EPA funded Sociologist Sabrina McCormick has some advice for city officials trying to push their climate projects past the legislature;
The best way to fight climate change? Don’t call it climate change.
American cities from Boston to Baton Rouge are getting hammered by hurricanes, torrential downpours, and blizzards amped up by climate change. Maybe that’s why Americans are coming around to the idea that the climate is actually changing. But are all the floods, heat waves, and other disasters spurring cities to prepare for our overheated future?
Sabrina McCormick, a sociologist at George Washington University who once investigated how cities cope with disasters for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, set out earlier this year to find out. Her study, recently published in the journal Climatic Change, breaks down 65 in-depth interviews with city officials and experts in six cities — Portland, Boston, Los Angeles, Raleigh, Tucson, and Tampa. It seeks to answer the etiquette question from hell: How does a city go about preparing for something that its residents would rather not think about, or even believe in?
In a recent interview, McCormick said she learned that many city officials believe the key to getting everybody on board to battle climate change is to avoid uttering the words “climate change.” It’s “a poisonous term to use,” one said. …
Read more: http://grist.org/cities/the-best-way-to-fight-climate-change-dont-call-it-climate-change/
The study referenced by the Grist article;
Localized vulnerability assessments are critical to effective climate adaptation. However, the differences between how local decision-makers and experts see vulnerability have not yet been fully explored, especially in the United States. Seeing possible distinctions between these approaches is critical since it is necessary to ensure a comprehensive, accountable approach. This research explores the distinct approach of local stakeholders to conceptualizing climate vulnerability in six American cities. Sixty-five interviews of cross-sectoral local stakeholders were conducted in: Boston (MA), Los Angeles (CA), Portland (OR), Raleigh (NC), and Tampa (FL). Findings demonstrate that conceptualizations of vulnerability are affected by intellectual frameworks that tend to orient around infrastructure and human health; that retrospective and prospective thinking are inter-related and affect one another; and that institutionalized forms and biases are critical. These factors shape the way that vulnerability is conceived differently than traditional expert frameworks.
Read more (paywalled): http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-016-1757-3
I’m not sure how McCormick reconciles “an accountable approach” with not mentioning that proposed public works projects are part of a climate agenda. Perhaps accountability means something different to sociologists.
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The UNDP figured this out a long time ago. Don’t call it climate action. It won’t sell as well as bureaucratic mumbo jumbo that is too fancy to understand but fancy enough to hold in awe. They call it Sustainable Development Goals.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2812034
Independently the use of the word ‘change’ is not good in marketing.
Powerful words include ‘free’ and no strings and can opt out, no more to pay ‘proven scientific evidence’.
Rebranding as stated above is the best way out of this, so it will be ‘moving forward’ and ‘sustainability’ which ‘no one may deny’.
The problem is in the core narrative.
Extremes of weather encompass the most likely forecasts in the next 50 to 100 years.
Even if you believe that there will be more cyclones and bigger storms in a warming world, when this is unlikely or that there will be more hot days, which is more likely, you may as well build to higher specifications against that one in a two hundred year event.
In NSW the water board, despite the Professor Flannery predictions of dams drying up, have been quietly building the dam walls for a 200 year rainfall event.
There is good sense in building cities with ergonomic skyscrapers and open spaces able to withstand climate change.
From a sociological point of view she has a problem.
If the real people who actually build cities don’t believe CAGW theory, they may not be prepared to change their building codes, for good reason, on those grounds.
But their codes may still need improvement for other reasons, such as the fact that climate changes anyway.
Perhaps her best bet would be to argue that climate always changes and cut the cackle.
After all, this may actually be true.
“Powerful words include ‘free’ and no strings and can opt out, no more to pay ‘proven scientific evidence’.”
Don’t forget, “You can keep your doctor.”
God help us.
Are these people unable to write in even vaguely understandable English!
I think you misunderstand the purpose of pomo writing. It is not to convey information as such, especially not to the unwashed. It is to establish your membership of a particular community. This style of writing is valued BECAUSE it is distinctive.
