Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Our old friend John Cook thinks climate skeptics have to be psychologically “inoculated”, to help reeducate us into accepting climate science, without triggering a reflexive “denial” response.
The science for climate change only feeds the denial: how do you beat that?
As the scientific consensus for climate change has strengthened over the past decade, the arguments against the science of climate change have been on the increase.
…
How to get the right message out
There’s a great deal of research into how to communicate science more effectively and science communication should be evidence-based. But scientists and science communicators cannot afford to ignore the potential of misinformation to undermine good science communication.
One way to reduce the influence of misinformation is inoculation: we can stop the spread of science denial by exposing people to a weak form of science denial.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3YngyVdyrI
The findings of psychology underscore the importance of this new study into the production of misinformation by conservative think-tanks. To paraphrase the authors, the era of science denial is not over. Climate science communicators would be prudent not to start waving a “mission accomplished” banner just yet.
One question John – have you tried looking in the mirror?
Climate models have demonstrated no skill whatsoever at predicting the climate. There has been no improvement in the embarrassingly broad range of climate sensitivity predictions, which strongly suggests models are very incomplete, that scientists are having a hard time reconciling models with reality.
John, what is the source of your overwhelming confidence in your position? Why do you ignore the growing discrepancy between models and observations? Could it be, that you are the one who is clinging desperately to climate fallacies, in the face of a growing body of adverse evidence?
You’d better hope you’re right John Cook and Gavin Schmidt because whatever it is you’re spending to keep doubling down like this, is going to run out one day.
“I’ve never found a single person pushing the global warming religion who isn’t in some way a parasite on the public purse.”
Sorry, cannot agree.
Have one green wife and 3 green sons, all intelligent people with a wish to improve the world. Many of my friends are intelligent people but suffer from the same disease.
People need someone or something to blame for life’s problems.
On the Cook agenda there are two obvious problems.
He quotes 3 other studies at different times all showing 97%
4 studies of a nebulous consensus all coming up with exactly the same figure?
Like winning Tattslotto with the same set of numbers 4 times in a row.
Absolutely unbelievable.
He then doubles down by saying they had several different definitions of a consensus but the results all kept coming out the same way at 97%.
Any sane person would understand if you change the definition you should get different outcomes, even if only by a few percent.
When you do not you should know you are being conned.
97% is the same percentage as any communist or dictatorial election result.
Near total support with 3% chucked in to make the result “believable”.
Comments at the conversation closed overnight. I will try to put this comment , middle bit , up there tomorrow.
Anthony
“97% is the same percentage as any communist or dictatorial election result.
Near total support with 3% chucked in to make the result “believable”.”
An article along these lines would be fantastic to use against Cook forever.
this says it all.
A cowboy-hat-wearing Mormon rancher who died during the arrests of his fellow Oregon occupiers on Tuesday night had vowed weeks ago never to be taken alive by authorities.
Image: LaVoy Finicum
Robert LaVoy Finicum at daughter Challice Finch’s wedding. Finicum Family
LaVoy Finicum, one of the protesters’ de facto spokesmen, died after shots were fired when police stopped the group on Highway 395 as they headed to a public meeting. Five of his cohorts were arrested at the scene, officials said.
Oregon State Police said an investigation was being carried out into what it described as a “officer-involved shooting,” following protocols used “when deadly physical force is used.” The FBI and state police said they had conducted “enforcement action” along the highway at around 4:25 p.m. local time (7:25 p.m. ET).
Authorities would not confirm Finicum’s death but his daughter Challice Finch told NBC News that she had been notified by another protester.
Finicum was a Mormon rancher from Arizona who had 11 children, 19 grandchildren and a wife of 23 years.
During the occupation, the 54-year-old broke away from the rest of the group and set up a one-man camp on a chair outside the building, hunkered down under a sleeping bag, a tarpaulin, and clutching his rifle in the bitter January air.
Finicum vowed three weeks ago that he would rather die than be taken into custody.
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FROM JAN. 6: There Are Things More Important Than Your Life: LaVoy Finicum 0:56
Go away.
The same number popping up in that kind of way was what tipped people off that Cyril Burt’s work was fake.
(Whoops, unclear. Not 97%. Having a number that was exactly the same in several studies.)
The issue I’ve run into with the AGW crowd is that they steadfastly refuse to look at any data that is contrary to their belief system. John Cook appears to be a blazing example of this.
I’m just wondering how long this failed CAGW hypothesis can last under the rules of the Scientific Method..
