From CORNELL UNIVERSITY and the “we have compassion and fairness and you don’t” department comes this eye-roller. One wonders how they might rate the compassion and fairness of this statement:
“We are not morally bad people for taking carbon and turning it into the energy that offers life to humanity…” Carbon-based energy, which is “the most affordable and reliable source of energy in demand today, liberates people from poverty,” “Without energy, life is brutal and short.” – Dr. John Christy Source
Moral values influence level of climate change action
The findings also suggest that a moral value rated more highly by conservatives – purity – also appears to have a positive effect, though not as pronounced as compassion and fairness.
Those insights from a group of four researchers at Cornell – Janis Dickinson, professor of natural resources; Poppy McLeod, professor of communication; Robert Bloomfield, professor of management and professor of accounting; and Shorna Allred, professor of natural resources – were published in PLOS ONE. While prior research has investigated the relationship between moral values and environmental attitudes, this work extends this investigation to intentionality with respect to changes in environmental behavior.
The authors’ work is based on Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory. A professor at New York University, Haidt identifies five “moral axes” around which humans develop individual moral reasoning: compassion/harming, fairness/cheating, in-group loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion and purity/degradation.
Previous research using Haidt’s moral foundations has found that those who identify as liberal prize the values of compassion and fairness most highly. Those who consider themselves conservative place nearly as high a value on compassion and fairness, but place a substantially higher value on in-group loyalty, authority and purity.
The Cornell researchers also found that belief in climate change was significantly associated with increased willingness to act, while those who identified as politically conservative, and who were older and male, were less inclined to act.
Given that liberal attitudes tend to favor action on climate change, Dickinson was not surprised that compassion and fairness correlated strongly with individual willingness to make lifestyle changes.
“Compassion and fairness make perfect sense, because climate change is an environmental justice issue, and being willing to do something about climate change also requires that we care about future generations. Both of those things require compassion and a sense of fairness,” said Dickinson, the study’s lead author. “But it’s not as clear why purity would be important. It may be because within the religious community, leaders have been focusing on the ideas that we are stewards of the earth and that there’s something impure about destroying natural systems.”
The association between the valuation of purity and a willingness to make personal lifestyle changes, while not as strong as for compassion and fairness, indicates the potential for alternative pathways to climate change action for liberals and conservatives.
“Our finding that willingness to take action on climate change was related to moral values embraced by both liberals and conservatives suggests that it is too simplistic to use political ideology alone to predict support for climate change action,” said McLeod.
“As we learn what’s important to different kinds of people with respect to climate change, that information can help us communicate in ways where the problem can be heard,” said Dickinson. “And I think we may be missing arguments that are important to people if we ignore moral diversity.”
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Not to bore you to tears but Don Boudreaux over at Cafe Hayek has a great pertinent quote about economic planning of which climate change policy is a part.
… is from page 95 of the 2016 Mercatus Center re-issue of my late colleague Don Lavoie’s superb 1985 volume National Economic Planning: What Is Left?:
“But the same lack of knowledge on the part of any single person or organization which makes it impossible for comprehensive planning to replace the market also makes it irrational for a non-comprehensive planning agency to try merely to “guide” the market. If the guiding agency is less knowledgeable than the system it is trying to guide – and even worse, if its actions necessarily result in further undesired consequences in the working of that system – then what is going on is not planning at all but, rather, blind interference by some agents with the plans of others.”
When I read that I think about the application of immature technology to a complex problem which is the same as imposing a huge tariff or tax which has the effect of lowering the value of output and by definition the value of labor.
“fairness/cheating”
Those are moral values liberals want for everyone but themselves. If their opponents are caught cheating, they want to throw the book at them. If their side is caught cheating, they ignore it and pretend it didn’t happen. Liberals will cheer even louder for their team after finding out they cheated to win. The win is what’s important to them.
For example, consider what happened when the recordings of Jonathan Gruber surfaced that showed that he and Obama deliberately lied to Congress and the “stupid” American public to get Obamacare passed. Liberals were not angry at Obama for the lies and deception. They were angry at Gruber for letting the cat out of the bag. They also don’t care if illegal aliens vote, as long as they vote for Democrats. They would have been thrilled if illegal voting had put Hillary over the top. They also don’t care if climate scientists lie and cheat in their research or data collection as long as it promotes the “cause.”
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There is a website that uses this for its headline….
“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. — D.H. Lawrence ”
http://neveryetmelted.com/
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They put up interesting posts.