I have had a paper in my field nearly rejected because the language was too informal. I still don’t understand what was informal about it. Maybe I used “don’t” instead of “do not”. Every discipline (from physics to panel-beating) has its own dialect.
The other thing that’s very important in pomo papers is to cite everyone else in your field at least once in every paper. That way the whole community of pomo crackpots gets to survive another academic year.
The people targeted by the writing will not admit they have no clue what it says but they will merrily agree with the author, showing how wise they are by accepting the information.
The best way to sound important is to make sure nobody can figure out what you are saying.
I still like using Global Warming, especially on a cold winter day…
These are poisonous too – to humanity:
Climate action
Climate agenda
Climate agreement
Climate anxiety counseling
Climate blueprint
Climate budget
Climate catastrophe
Climate challenge
Climate chaos
Climate crisis
Climate danger
Climate d*nier
Climate disruption
Climate fatigue
Climate finance
Climate justice
Climate mitigation
Climate policy
Climate punishment
Climate resilience
Climate risk
Climate scenarios
Climate weirding
“I’m not sure how McCormick reconciles “an accountable approach” with not mentioning that proposed public works projects are part of a climate agenda. Perhaps accountability means something different to sociologists.”
This was always the end game. I suspect the socialist sociologists are one and the same with the greens CAGW activists. They are becoming frustrated by the lack of traction their games have been getting latley, namely Climate Change and Global Warming, so they feel emboldened to just act out and TAKE what they want by deception and force. They have had a great executive influence!…Now they will just take your money and spend it on their heart’s desires and cut out the Green Agenda middle man.
oh is change EVER gonna come.!!!
Name changes are common within government buearocracies, the reason why they are common is because as we all know its hard to hit a moving target
I’ve admired Confucius for a long time, the “Rectification of Names” in particular. If any political party here adopted the rectification of names as part of its program, and *lived* it, they’d get my vote.
Rebranding again are we? How about…. Climate hysteria or Global flight of fancy?
I believe in Climate Change!
I believe in Climate Change!
I believe in Climate Change!
I believe in Climate Change!
I believe in Climate Change!
I believe in Climate Change!
http://hondaswap.com/attachments/hypnotize-gif.13615/
http://hondaswap.com/attachments/13615d1276293874-hypnotize.gif
Take me to your policy leader. I’ll do anything for you, anything. (Just don’t call it climate change. Call it Gina.)
Keep inventing new terms and attaching them to corruption, scientific malpractice and leftist / Marxists politics, and we’ll keep making those terms politically poisonous.
Check out the “Visually similar images” you get when you right-click her image at the top and select “Search Google for image.”
I think she is saying that the concept of climate change stinks so much that to get their power grabbing agenda happening they are going to have to try something else.
“It seeks to answer the etiquette question from hell: How does a city go about preparing for something that its residents would rather not think about, or even believe in?”
Hell’s Etiquette for Complete Dummies: How to Get Elected and Do What No One Elected You to Do Without Anyone Knowing
…Donald Trump is the “CHANGE” they fear ! He will be the beginning of the end of this “Lunatic Fringe” !
Methinks you place too much trust in the Donald…
“I’m not sure how McCormick reconciles “an accountable approach” ”
In Holland, well known for its protection by dikes, we counted the risk of flooding by looking back to the water level in the past. Water levels in Holland mostly are very well measured. From there we counted the chance to flooding statistically, could be 1:1250, 1:4000, 1:10.000. This means for example: for place X with a dike of 6 meter the chance on flooding is once in the 10.000 years. Since 1996 safety is arranged in a law, the “Wet op de waterkeringen”, simply to translate as “Law on the dikes”. The check up is “climate independent”. A possible future climate change is NOT taken into account. We want to be safe anyway.
What nowadays is taken into account is not only the chance on flooding, but also the [personal and economic] risk there is. Where risks on economic damage or risks because of loosing essential functions are very high, the ‘protection level’ rises. In Holland “Rijkswaterstaat” can tell you everything about water safety. And about how to count the risk.
