Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t The Spectator – Guardian author John Gibbons has written an extraordinary piece which blames climate denial on old white people.
Climate deniers want to protect the status quo that made them rich
Sceptics prefer to reject regulations to combat global warming and remain indifferent to the havoc it will wreak on future generations
From my vantage point outside the glass doors, the sea of grey hair and balding pates had the appearance of a golf society event or an active retirement group. Instead, it was the inaugural meeting of Ireland’s first climate denial group, the self-styled Irish Climate Science Forum (ICSF) in Dublin in May. All media were barred from attending.
Its guest speaker was the retired physicist and noted US climate contrarian, Richard Lindzen. His jeremiad against the “narrative of hysteria” on climate change was lapped up by an audience largely composed of male engineers and meteorologists – mostly retired. This demographic profile of attendees at climate denier meetings has been replicated in London, Washington and elsewhere.
…
Short-termism and self-interest is part of the answer. A 2012 study in Nature Climate Change presented evidence of “how remarkably well-equipped ordinary individuals are to discern which stances towards scientific information secure their personal interests”.
This is surely only half the explanation. A 2007 study by Kahan et al on risk perception identified “atypically high levels of technological and environmental risk acceptance among white males”. An earlier paper teased out a similar point: “Perhaps white males see less risk in the world because they create, manage, control and benefit from so much of it.” Others, who have not enjoyed such an armchair ride in life, report far higher levels of risk aversion.
Another 2011 paper observed uncontroversially that “conservative white males are likely to favour protection of the current industrial capitalist order which has historically served them well”. It added that “heightened emotional and psychic investment in defending in-group claims may translate into misperceived understanding about problems like climate change that threaten the continued order of the system.”
A paper earlier this year from Vanderbilt University pinpointed what motivates many who choose to reject climate change: not science denial, but “regulation phobia”. Most deniers accept science in general, and even pride themselves on their science literacy, however, combatting climate change means more regulations and, the paper says, “demands a transformation of internalised attitudes”. This, the authors conclude, “has produced what can fairly be described as a phobic reaction among many people”
…
I have an alternative theory.
The middle age engineers and meteorologists in that room in Ireland, and other similar gatherings, were taught how to think for themselves, back in an age when schools were focussed on education.
We learned our history – we learned that democracy is fragile, that sometimes people trade freedom for safety, even when the threat is imaginary.
We learned we should not believe everything we read – that people who call themselves scientists sometimes lie about their work.
We learned that it is OK to evaluate the evidence for ourselves, to reach our own conclusions.
And yes, we also learned that racial stereotyping is silly and wrong; that not all climate skeptics are white.
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Excellent essay.
I completely agree!
It’s awesome how he considers older heads, with real science training and an ethos of honesty, with denial as a flaw and the younger crowd, admittedly less scientifically educated, being bought and paid for by the billions in warming funds are the real scientists. A little perspective would reveal that the older heads not only have a better point of view regarding background, but they also simply have a longer term perspective themselves that gives them a superior view of the situation
There was a time when, in most societies, the older generations were respected for their wisdom.
Oddly the right-on right lefty Guardian crew are the first attack racism, sexism and ageism but have no problem in combining all three.
Clearly their moral standards are as fluid as their “gender identification”.
If “balding pates” and a pale face are an indication of those who willingly and knowingly ignore “science” maybe they will stop reproducing the lies and deception promulgated by cue-balls like John Abrams, ME Mann, John Cook, James Hansen and Gavin Schmidt.
But of course their insults and racial stereotypes are also only applied where convenient. Hypocrites as usual.
I don’t believe i have read such a disgusting ,mendacious attack on a group of people .almost racist, in tone,as this one
He appears to attribute or transfer the’ green’s motives ‘(ie to control manage regulate etc.)to a group of !mostly retired’ meteorologists &engineers ,who (he claims )want to control …….something ?????
Oh, it is bigotry and racist. And they wonder why they lose elections.
kendo, it isn’t “almost racist”, it is racist.
Of course since they are of the left, such racism is acceptable.
“There was a time when, in most societies, the older generations were respected for their wisdom. ”
Yes. But we now live in a ‘Progressive’ age, where everything the old people did was wrong, and must be changed For Great Progress!
The cult of youth is one of the left’s greatest successes. Because you haven’t have Progresive Utopia if you have to listen to the old farts telling you why it won’t work.
Yes, I am thankful for old people of any complexion who have the good sense to think for themselves and provide sober guidance based on years of practical and objective experience of the real world. Magical thinking seems to be the realm of the young and gullible who never had to struggle to make their lives work. I suspect they well all get an education when they begin to suffer the privations of their self-imposed rationing of the gifts of modern industrial society.