Good news about the environment and it’s ability to sustain humour. Sir David Attenborough has been reported to the FBI for inciting the murder of Mr. Trump.
https://inews.co.uk/essentials/culture/television/david-attenborough-reported-fbi-shoot-donald-trump-joke/
This must be where “out of the abundance of caution–and after tests say otherwise in NY” comes from.
Joel is on to something. I’ve just returned from a trip to the Balkans (Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania). The huge take away is that people everywhere need to identify with some kind of group. In those countries, they are ethnic (from the three Slavic tribes, gypsies, Romans, etc.), religious (Catholic, Orthodox Christian, Muslim), and political (democracy, communism, theocracy, dictatorships).
In modern times, the political group identity has prevailed. However, when, for example, Croatia decided to secede from Yugoslavia after the death of Tito, the Serbs decide it is important to invade Croatia to “protect” their Serb brothers who have lived there as a peaceful minority for a thousand years. In Bosnia, it was about enforcing the Yugoslav political identity against the religious identity of the Muslims, who had also been around for a very long time. (Belgrade Serbia has been destroyed in wars 44 times in the last thousand years and lived under 60 different rulers, including the Ottoman Turks).
So, from the rock crusher of the Balkans, to the “melting pot” of the United States, we can see the same themes playing out. Religious and ethnic identity groups have largely been swept under the rug of liberal technocratic democracy, which has provided a rising standard of living for pretty much everyone – or at least the elites. The platforms of both the Republican and Democratic parties now consist of technocratic gobbledegook incomprehensible to voters, the majority of whom can’t identify the branches of government or who fought the Civil War. White nationalists are forming their own ethnic identity groups. Others relate to religious groups. All are losing faith with the established order of liberal technocratic politics. Even the minorities who traditionally supported the liberal cause have abandoned it.
Into the polite water balloon fight of American politics came The Trump, on his golden steed, orange hair flying in the wind, an exotic woman behind him from a country nobody can name, armed with a verbal sniper rifle and no rules of engagement. Claiming to have never read a book in his life, he captures the political identity group of voters and repudiates the entire political establishment, the “relative morals” orthodoxy of political correctness and in particular, the Climate Change religion and replacing them with his own idiosyncratic brand of absolute moralism. No wonder he won.
The whole of what Joel calls the “Progressive agenda” and moral relativism is now open to question, examination and repudiation where appropriate. And not just the United States – The liberal European elites are scared out of their wits that Trumpism will spread to their voters. Check out Marine LaPen in France for example.
It’s going to be an interesting ride for sure…
There is a problem with this study. it is discussing the moral viewpoints of Liberals and Conservatives and how they influence each groups’ position in regards to the Claim that Man Made Change Change exists and it is a danger.
Morality does not pay into it. What it boils down to is the factual reality of the situation. Before these people at CORNELL UNIVERSITY can begin to quantify any moral presents influencing the CAGW theory , they have to first learn and understand arguments and evidence that the people who do not subscribe to the theory, base their position on.
This education must come from those who find CAGW incorrect and unscientific. They should not get these facts from a third party or a proponent of CAGW.
Only after they understand how many scientists in a multitude of fields have reached the conclusion that the CAGW theory is wrong or over stated can they begin to address the activities each side does or does not take, as well as finally, the moral aspects of the issue.
But then it was never meant to be a honest evaluation but merely another exercise in psycho-babble.
Of course on a positive side they put on full display their dishonesty and lack of an moral compass for all to see.
michael
Compassion and fairness make perfect sense, because climate change is an environmental justice issue, and being willing to do something about climate change also requires that we care about future generations.” These just are words strung together. Climate change is change in climate or climates. Justice is nothing to do with glacial periods. Maybe we can all complain about the ice ages which began so long ago and unjustly changed the lives of plants and animals. Can we stop it happening again when the current interglacial ends? It will be so unfair!
I do not see the eye rolling here. If one accepts the assumption that climate change is dangerous and that humans are causing it, then everything that follows does indeed flow from compassion and fairness.
Of course, I am not convinced that climate change is even mostly human caused or is dangerous and to assert a wide range of political agendas based on that does not seem compassionate or fair since in any case you take from a producer and give to a consumer with no obvious trade.
It would be interesting and may be part of the research to decide which comes first: Is compassion and fairness a trait that creates vulnerability or susceptibility to memes of climate change catastrophe? Or does a person first accept climate change catastrophe? Well that makes no sense that some people accept it and seem by amazing coincidence to also be compassionate and fair; so it must be that being compassionate and fair breeds susceptibility to messages of doom.
“Two moral values highly rated by liberals — compassion and fairness…”
From the first sentence we are lead to believe that conservatives are against these qualities. Was Lincoln a liberal?