The disparity between CAGW projections vs. reality already exceed 2+ standard deviations for 20+ years, which is sufficient disparity and duration to discomfirm the CAGW hypothesis.
The CAGW alarmists are well aware of this reality, which explains why they rushed to adopt KARL2015 adjustments to avoid CAGW being tossed in the wood chipper…
The indefensible KARL2015 adjustments were so obviously contrived, Congess subpoenaed NOAA for all internal KARL2015 e-mails, which NOAA has so far refused to do, claiming it’s “propriety” information…. Jeez… Add contempt of Congess to their crimes…
How much longer will we have to put up with this CAGW charade???
How much longer? That’s a good question.
How much longer until they admit their math was off on the peak oil alarm? That the hole in the ozone layer is a natural phenomenon that was there all along? That the population bomb was a dud?
When has a green or a socialist EVER admitted they were wrong? And what makes you think they’re likely to start now, with their greatest failure ever?
As suggested by the title, inoculation and brainwashing are similar. Brainwashing however seeks to get people to adopt different ideas while inoculation is concerned with protecting existing ideas. The goal or process of of attitude and belief inoculations concerns strengthening existing attitudes and beliefs and building resistance to future counterarguments.
If you think it’s supporting proper thinking you call it inoculation, if you disapprove of application it is better labelled as “mind control”. In practice inoculation can provide protection from brainwashing or of a person’s being captured by propaganda or it can serve as mind control and suppress worthwhile inquiry and inhibit rational consideration.
Ideally the scientific process provides for the washing out bad ideas, as through observation,testing and experiementation the better ideas gain support while the lesser ideas are marginalized. Using psychological processes that work (outside of the truth or falsity of the underlying beliefs) seems like a dangerous course and antithetical to a scientific approach. Don’t we want to give counterarguments any attention they may be deserving of. But I can see the logic of someone who has the TRUTH and believes others have to be manipulated to understand and support it.
It remains amazing to me that all the climate models are collectively wrong to the upside, they must all be intentionally doing the same thing wrong and refusing to fix it. You’d think one modeller would eventually notice they are always high, so a curious modeler would find what’s wrong and fix it but nope that’s not being done here. One can only conclude the modelers don’t want to find the correct answer, they want to provide answer the alarmists want to hear.
When a group of people play the “guess the number of marbles in a jar” game, each individual guesser usually doesn’t have a clue, but somehow the average of their bad guesses turns out to be near the correct number. It doesn’the work this way in climate modeling. I wonder how the “guess the number of marbles” game would work if the participants were told the person who guesses the lowest amount will get punished.
Absolutely right. If they dialed the co2 sensitivity down to what it actually is then you’d have no global warming and show’s over folks. It’s actually very funny to watch them hauling their dreadful and shameful dead albatross around for all eternity. Not a job I would ever do.
‘But scientists and science communicators cannot afford to ignore the potential of misinformation to undermine good science communication.’
Can’t afford? What does that mean? What’s at risk? Their life? Their income?
Freedom of speech is tolerance of the wrong.
Who are these “science communicators,” and where did they come from? We didn’t used to have them. Life was better then.
“As the scientific consensus for climate change has strengthened over the past decade”
Hmmm. I am not sure what “scientific consensus for climate change” means. I am very doubtful that any such “consensus” has strengthened among scientist or engineers over the past 10 years. Perhaps Cook meant political consensus instead.
I suppose this is but the first of many inoculations to come. But look out for a flood of intentionally wacko comments in the blogosphere intended to make skeptics appear to be racists, misogynists, and any other ignorant or nasty kind of “ist”. Just another Alinsky tactic:
RULE 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.
RULE 8: “Keep the pressure on. Never let up.” Keep trying new things to keep the opposition off balance. As the opposition masters one approach, hit them from the flank with something new.
RULE 12: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.
When one side of a scientific debate relies on shrinks and pseudo scientists to make their point, then they have lost the debate.
I am perplexed:
why do you insist on posting graphics which include the “mean” of the various models’ outputs…the multi model mean is a meaningless, inevitably misleading concept, one divorced from any professionally accepted statistical analysis.
See RGB@Duke’s numerous posts on this subject.
Since large scale conspiracy theories are shown to be unstable by probability modeling, then it’s time to move on to how they persist in policy and belief systems against the fact checking of such truth detectors as satellite data. See for background
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/01/160126162330.htm
Resourceguy,
“Since large scale conspiracy theories are shown to be unstable by probability modeling…”
Shown by some physicists that got a paper published? What happened to your skepticism, sir? Probability modeling? Human society probability modeling? And you go for that as if some sort of scientific evidence? Amazing . .