I think her activities of promoting these falsehoods are insidious and Pure EVIL. That they are promoted by the EPA is even worse.
When anyone uses the technically-ambiguous term “climate change” I tend to dismiss them as scoundrels or imbeciles.
The issue is catastrophic human-made global warming, and whether it is catastrophic or not. That is the basis of the oft-rancorous debate between global warming alarmists (aka “warmists”) and “skeptics”, who disagree on the magnitude of Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (“ECS”) to increasing atmospheric CO2.
The warmists say ECS is high, typically about 3 degrees C or more for a hypothetical doubling of atmospheric CO2 (3C/2xCO2), and the skeptics say ECS is much lower, typically about 1C/2xCO2 or less and so not dangerous. The warmists have been reducing their estimates of ECS over the years – some of their earlier estimates of ECS were as high as about 10C/2xCO2.
It should be noted that there is NO credible evidence that ECS is higher than about 1C/2xCO2. However, the warmists have captured the limited attention spans of politicians and the mainstream press, and have caused society to squander many trillion of dollars of scarce global resources on this false crisis. In so doing, the warmists have driven up energy costs, increased winter mortality among the elderly and the poor, and compromised our energy systems with green energy schemes that are not green and produce little useful energy.
Countries like the UK and Germany that were early-adopters of green energy debacles are now retreating from them as fast as they politically can. Remarkably, venues like Ontario and Alberta in Canada are enthusiastically adopting these same green energy scams, even as the early-adopters are bailing out. This is a measure of how truly imbecilic some politicians are – they cannot even learn from the glaring mistakes of others.
When the history of the global warming scam is written, people will look in wonder at the stupidity of it all, and how so many people could be so utterly duped. Global warming alarmism will be regarded as another example of “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”, first written in 1841 and still going strong.
Regards to all, Allan
UK just announced going ahead with Hinkley Point C nuclear power project.
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-37352816
yes…
whatever your view on climate change, or on nuclear power, this is a bad deal for the UK
It will take at least 10 years to build – none of the other reactors of this design are on schedule, one at Flammanville has safety issues over steel used – and the builders get a guaranteed, inflation proofed, price for its electricity massively above current prices…
EDF the builder is in dire financial straits… this project may bankrupt it. Its own financial director resigned because of that.
there are 3 other designs which could likely be built quicker
Actually, with a number of strings like EDF has no get out (they have to own and operate). I suspect was a clever way to kick the problem back to France without angering the Chinese. Definitely a bad deal for the UK.
Allan,
Beautiful summary of this ghastly situation. Thank you.
Dan
Thank you Dan for your kind words.
McCormick said: “avoid uttering the words “climate change.” It’s “a poisonous term to use,”
Maybe she should tell them, politicians, to use the real name Agenda 21, better known as “Population Control”.
Agenda 21 as you use the term is a conspiracy theory, no more ‘respectable’ than chemtrails or 9/11 truthers…
It has no place in discussion of the science of climate change
How would you know?
Griff is just regurgitating a recent UK Guardian article; that’s about all he can manage.
I don’t want your respect, Griff . . the very concept makes my skin crawl.
Griff, I have read UN’s Agenda 21. It is population control. The same is true with “Co2 drives the climate” agenda. Many of Agenda 21 proposals are being implemented at the local level. Others proposals are being done on the federal level under the term “sustainability” This type of rule making is called Bottom up, Top down. Example; President Obama wants to give control of the internet to a international body of unelected persons. Who going to pay this body of regulators? Why of course the internet will. At first the “fees” will be small. But, as with all government agencies, as they become more money hungry. Web site like Watt up with That will not be able to a afford the “fees”. The ground work is being laid not for a “One World Government”, but for a One World Unelected Bureaucrats.
hohohohoho…
the term “climate change” was in fact promoted by Republican strategist Frank Luntz, who suggested using it because it’s less “frightening” then saying “global warming…
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/04/28/fox_news_global_warming_versus_climate_change.html
They’ll come up with something else – here’s Al Gore’s strategy: https://www.facebook.com/fourtimesayear/photos/a.427072877441780.1073741829.360297500785985/432577293558005/?type=3&theater
You believe whatever you are told to believe.
