Scientific American: "Denial" Helps Us Cope with Our Collective Climate Grief

When I was twelve, growing up in the North of England, I used to hang out in both my Dad’s greenhouse and the school greenhouse, along with all the tomato plants we grew. It wasn’t an image, it was reality, and it was great – warmth, yummy tomatoes, cutting English language classes and the like. Poor lady seems to have had a sh!t childhood and wants to inflict it on any moron that will listen.

The point of this is that nobody accepted eugenics until some minor psychiatrist “proved”it. That was the death warrant for many people. Eugenics took about 25 to 40 years to be disproved, although prominent eugenicists did move into the IPCC and UN. Can’t remember their names at the moment.
So these warmists are following that pattern, trying to use the embarrassing Lewandowsky and now these numpty to prove skeptics are crazy. Why? Because their wild science is in claim has proved invalid.
Only this is the internet age where google can summon up crazy ideas in 0.2 of a second. Skeptic voices can be heard in the same 0.2 seconds and the absurd warmist claims disproved at about the same rate.
People only have to look out the window while driving to work to see that these disasters have not happened.

Psychological projection: from wiki…
is a theory in psychology in which humans defend themselves against their own unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others. For example, a person who is habitually rude may constantly accuse other people of being rude. It incorporates blame shifting.
I think the psychosis lies within the author at Scientific American.

Part of the grief is the failure to have kooky CAGW ideas accepted by the general population even after what can only be considered massive support by a compliant and alarmist media. No one could have asked for more media support, so consistently and so unswervingly biased in favour of one interpretation of the available facts. The coverage and advantage has been as great as the pro-war propaganda during recent major wars. Perhaps people forget there were active pacifist campaigns with breathing space throughout the wars. Where are the pages of print devoted to common sense and factual presentations? I leave further analysis to the social historians.
And after all that agit-prop, and even given the appalling lack of scientific education received by the ordinary citizen, the idea that the world is about to roast because of the combustion of fuel is just not believable to the ordinary citizen.
Finding something unbelievable is not the same as ‘denial of a truth’. When something is not true to begin with like the C part of CAGW, failing to believe it does not constitute denial. In order for something to be proven true, it is axiomatic that one has to prove it is not ‘something else’. In the case of climate, the requirement is to prove it is not natural variability that provides the vague correlations underwriting the ‘human CO2’ claims. Geological history provides a power case against the alarmist narrative.
As anyone with hearing knows, the ‘melting of Arctic ice’ has the most caché these days. There is so little else that resembles the bogeymen of yesteryear the AGW enthusiasts have been reduced to crying, ‘look at that Arctic Ice retreat’. That’s it! No one can find the hidden heat, no one can find the higher temperatures that are supposed to be cruising up, no one can mention the Sahara Desert any more because it is shrinking rapidly, no one can point to anything that carries enough weight with general public to overturn their common sense and considerable experience. Once the Arctic ice starts expanding again, even that straw will slip from their alarming grasp.
The surprise for the ‘climate scientist community’ is that the masses of half-educated people supposedly as dumb as a bag of hammers compared with their ‘titled and knowing’ credentials can see through the hype like a wet T-shirt on a Florida beach. The only thing unusual about Tropical Storm Sandy was the position of the moon during the surge. The only thing unusual about Hurricane Katrina was the reaction (or lack of it) by Cheney’s minions who want to run a social experiment to see what happens during a city-wide disaster if you wall them off and don’t lift a finger to help. Not much, it turns out.
The general population is smarter and more resilient, more perspicacious and more level-headed than the average CAGW alarmist. That is bound to result in a lot of grief for the true GW believers. The climate faithful are simply in denial that so many people can be so clever as to see through their cries of “Wolf! Wolf!” The public is beginning to notice that a lot of the sheep are gone, and it is the climate shepherds that are stealing them. There is no denying that.

Katrina. And nothing since.

“So why weren’t we coming together to nip this in the bud? Why were we failing to embrace what appeared to be so obvious?”
. . Just because I’m easy . . You must at least generate the appearance that the politicos and celebrities pushing such a supposed crisis are making significant sacrifices themselves. (Only hypocritical posers/fakers would even need to be told something so blatantly obvious to normal folks, you dorky shill.)
Yer welcome.

When I was 12, workers unloading a truck at an AFB near where I lived dropped a crate of nitroglycerin near a bunker to where it was to be moved. The crate blew a huge hole in the ground as well as blowing out windows of large buildings 20 miles away. Early each morning for years afterward large spider-like trucks carried large metal crates with radioactive warning emblems away from what had been revealed as a nuclear weapons storage facility. It was a reminder that those drills we endured just four years before, during which we sat under our desk or marched to the chapel, were an exercise in futility; I lived at ground zero and there was nowhere to hide if the bombs dropped from the sky. Fortunately, none every did.
About five years later, the OPEC shut off our oil supply and the price of gasoline at the pump rose from about $0.30/gal to about a buck. Meanwhile, scientists were telling us that the world’s oil supply was limited and that the last drop of oil would be pumped out in about 30 years.
If that news wasn’t bad enough, scientists were telling us that we were overdue for an ice age.
Not long after that, though, we discovered there was a hole in the ozone layer caused by releasing CFCs into the atmosphere. If acid rain didn’t kills us first, a wicked sunburn and skin cancer would. And we’d run out of food to feed the exploding population. We’re going to starve if drugs, alcohol and tobacco doesn’t kill us first.
Now the climate is changing. Extreme weather is going to kills us all.
After a lifetime of being told scary stories, it’s hard to be scared anymore. Because
It’s 1, 2, 3, what are we fighting for,
Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn,
Next stop is VietNam.
And it’s 5, 6, 7, open up the pealy gates,
Ain’t got time to wonder why,
Whoopee we’re all gonna die.

