Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Naomi Klein has claimed that the reason Americans, British, Australians and Canadians are the world’s leading “climate deniers”, is that we share a “frontier mentality”.
According to Klein;
Klein said the denial of climate science was prevalent in English-speaking countries such as Australia, Canada, the US and the UK because of a “colonial settler mentality”.
“Countries founded on a powerful frontier mentality have this idea of limitless nature than can be endlessly extracted,” she said.
“Climate change is threatening to that because there are limits and you have to respect those limits. Where that frontier narrative is strongest is where denialism is strongest.
“The rest of Europe has a keener sense of boundaries – they’ve lived against the limits of nature for longer.”
For once Naomi has a point. People who reject climate alarmism, in my experience, tend to be people who think for themselves.
I am a little surprised that these comments came from a Canadian who clearly is unaware of the climate in her own country and why many do not believe in man induced global warming . When you get 18 feet of snow in the winter like Prince Edward Island received this past winter and half of Canada had the coldest temperatures ever recorded in most Eastern Provinces and the 10 Eastern US states, you would understand why they reject man induced global warming. Do your home work Naomi. Your theories are naïve and poorly researched.
What she is canadian?
Inconcievable.
Actually I am pretty sure that is a photo of David Suzuki, AKA Dr Fruit Fly, in drag.
Naomi is a classic parasite , pontificating into the mirror.
Message to Naomi; I too despise what you see in your mirror.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Klein
“Naomi Klein (born May 8, 1970) is a Canadian author, social activist, and filmmaker known for her political analyses and criticism of corporate globalization and of corporate capitalism.”
Well. She is Canadian (at least it isn’t our fault). Obviously a progressive gadfly (no reasoning skills and a lack of technical expertise).
Background appropriate to discussing climate: spent much of teenage years in shopping malls, went to UofT but didn’t graduate.
Please remind me why her viewpoint is relevant?
That’s probably why most Canadians live within 100 miles of the US border.
Pity about the UK not exactly having all those wide open spaces and actual waves of settlers with endless expansion fantasies for the past thousand years or so. Typical CAGWarmist, fineagling the facts again to squeeze into a confected narrative. What the four nations noted do have in common, and we should add the New Zealanders to the list I suppose , in case this twit had not noticed, is a common language, democratic system, political, cultural and investment links such that we readily see, hear and understand the discourse that is happening in each other’s country. We are just old acquaintances and friends with family ties so what do you expect. Nothing to do with some “settler” fantasy although “settlers” are nothing if not pragmatists and realists.
As for the cat thing some wrote about above, it probably comes from the lips pursed in self importance, just like a cats sphincter as it swishes down the street, tail in the air.
PS
So Naomi, you reckon the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch and the French don’t have that “settler” thing going for them too? The Chinese are pretty optimistic too and they sure get around as did the Turks in their day, the Germans and the Danes / Norwegians. Wot the heck, the Swedes got out into what is now Russia – in fact they are “The Rus”! And the Jews, they are the champs at settling wide open and all sorts of spaces. Now there is a pragmatic people.
Gee whiz, a lot of people sure do get around now you mention it.
I note you never graduated from university, Naomi. Sorry to tell you this but it shows.
Er, I’d like to see her data to back up these claims.
Meanwhile, consider a little anecdotal evidence on nations which have treated nature as a resource to be exploited without remorse: the Soviet Union, China, Haiti, and Indonesia, to name a few. Bunch of Brits.
What does she expect, WUWT is only published in English!
This sort of cod psychology is an even bigger load of bollocks than the wurfling about socialist conspiracies that is so common in the comments section.
Aside from anything else, and as several posters have noted, the UK does not have a frontier mentality. It has been fully settled for a few thousand years.
“Klein said the denial of climate science…”
Well, except it is she and her ilk who don’t accept the proper application of science regarding climate.
By the way, while you are all here, let’s see a show of hands: who here “denies climate”?
*looks around, sees no hands raised*
There you go – she is not talking about any of us.
Is not wind “nature that can be extracted”? Is not sun shine “nature that can be extracted”? I just want to extract different things.
I think many here are forgetting one important thing:
back in the “frontier” days, the climate didn’t change.
/sarc
Klein is a antidemocratic sociopathic hag who is miserable because she wasn’t born in Stalin’s communist utopia. She’s trying to recreate it by using the false story the planet is burning up. If she gets her way the climate ‘deniers’ will end up in re-education camps or slave labour gulags.
Naomi makes two mistakes in her interpretation of skepticism.