Soon using gasoline will be considered un-Canadian… just watch.
It’s already headed that way Tom.
These guys obviously have axes to grind.
Future generations well not be free from the effects of population growth.
Why would they wish to be free from those affects?
My generation was affected by population growth too: we came into existence. Future generations will be affected the same way. The number of people in future generations who volunteer to reduce that effect in the obvious way is likely to be small, just as the number of people saying there are too many people now never volunteer to decrease the population by one.
I guess you are liberal if you have compassion and fairness toward future generations as they state, and present generations can go to hell (which they are blind to). Denying developing countries access to affordable energy is killing and will continue to kill people by the 10s of millions a year. The past few years, climate science papers have been more commonly written by sociology business, psychologists and professors of belly fluff dynamics. These people are less equipped than an observant 10 year old to assess climate change progress.
Now about the “Authors”.
“Those insights from a group of four researchers at Cornell – Janis Dickinson, professor of natural resources; Poppy McLeod, professor of communication; Robert Bloomfield, professor of management and professor of accounting; and Shorna Allred, professor of natural resources”
Lets see who do we have here a pair of professors of natural resources.
” Janis Dickinson” quote of the day- from the web site
“I am not taking any more grad students and I have moved back to California – best of luck with your search! I strongly suggest that you seek out alternative mentors for the Cornell Lab’s postdoctoral positions and wish you the best of luck with your application.”
I give up, anything I was planning to say is toast after that. Buzz sputter pop..
michael
Perhaps Al Gore and John Kerry could show a little….. “compassion, fairness and purity”…and make a personal lifestyle change.. by reducing their CO2 footprints.
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/patrick-goodenough/his-very-long-trip-kerry-producing-much-co2-average-american-1-year
Though that would mean reducing their photo ops and they might have missed the…. “Dialogue on transformative implementation of gender-responsive climate solutions” …in Marrakech.[http://unfccc.int/files/meetings/marrakech_nov_2016/application/pdf/overview_schedule_marrakech_second_week.pdf]
“Environmental justice is the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.”
Oh shut up.
So this is what an echo chamber sounds like.
It depends on what’s being echoed!
With regards to the study, there is an assumed “settled science” position, that CAGW is scientific fact proven by empiric data as opposed to being a possibility as evidences in a virtual world of models, vaguely supported by basic bench science in physics. That position of CAGW being a foregone fact of science is as much an “echo” of a different echo chamber as the remarks on this site.
The only way for the “echo chamber” to go away is for the supporters of CAGW to stop pretending that their their hypothesis is proven fact, and come to the table and engage in real scientific discussion regarding the uncertainties and questions around about the so called “proof” that CAGW is real and killing us.
Dr Deanster,
In order to understand why warmists are so intransigent about their position you need to go back in history to see how their position evolved.
When the Vostok ice cores first came out, there was a panic about the obvious correlation between CO2 and temperature. People like Hansen jumped to the wrong conclusion and then piled on with a bunch of bogus theory like positive feedback that presumed to support the connection they needed. Meanwhile, it was discovered that CO2 was a lagging indicator of temperature, but this was incorrectly rejected when it was considered that positive feedback was enough to explain the apparent correlation and even to this day, most warmists refuse to acknowledge the actual direction of causality shown in the ice cores.
Now, they needed a benchmark to hang their hat on and the only criteria was that the effect had to be large enough to justify international action since at the time, the a US administration wasn’t going to do squat as they considered people like Hansen nut jobs for making unsubstantiated claims about CO2 leading to a global climate catastrophe. This is where the magical 3C increase from doubling CO2 came from. This was large enough to scare more than just a few misled climate scientists, seemed to be consistent with ice cores when CO2 is presumed to cause all change and served as justification for the IPCC.
When Clinton came to power, Hansen and his ilk found a gullible politician to promote their position, who of course was Al Gore. This was the connection that resulted in GISS and NOAA becoming redirected to presume CAGW, rather than to try and determine whether or not CAGW was even possible. They had their 3C number canonized by an international body and that was all they needed. No further proof was necessary and the gravy train started to run.
Today, we know far better and that the actual effect is closer to 1C and most likely less, which completely eliminates any urgency for action and in fact disputes the need to an organization like the IPCC. To those who have entire careers invested in this presumption, the idea that they have been so wrong for decades is unfathomable and the natural response to truth that undermines beliefs is denial. While the truth has a multi trillion positive impact to the worlds economies, it also has a multi-billion dollar negative impact on those who jumped on the gravy train. Money talks and that’s what this is all about.