There isn’t going to BE a modern industrial society. Those same evil leftist propaganda pushers at the Grauniad also support demographic replacement of white Christians with black and brown Muslims. We have already fallen off that cliff and are heading at accelerating pace towards a new dark ages from which there may be no Renaissance.
” … demographic replacement of white Christians with black and brown Muslims.”
With regard to the “white Christians” and “brown Muslims”, is it the “Christians” versus the “Muslims” or the “white” versus the “brown” that gives you pause?
Many in the genetics “community” these days deny that “Race” exists except as a sociological construct. Others argue that Race is a biological reality. I don’t know for sure. Let’s assume the folks in the latter camp are correct.
Then isn’t it true that Arabs are Caucasian by DNA? So which part of the “brown Muslim” do you fear most, the “brown” or the “Muslim”?
(This trend of getting off topic needs to stop) MOD
(This trend of getting off topic needs to stop) MOD
I’m sorry about that? I thought the article seemed to center around race.
(You were getting into race itself,which is now a diversion from the topic,which is about White people allegedly denying climate change) MOD
Understood!
The long quote from Gibbons [not the author of the article; merely quoted within the article] is plainly ageist and racist. It is also – very likely – misanthropic.
For shame.
[Mods – see below – /SARC. Cubed.]
Auto.
Goodness – it is ridiculous that I should write the above -but would I have done so were there not a plethora of articles, not just in climate [not ‘climate science – for sure ], finding ‘isms’ in everything from white-boards to blackberries, Asian slaw to brown hatters. everywhere anyone looks [or, I guess, doesn’t care to look . . . . . . ]
Sad – ain’t it.
WHO SAYS….LOGIC HAS FLOWN THE COOP WITH THIS STATEMENT! HE SHOWS HIS BIAS!
“Climate denial-is the fault of old white people”
Thank you. My work here is done.
BTW, exactly what is it that you think I am denying? Gore, DiCaprio, De Grasse Tyson, Nye, Griff, Mosh, Stokes, feel free to weigh in.
Furthermore, I would stake my last dollar that Richard Lindzen has forgotten more about climate science than John Gibbons and the above stated climate “experts” will ever know.
John Gibbons is not an ‘expert’ he is a journalist for the Leftist rag Pravda …. er, Guardian. He doesn’t know the science and it is him who is indulging in Motivated Reasoning. What a tosspot.
Among John Gibbons early writings on climate was Forecasts, Famines, and Freezes: Climates and Man’s Future (1976)
He is an astrophysicist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gribbin
and of course an old white man (age 71).
It doesn’t add up…
John Gibbons is NOT John Gribben.
John Gribbons is NOT the same as John Gribbin,who is a man who wrote the absurd Jupiter effect.back in the early 1980’s despite being an Astrophysicist
http://www.lifesci.sussex.ac.uk/home/John_Gribbin/
I looked up John Gribbons,failed to find him anywhere,he isn’t explained at Guardian either.
John Gibbons is an activist who recycles the warmunist narrative from abroad in the Irish media. I first came across him on a radio interview a few years ago when he was the environmental correspondent for the Irish Times newspaper (Core demographic: progressive left wealthy middle class in Ireland) before he was let go in a series of cutbacks. Generally he is bought on by radio producers in the media to generate “heat” to keep the audience engaged.
If you want to get a feel for him then look at http://www.indymedia.ie/article/95060
There is an mp3 link to the interview if you follow the comments.
I totally agree with you and mostly with the tautological and syllogism fallacy of the therm of “climate change”denials !
About journalists try to remember what Mark Twain said about it: “The journalist is a person who write about everything without knowing nothing” and … always quoting what he will be never able to understand( my own contribution )
Anyhow I really like your contribution !
Thank you and to all realistic people !
Don’t think Mosh and Stokes quite fit with the others.
Their attacks on Judith were intolerable as well as ignorant.
Brett, I agree with you about ad hominem attacks. My point would be that Stokes and Mosher are much better informed than the other ‘celebrities.’
Nick and Mosher,two aging white men, make a valued contribution to the debate. Nick,his website about temperature trends, Mosher for his Climategate book.
Kam, that is a good list of rogues and easily deceived followers (what Stalin called useful idiots).
I suppose to say that the rogues are generally scoundrels and not truth tellers is an underestimate
of their deceit and ability to deceive and make money on the backs of useful idiots.
Lenin, it was Lenin who coined the term “useful idiots”.