We have oral histories of climate change back through our ancestors who faced such devastation. City dwellers may be more protected from that devastation (or not like in the case of San Francisco and other lit up cities of the past). Just ask a dust bowl dweller or their children who are still alive. That oral history is pretty damn accurate and records the severe regional scale affects of global climate regime shifts.
Which leads to the second mistake. We are not afraid at all of what climate change may do to rural food productivity, and forest products. In fact, we are more prepared for it than urban and metropolitan folks are.
To wit, I have nothing but laughter for city dwellers with money buying river front property, and paying for flood plain insurance. I have nothing but respect for farmers (who’s house is in a protected rock outcropping area, not sitting on valuable pasture), who know all too well that a river will meander within that flood plain, silting up here and gouging there, regardless of gooperment riprap and oh so carefully placed river log along the river bank and in the bed.
Country folks with pioneer ancestry will mitigate climate effects, even welcome the drought, flood, or freeze that will surely come again, all the while battling what is truly the devastating event: gooberment intervention.
Naomi knows not what she speaks of, nor where her plate of food or the house she dwells in, come from.
Clueless Klein asks; “Is Capitalism now at war with our planet?”
Aside from the idiotic idea of a “war on the planet” itself, this clearly shows the proclivities and motivations of the Warmunist crowd. “The Science” is simply a means to an end, and for them, “the ends justify the means”.
These people (if you can call them that) are actually at war with humanity.
Maybe “the reason Americans, British, Australians and Canadians are the world’s leading “climate deniers” is because the best skeptic website, WUWT is pretty much mostly written in English.
>>The rest of Europe has a keener sense of boundaries – they’ve lived against the limits of nature for longer.<<
Once again, a North American liberal compares North Americans to Europeans and finds the Northern Americans somehow wanting. Notice her sweeping generalizations and stereotyping here, and how she seems to conveniently ignore that North Americans originally WERE Europeans now only a few generations removed from the old world. Somehow it makes them a separate class of people. She also conveniently forgets how Europeans with their "keener sense of boundaries" brought the world the expansionist, "enlightened," totalitarian regimes of Communism and Nazism that destroyed millions of lives during the last century.
Naomi is a liberal boob who believes in dangerous fairy tales, many of which she has invented out of her own scrambled psyche. Humans are humans the world over and are not well served by Klein's divisive, simplistic, stereotypical thinking.
Socialism is the evil Santa who will put a ration coupon in everybody stocking. (Cartoon image for Josh?)
Socialist theory is a fantasy requiring constant lying to enforce its “reality”. We should not let others force their fantasies upon us. In often repeated words — don’t let the lunatics run the asylum.
Kowtowing before consensus and kowtowing before authority are exactly the same thing.
Eugene WR Gallun
Examination of the Venusian atmosphere causes denial. It’s a condition called “incontrovertible evidence”!
Perhaps Naomi Klein might take a history class or two. She may learn that of the 102 souls, on the Mayflower 45 perished by the first thanksgiving. Also a visit to the Plymouth Village would be in order, just to get an idea as to how hard life was.
michael
Every time I see the word DENIER, I think PAYROLL.
Tim
Odd comment. Do you mean the government-paid professional Climate Deniers who are funded by their 31 billions a year in “climate research” budgets?
Or the 1.3 trillions in new taxes their politicians want so desperately?
Or their bankers and businesses seeking their share of 31 trillion in carbon trading futures?
All of the above.
“The rest of Europe has a keener sense of boundaries – they’ve lived against the limits of nature for longer.”
Who’da ever thunk Lebensraum was such an important portent of global warming amid all those tree rings, ice layers and sediments of Europe eh?
If you can’t attack the message, attack the messenger. I think that’s all the Warmists can do.
Sounds like she is describing characteristics that allowed the English speaking democracies to avoid the various statist “isms” that made the 20th century so bloody. Property rights, rule of law, representative government all militate against statist remedies to the products of exhalation.
How does she explain climate denying (by thier actions not words) China?
As a Dutchman I feel the odd one out. Help!
If we include the second most skeptic country, Norway, in the list, I wonder if there any other factors that might influence climate skepticism:
http://www.russellsage.org/sites/all/files/chartbook/Fig10_Comparative.png
No confounding factors there then, Naomi.
Oddly China and Indian and most of the far east and Africa are no ‘fans ‘ of CAGW either , expect when they after some guilt cash. So how does she explain that , well that is easy ‘evil west bad ‘ everyone else good. Although like many that endlessly talk about the ‘evil west ‘ they would not live anywhere else , especially not in any of the ‘socialists paradises’ which they prise sing for , from a ‘distance’