Of course the term “climate change” has existed for a long time as a generic description for ALL climate changes, from glacial periods to inter-glacials, describing both periods of warming and cooling. I’d like it to go back to that proper definition. As a term for energy balance in the short term (anything less than 500 years), climate change is a lousy term.
The question to ask in terms of today’s debate is why was it necessary to conflate the terms climate change and global warming thereby the prior definition of the former? It became clear that “global warming” no longer carried enough prestige and power as a term of alarm. As propaganda, it no longer scared anyone. That’s why it had to change. And now, climate change doesn’t enough people either. And why doesn’t it? Because the people flinging it are reckless, dogmatic, filled with hubris, and technically wrong. I hope you’ll contemplate that, Griff. The EPA can change the term again, but if careless, reckless, dogmatic and wrong still rule, those toxic poisons will pickle the new term, too.
More gums than teeth. Anathema. I cannot bear to look at that image. Perhaps those gnashers prompted her calling. An outward sign of inward hate. Sorry….. I apologise, but sometimes, only an ad hominem will do.
http://publichealth.gwu.edu/departments/environmental-and-occupational-health/sabrina-mccormick
Sociology only serves as a tool for manipulating the public, a bad tool. See GMU
In the UK no one is talking about climate change. There are some people particularly the BBC still trying to push it but no one takes any notice anymore. In fact, as Brexit showed, no one really takes any notice of the BBC anymore.
I think you’ve won the argument Anthony and co. (not that was ever in doubt) here. I know they’re still trying to forge ahead with token, international agreements but their grand designs on power are over.
“I think you’ve won the argument Anthony and co. (not that was ever in doubt) here. I know they’re still trying to forge ahead with token, international agreements but their grand designs on power are over.”
It’s only your illusion my friend.
Statement from the energy sec after today announcing the go-ahead of the Hinckley Nuke PS.
“Britain needs to upgrade its supplies of energy, and we have always been clear that nuclear is an important part of ensuring our future low-carbon energy security.”
It’s not in doubt either in the majority, nor in the policy of those put in power by that majority.
I think you are quite wrong about the UK – you just need to broaden your sources of information.
Try this:
http://www.businessgreen.com/type/news
You are hardly an expert on the UK, griffy boy. Maybe when you’re a bit older and experienced, eh.
Only the BBC, the Indie and the Groaniad bother with constant alarmism these days and they’re preaching to the converted, like EGriff anyway.
It’s an echo chamber.
So what would she put in the Cost vs Benefits analysis that should accompany each specific project? The devil will be in the detail as ever.
Ah, is it time for a name change already? I must confess to being a bit of a traditionalist and have always had a bit of a thing for AGW.
I know, I know, it’s soooo last season but there we go….
It doesn’t work if there’s no “catastrophe”…CAGW.
How about we call it the Modern Optimum Period.
“What are the stars?” said O’Brien indifferently. “They are bits of fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out. The earth is the centre of the universe. The sun and the stars go round it.”
“For certain purposes, of course, that is not true. When we navigate the ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to assume that the earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions upon millions of kilometres away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?”
Winston shrank back upon the bed. Whatever he said, the swift answer crushed him like a bludgeon. And yet he knew, he knew, that he was in the right. The belief that nothing exists outside your own mind — surely there must be some way of demonstrating that it was false? Had it not been exposed long ago as a fallacy? There was even a name for it, which he had forgotten. A faint smile twitched the corners of O’Brien’s mouth as he looked down at him.
“I told you, Winston,” he said, ‘”that metaphysics is not your strong point. The word you are trying to think of is solipsism. But you are mistaken. This is not solipsism. Collective solipsism, if you like. But that is a different thing: in fact, the opposite thing.”
― George Orwell, “1984” (1949)