCour likely faked the entire interview database, cutting & pasting together a database by using another survey database and pasting in fake results for his paper. His spectacular finding was that people’s deeply held beliefs could be changed a brief conversation with a polling interviewer if the interviewer revealed himself/herself as gay. It went against a massive and decades long area of research that showed such an occurrence was unlikely. The Progressives though liked the LeCour results (their confirmation bias kicked in) since it supported their internal belief that deeply held opposition to gay rights and gay marriage were easily overcome with simple brief exposure to a message.
Mr Le Cour’s job offer from Princeton was revoked. Meanwhile his PhD thesis and award are now under review at UCLA. No one at UCLA including Mr LeCour’s thesis advisor is talking to the media as the internal review is underway.
What this sordid LeCour episode represents is a basic failure at Science magazine to do a proper peer-review and ensure the database from the study was adequately examined by the reviewers.
Sound familiar???
Sorry, the name of this perp is LaCour, not LeCour.
It never occurred to these people that maybe the typical pollee just wanted to avoid an uncomfortable confrontation with a person who they didn’t want to offend?
Based on the reporting so far: few, if any, of the interviews used in the LaCour paper actually happened. Kinda hard to offend anyone if the “scientist” just makes stuff up to get published and get a sweet job offer.
I get that… but what I’m saying is that his advisor apparently had blinders on when he was allowed to even put such a thesis together.
Results can be swayed, if they couldnt politicians would not go door to door as they have for 100’s of years. Of course the methods of the paper were suspect, and downright juvenile IMO
Pols typically promise to use other people’s money to buy support from another group.
The fantastical claim in the LaCour paper was that a simple “enlightening” conversation with a gay person could sway deeply held, often religious-based, beliefs.
That is simply why, even if big-name Climate Scientists stood up today and said, “We were wrong,” most on the Left who “believe” in Climate Change simply would not be swayed from their core belief system of the supposed evils of the CO2 molecule.
Far too familiar. And if this is how utterly shambolic a fraud must be before the perp. is caught, then how many such frauds go undetected? Here is the other recent massive fraud in social psychology. For the record. Diederik Stapel and his career of deception:
http://web.missouri.edu/~segerti/capstone/StapelLying.pdf
Most of the money doesnt get to the disaster, look at the poor Haitians and the earthquake, most of the funds stolen, with the worst perps being the Clintons. These disasters are treated as opportunities by many of the elites..
Hurricane Katrina, while a catastrophe for New Orleans, was a god-send for Pope Algore and his self-enriching lie-machine that pumped up his now-discredited movie.
Surely the equal and opposite conclusion is that blaming climate change for a disaster, generates more aid.
There shouldn’t be a comma after ‘appeals’ in the headline.
[Noted. .mod]
Well spotted. Pity it hasn’t been fixed. Anybody who understands about punctuation will know what a difference the comma makes to the headline and why, therefore, it should not be there. Unfortunately understanding about the use of commas and apostrophes is not what it used to be.
Well, if you’re going to get all grammary on us, not only is the comma incorrect, but ‘which’ should be replaced with ‘that.’
Blah, blah, blah, therefore climate skeptics are nasty.
Daniel A. Chapman and Brian Lickel have encountered the bane of the social sciences. The vast majority of papers are false, obvious and/or trivial.
In all of social science, Samuelson could think of only one example that did not suffer from that.
Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem led me to give up Economics. arrow’s theorem is true, far from obvious (given many people’s desire to attach logic to public policy) and non-trivial. I am surprised Samuelson did not note this – of course, it undermines much of neo-classical economics but that is another story.
I looked it up. Now my brain hurts. Thanks bernie. 😉 Anyway, you are right, it is neither obvious nor trivial.
What’s the point in giving money to a “charity” which then promotes political propaganda like WWF or the UK RSPB?
I used to give money to the RSPB. However I live on the Somerset Levels and I soon became aware that the RSPB were advocating the intentional flooding of the land around me.
The RSPB, Environment Agency, Royal Society and BBC all seem to think that the Somerset Levels should be mostly underwater for most of the year.
The people are told that they must learn “resilience”.
They must be resilient whilst these intellectually deficient experts busy themselves flooding people’s homes and ruining people’s lives.
I no longer donate to the RSPB. I do still pay for the other organizations through my taxes and TV license. What a bunch of nasty imbeciles they all turned out to be.
What a totally counterintuitive result!
I’m stunned. 🙂
I’m stunned people get money for this sh1t.
Naturally skeptics are less likely to donate if climate change is claimed as the cause. It introduces doubt about what the priorities of the relief fund are. Are my funds going to provide food, shelter and medicine, or are they going to be diverted to further a decarbonization agenda. Credibility is important. Starting out by making claims of a dubious and unprovable nature does not enhance ones credibility. There is no shortage of charlatans hijacking or starting charities to further their own agenda.
Which should be a huge reason the Vatican should have stayed out of the UNFCCC’s Climate Change fraud. But the bribe from the UNFCCC by promising the Vatican a piece of the annual $100 billion Climate Aid fund was too tempting to turn down. Thus we are about to blessed by the pontificating Encyclical on CC, which in the long run will inflict even more damage on the Holy Roman Catholic Church when the CC meme eventually collapsing under the weight of its own lies.
“As predicted, those high in climate change skepticism reported greater justifications for not helping the victims when the disaster was attributed to climate change.”
It’s true, I never donate to schemes or scams. But they didn’t need a study to determine the real truth. All you need is the tax returns of people like Joe Biden, and the far-left in general, that demonstrate most are all-in for donating other people’s money to charity, but not so much of their own. Clinton Global Grifters Inc. is a thinly disguised money laundering scheme that pedals influence and reroutes misdirected government money into its own coffers, which then largely benefits (you guessed it) the Clinton’s. The people the donations were originally intended intended to help rarely (if ever) receive direct assistance. some estimate at less than 10% of the take, and the effectiveness of that ‘assistance’ is itself questionable.
Perhaps the more important point to the text you quoted is that it’s a lame attempt to shift blame to the skeptics. It is demagogue rhetoric and it does not even belong in social science studies.
It’s not charity to donate other people’s money. It’s called theft.
No, because they don’t want to give their charity to alarmist organizations that support climate change rhetoric. Take a look at the money raised by Mercury One for disaster relief and you will see the money flows to help people in real need.
The wrong subjects were studied. The ones who should be examined are the ones who make the appeals for charity, using “climate change” as an excuse. Perhaps that study will appear as a followup to this unimportant result.