Do I need to mention all the communist French scientists who were pro-Soviet Union?
Being communist is one thing – let’s say it’s ideological, or ideals-logical as the French ministry of ecoloonacies, Ségolène Royal (also mother of François Hollande’s children), describes the root of this word (“idéologique”/”idéaux-logique” – yes, she isn’t very bright or even very good in French).
Being a supporter of Soviet Union is another thing entirely. Soviet Union after the war (the war during which the communist union, the CGT (confédération générale du travail) helped the Reich by sabotage in the French military plants), was forcing official “science” on biology.
Few scientists threw away their membership card of the PCF (parti communiste français) and too late.
People now claim that no one could know about Soviet Union. But people knew already in the 30ties, they were just not heard.
The secrets of Soviet Union were well kept by being public domain but too ugly.
When you discuss with French academics, try to bring that up. You will feel the antibodies.
phew!
– this guy just keeps on + on eh?
I normally avoid insults and prefer to make a point via independently verifiable evidence – but I’m happy to make an exception for the odious smirking Mr. Cook. It is part of his MO to be provocative but in terms of the pyschological projection of truly putrid made up drivel – he’s world class.
That the twerp is funded by Aussie taxes must be a sounce of enduring pride for both the taxpayers and the downunder academic community
The Cook article at “The Conversation” comes a day after another one ranting about “deniers” by Lewandowsky,
https://theconversation.com/we-just-had-the-hottest-year-on-record-where-does-that-leave-climate-denial-53576
where I just posted this comment, which I expect will soon be deleted:
“It’s a nice illustration of the dishonesty of the so-called Conversation, and its claim to be free of bias, that rather than provide an alternative view, this article is followed up by another one featuring a virtually identical picture by Lewandowsky’s fellow climate activist John Cook.”
Talking about balance:
https://theconversation.com/pour-creer-des-emplois-que-peut-le-politique-quand-seul-le-patronat-decide-53472
If you don’t read French, it’s a Marxist lamentation about the power of employers and neoliberal politics, whatever that is…
HAHAHA
from wiki
The Iraqi presidential election of 1995 took place on October 15 of that year. It was the first direct presidential election under the rule of Saddam Hussein, who had seized power through the Revolutionary Command Council in 1979. Taking the form of a referendum with no other candidates, the election involved giving voters paper ballots that said: “Do you approve of President Saddam Hussein being the President of the Republic?”[1][2] They then used pens to mark “yes” or “no”.[2] The next day, Izzat Ibrahim, Hussein’s deputy in the ruling Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), announced the incumbent had won 99.96% of some 8.4 million valid votes cast. Officially, 3,052 people voted against him (45 of them in Baghdad),[3][4] and turnout was 99.47%.[5] The international community reacted with widespread incredulity to these figures.[6]
guess he didn’t know about the 97% meme but still funny, and about the same looks to me
John Cook writes:
“The science for climate change only feeds the denial: how do you beat that? ….”
======================
Yeah John, ain’t it a bitch that the science doesn’t support your CAGW propaganda and that the more people are exposed to the science the more skeptical of CAGW they become
“John Cook writes:
“The science for climate change only feeds the denial: how do you beat that? ….””
Let me fix that –
“The science for climate change only feeds the denial that anthropogenic global warming will cause catastrophic climate changes: how do you beat that? ….”
You don’t, nor should you try to.
You accept that your belief doesn’t match the science.
Can you say, “reality check”?
Authority figures, foretelling
Hot doom (and our “myths” dispelling),
Cast great dispersions
On skeptical versions
(Which keep carbon credits from selling)!
Now, shriller and louder they’re yelling,
To drown out the doubters’ rebelling!
New taxes are “just”
When you’ve gained public trust,
So “the questioners” (quickly) they’re quelling.
I’ve arrived at this realization;
Our industrial civilization
Can only be sin
If the ‘green’ Marxists win-
On their platform of demonization!
Psychologists go to college to try to understand their own problems. When they finish they think they know themselves, and they assume everybody else thinks like they do. He simply cannot understand those of us trained in critical thinking.
This clown thinks we will swallow the ‘climate change’ cow flop if they sugar-coat it and call it a cinnamon roll.