The lead sentence of the article describes compassion and fairness as “two values highly rated by liberals”. Four paragraphs later, the article states that conservatives rate those two values “nearly as highly”, but that conservatives rate the other three values “substantially higher”. In other words, the difference between the two groups in these values isn’t in what liberals value highly, but in the values that conservatives rate substantially higher. And according to the article, one of those values (purity) correlates with willingness to make sacrifices.
If true that would be interesting, if not useful. If you were ill-informed enough to believe that CO2 was an unmixed evil with large negative externalities, certainly valuing fairness, compassion, and purity would lead you to support its reduction. But I find it difficult to believe that instead of fairness, compassion, and purity, significant number of people value harming, cheating, and degradation — so I wonder very much how this group managed to differentiate people on the fairness, compassion, and purity axes in the first place in order to detect a correlation. I also wonder what “personal choices” were on offer to “mitigate” climate change’s impact, and how strong the correlation they found. It seems difficulty to believe that conservatives and liberals value compassion and purity nearly the same — yet proponents of mitigation and adaption do not. The devil is in the details, and in this article the details are completely missing.
The first quote from Dickinson about climate change being an “environmental justice issue” are revealed about her mindset. But she doesn’t mention liberals specifically in that quote, and the author’s summary of her view leading up to that quote is nonsensical when conservatives rate compassion and fairness nearly as highly. I wonder if it is Dickinson making the association or the unnamed author of the press release. The quote from McLeod strikes me as quite reasonable: “Our finding that willingness to take action on climate change was related to moral values embraced by both liberals and conservatives suggests that it is too simplistic to use political ideology alone to predict support for climate change action.”
The authors came closest to the real issue here: “The Cornell researchers also found that belief in climate change was significantly associated with increased willingness to act.” This is no surprise, but I’ll go further with something they probably didn’t ask about. Increased willingness to act is nearly perfectly associated with the belief that climate change causes *significant harm* and can be *avoided by mitigation*. This is a tough sell, given that the world’s temperature has increased by about 1C since the 19th century with no apparent net harm whatsoever, and that adaptation to that rise was vastly cheaper than attempting to mitigate it would have been, even if you imagine mitigation would have worked.
Religion and philosophy are about fairness and compassion. Science is about fact.
That depends on the religion. And the philosophy.
“Haidt identifies five “moral axes” around which humans develop individual moral reasoning: compassion/harming, fairness/cheating, in-group loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion and purity/degradation.”
Haidt’s axes look to me like pop psychology at it’s worst – as arbitrary as Eric Berne’s transactional analysis, as bogus as scientology, and as useless as Eysenck’s model of personality.
The key terms in Haidt’s theory (the poles of his axes) are ill-defined, impossible to quantify, and/or dependent on the point of view of the individual, often requiring post-facto judgments.
“As we learn what’s important to different kinds of people with respect to climate change, that information can help us communicate in ways where the problem can be heard,” said Dickinson. “And I think we may be missing arguments that are important to people if we ignore moral diversity.”
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What’s really being said is that they need a broader brush to capture the hearts and minds of those currently unwilling to fall in line and believe the meme. They are looking to expand their reach and mastery over all sinners.
It’s all about communication. Again. Never about facts and science. Nope. Communication is the key, AKA hoodwinking, conning, etc. They want to hit people where their emotions lie and grab them by their morals. Simple. That’s manipulation, folks.
“It’s all about communication.”
There is no clearer indication of this than Schmidt rising to director at GISS. During Hansen’s tenure, Schmidt was his right hand man and chief propagandist running the Real Climate web site. That Schmidt rose to the top tells me in no uncertain terms that messaging far more important to the alarmists than the science behind the message.
Control the message and manipulate the masses – that’s all they have.
It is one thing to say you believe in compassion and fairness, and it is another thing to actually do something. Liberals may talk about compassion and fairness, but conservatives actually contribute more money to charity.
Another nasty observation along these lines …. I find that Liberals are in love with the ideas of compassion and fairness … but only as far as it is window dressing for their flawed characters. It’s all tied up in Noble Cause Corruption. They will embrace a noble cause, like opposition to the raped women of the congo … but at the same time will hold up a sign at an anti-trump rally saying rape Melania. I have a sociopathic, liberal sister in law, who jumps on every “compassion” bandwagon put forth by the libs ….. but wouldn’t go see her dying mother, or let her kids visit either of their grandparents. ….. now that’s some real compassion for ya!!
As long as it is not “real compassion”, … but rather the idea of it, they are all on board.
How is it immoral to want a warmer planet and more CO2 to support more life?
“belief in climate change was significantly associated with increased willingness to act” — and this *surprised* anyone?