You do rather wonder sometimes but, is this one a bit/lot bigger than the previous scares. I don’t recall any great windmill construction projects, rampant tax rises or sunshine panels going up during the global cooling crisis.
‘The People’ are patently over-reacting, they are revelling in doom and disaster scenarios and cannot in any way accept their own blame for what is perceived to be happening. They are incapable of reasonable argument any more – hence the endless appeals to authority & consensus or the relentless ad-homs.
In other words, vast numbers of people are behaving like drunks – that is how chronically and clinically depressed folks behave. Anyone over the age of, let’s say, 40 will know that.
Of course the scary thing here is like when you yourself are one of The Drunks. If you are drunk/stupid at a roaring party where everyone else is drunk, you don’t realise just how dumb you/they are all behaving. But call in on that party after a year of abstinence and frankly, its really really frightening what you see and how those folks react towards you you.
Let talk ideas and not people or events.
Two possibilities, and not mutually exclusive either.
1. Something is depressing the people. Certainly western societies get through huge amounts of alcohol but also sugar = glucose = carbohydrate. Me, you, we all, feel sleepy after a large meal. A large meal of what though.
Try that large meal without any carbs and see what happens. We are all sat here in the perfect piece of test equipment.
Maybe you don’t want to.
Why?
Are you scared to = lack of self confidence = depression.
Doctors say to eat carbs = appeal to authority = passing the buck = lack of self confidence = depression.
You get my drift?
2. Maybe what is left of our natural instincts tell us that something really rather bad is going to happen. We patently don’t know what exactly, how it will unfold or precisely when but, we just ‘feel’ something.
Maybe that something is that we are existing on a starvation diet. this is The time of the Full Stomachs. Yes we have masses to eat but it is universally nutrient free and tasteless mush. Carbohydrate. Some misguided souls venture that we may be carnivores. BS. We are lipivores. We are meant to eat fat, jst like those other predators at the top of the food chain lions/tigers. They kill to get fat, livers, kidneys, brains, blood and bone marrow. The scavengers, the vultures, hyenas maybe get to eat the meat.
Instinctively we know there is a monster over the hill.
I say, like Murray Salby although he hasn’t said it outright that I know of, the carbon dioxide signal in the sky is the smoke from the fire breathing monster that’s going to get us. Its coming from the dirt, being stirred up by tractors and ploughs and ignited with nitrogen fertiliser.
As any farmer will tell you, you cannot keep growing the same stuff in the same patch of dirt forever and all the while expecting more and more yield. It doesn’t happen and when that system crashes, it does so rapidly and spectacularly.
So there’s the prefect irony, we are growing stuff that is destroying us (obesity, heart disease and diabetes) while the growing of it destroys the dirt that everything depends on.
Of course we have the perfect universal excuse ‘Oh sorry, I was drunk at the time’

Climate Alarmism helps us deal with our collective sense of environmental guilt.
People are so alarmed at what they think we are doing to the environment generally that climate alarmism serves as a coping mechanism and avoidance strategy.
In reality we should forget bout climate alarmism and focus on more effective environmental improvement methods.

Psychiatrists are highly controversial. Move along, nothing to see here.
An Inconvenient Truth is “White Christmas” is a song, not a weather or climate forecast.
Their theory works both ways, though they are too blind or ignorant to understand that. Is that a stage of something?

‘slides were suspiciously coinciding with what we were beginning to see in the form of extreme weather, à la Hurricane Katrina. Any number of idioms might well have marked the juncture: “canaries in the coal mine” comes to mind.’
Katrina was extreme for Louisiana. It was not extreme for the world. Strong cyclones form every year, but few make landfall in the U.S. Describing Katrina as “canaries in the coal mine” is meteorologically ignorant. Dr van Susteren reveals the origins of her superstition. That you don’t share her superstition makes you defective.

The other obvious answer is we just don’t like being lied to. But seven or eight words does not make for a good article, so we get pages of climate alarmist denial instead.

I have fond childhood memories of sledding in Delaware. All winter long, it was white and cold. Except it probably wasn’t because Delaware is not a particularly Northern state. It’s just that I only remember the parts that stand out. I was 8 after all. Meanwhile, Brooklyn gets its fair share of snow too.
I let my subscription to Scientific American lapse about 15 years ago after they “blamed” the end of the last ice age on agriculture. In the time since, it’s remarkable how stable the climate has been considering how unstable the climate is.

The deterioration of our planet—the only home we have ever known and an assurance we used to take for granted—
WHAT deterioration?!!! Define it- in objective terms- and provide concrete, verifiable evidence. SA is being decidedly UN-scientific. They’re just a propaganda rag now.
If only Richard Feynman were still around…

How is anything in that article remotely “scientific”? It’s a subjective view of how things “used to be”. When I was 12 years old we rode our bikes to school right up until the Christmas break. That was 1976 and I live at 50 degrees north latitude, a fair bit further north than “New York”.
Does that mean I’m adding to the “data”? Hell no, it’s an anecdote, nothing more, nothing less. If I scrape the sides of my memory I can tell you that we’ve had multiple years of no snow right up to Christmas, but no discernible pattern really, other than to say maybe one in every ten years or so. It’s about as idiotic as saying that the snowbanks aren’t as big as when I was a kid (duh, I grew). Sadly now I measure snowfall by how high the piles are at the side of the driveway. Last year, not even waist height. The year before, over my head. On noes, the climate is warming. I fear Scientific American may have been surpassed by Sports Illustrated in terms of scientific content and quality (and that’s not saying much at all).