Thanks for confirming what I’ve suspected for years. Soft science = soft thinking.
http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com/pages/reviews4.html
Thanks for the link, Hortense. Depressing to see that it was written a decade and a half ago. Things have only gotten worse since then for America’s public schools.
I forced myself to watch his insidious ‘Inoculation’ video. I don’t think he’s aiming this ‘psychological’ technique at heretical scientists, or even rational laypeople who don’t accept the Gospel of Climate Change. I think he’s aiming at children, maybe the children of skeptics, maybe even college students.
There is no surer sign that we’re dealing, not with science, but with a religious cult, and one that is looking to consolidate its hold on the governing elites by inoculating the young. This fellow, and the movement he represents, are more dangerous that we might guess from viewing his laughable, oleaginous smirk.
/Mr Lynn
Cook must not get around much. If one visits general population news sites and looks at articles on AGW they will see all kinds of “weak” skeptic views (and weak alarmist views). Both are much more prevalent than strong views. So, how is he going to change something that is already orders of magnitude larger than anything he could create?
The guy reality isn’t very smart.
Previously John Cook had a 2013 paper** retracted in 2014 that conspired about climate skeptics being kooks who conspire, and now we see John Cook conspired again recently that climate skeptics conspire {The Conversation, ‘The science for climate change only feeds the denial: how do you beat that?’ January 26, 2016 2.18pm EST}. In that article John Cook wrote,
John Cook has a long term repeatedly expressed fixation with theories about there being conspiring skeptics. That makes John Cook a person who sees conspiring in people he intellectually opposes. John Cook is person who looks at the world through conspiracy colored glasses. John Cook need not look in the mirror to see that, he needs to just realize that he has become the mirror.
** Cook was co-author of retracted paper ‘Recursive fury: conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation’ by Lewandowsky, Cook, Oberauer, and Marriott, published by journal Frontiers on 18 March 2013.
John
Yep. Antibodies surging.
Goes along with US government school system focus on students coming to consensus. It’s all One.
L. E. Joiner: Extremely dangerous; UN already is acting on this. US schools too.
rtj1211 January 26, 2016 at 11:56 pm
+1
Recently I had a discussion with two friends. As they are mainly informed by the popular press, the discussion inevitably did turn into a confrontation, even while I was trying to be as open and careful as I could manage. We agreed to stop the discussion before it would start poisoning the friendship.
For now my feelings tell me they are convinced I am brainwashed and tricked into being skeptical and I guess form my part I feel they are pretty brainwashed themselves.
If any discussion in the future would start again though, my approach would be different. No head-on talk about climate itself any more, but first and foremost “going back to basics” with questions like:
“How can you test if information on websites can be trusted?”
“What different kind of info is out there and what different kind of testing would you need for them?”
“How does science work, what different approaches are there in science, and for predictive science what checking needs to be done?”
The big challenge for scientist would be to engage on this area with non-scientists. Not to try to educate them in science, but to give tools for clear thinking also in other areas. The big caveat would be to think you just have to approach with logic and you can brush aside political and religious thinking. This is what a lot of the original skeptical and fact-checking sites erroneously did do, only to expose their own hidden beliefs and political bias. My approach would be to get these different ways of thinking and reasoning out in the open and differentiate between them and draw the boundaries between them. Not because political or religious thinking would be something bad, but to safeguard purity in the scientific approach and prevent spilling over from other areas.
For now I won’t start the subject with them. I handed them some material to think over already and will wait if something will come out of that. How far they will go on this is up to them, because in the end only their own effort will bear some fruit, not me trying to convince them.
Indeed, it may very well be, they are not after good and trustworthy info – maybe they just want to be entertained by the main stream media. Because “brutal honesty” is not easy.
““One way to reduce the influence of misinformation is inoculation: we can stop the spread of science denial by exposing people to a weak form of science denial.”
Oops , they already did this. Aren’t Mann, Jones, Trenberth, etc. the poster boys for “science denial” ?
The Climategate emails already did a good job -but not in Cook’s favor, unfortunately.
Which leads me to another point. Cook, et al are much too vociferous in their “denial -propaganda” campaigns, indicating psychological projection toward true skeptics in order to deal with their own cognitive dissonance. In other words they don’t believe the “science” themselves on some level of their psyche but are incapable of resolving their own repression of this awareness and must project it outward onto others, in order to squelch it at any cost.
“Psychology 101”
Bingo, much of their behavior is clearly a psychological projection. Real psychologists are missing an opportunity to study this as it happening.