( A bit picky, but, hey.)
You are denying that the beliefs held sacred by said individuals are correct.
I’m old, white, and on a modest pension. Am I supposed to be rich?
Yes, about 2% of the old crackers I hang with when visiting AZ could be classified as “rich” farmers and my wife has a shirttail relative who is CEO of a fuel terminal distributorship. The fact that we worked hard to get where we are has no relevance to believing or disbelieving anthropogenic climate forcing through the virtual magic of CO2.
Mostly I think that we are free of the socialist indoctrination, which those who subscribe to the cultural ideologies which develop at street level in segregated minority communities are inundated with. Our food and shelter do not depend on how well we “work the system”, so we are naturally more independent thinkers who have learned perspicaciousness over our working careers.
The Guardian exists at this point solely to prop up lefty propaganda for the snowflakes who clap like trained seals. Meanwhile, several skeptical books are near the tip-top of the Amazon best sellers’ list–which Gore’s recent effort occupies about 100 down the list. “Warmism” has jumped the shark, folks–WAAAAAY too many ordinary people now know the truth. Maybe they can sell this BS in ivory-tower land where groupthink reigns, but nowhere else. For which we have MANY of those “grayheads and balding pates” here to thank!
Keep up the good work, everyone! 😉
Full Closure for All
I suggest that all scientists/futurists/businesses/universities/federal agencies/NGO’s/forecasters/analysts/energy predictors/environmental activists, should have to disclose the following material information:
1. Disclose if, where, how much and from whom they received funds if it relates to their predictions or studies;
2. Disclose the authors along with the general and specific sources of information and methodology used to formulate their prediction;
3. Disclose an accounting of their previous predictions much like Wall Streeters do: 1-5-10 year’s results of their prediction;
4. Disclose their new prediction(s) with a future timeframe.
Re: “regulation phobia”.
Because combatting climate change is a pseudo-issue, fueled only by conjecture based on not-fit-for-purpose models and speculation with, moreover, anti-correlative evidence against it (human CO2 up, warming stopped),
science realists know
that mandating anything to “combat” it
is a waste of time and money.
*****************************************
Good ol’ ad hominem meets the red herring maneuver (yawn), once AGAIN.
“regulation phobia”
Not wanting other people to run your life, has now been declared a mental disorder.
Thats the new generation of people. I see this kind of entitlement thinking everywhere. And suddenly in case of even a mild desaster they see the collapse of the government response and they think more regulation will solve the problem.
I think this is a sad development…
i’ve known of dogs that would tip over the kitchen garbage in order to get attention, even tho it meant a beating.
that’s what this all looks like to me
it’s an easy experiment, eh. might work.
i never kept a dog.
people who leave them in a house alone all day are not available when the animal wants attention.
and my point was evidently obscure so i’ll just find something productive to do.
Your point was evident. It is in line with the likes of “bad attention is better than no attention at all”.
Some people leave them in confined spaces while gone then play with the dog when they come home.
And, yes, your point was clear.
gnomish – September 22, 2017 at 6:15 pm
Gnomish, it is obvious to me that whoever told you that was completely ignorant of their dog’s actions.
What should have been stated was, ……. “Those attention seeking journalists are like the pet dogs that people leave in a house alone all day …… that pee all over and/or against the furniture, ……. because the animal wants attention, even though they know they will get a beating. ”
Or because they just couldn’t hold it anymore. Healthy dogs usually won’t soil areas they frequent if they have a choice. My own two, who live outside 24/7, always answer nature in 2-3 areas of the yard that almost seem marked off for that purpose. They eat, sleep, and play elsewhere. Makes the daily cleanup faster and easier; I only need to inspect their “bathrooms”.
“HA”, if outside, healthy dogs will always “mark” the areas they frequent.
And “Yes”, healthy dogs will piss on the inside house furnishings iffen they get angry with their “master” for leaving them confined in the house/home.
Punishment won’t work for cats that pee the walls, either–more’s the pity!
“Sceptics prefer to reject regulations to combat global warming and remain indifferent to the havoc it will wreak on future generations”
NO, we are all quite aware of the havoc that climate regulations will have on future generations.
That is why this manic anti-science, anti-progress, CO2-hatred, far-left agenda must be stopped.
In a country of aging white people, they attack aging white people. And they wonder why they lose elections.
This is why the left are so determined to import millions of ‘migrants’ to do the votes that old, white people won’t do.
The Left is no longer capable of being internally consistent. Like the “Ouroboros” snake, it is eating its own tail. The head should have swallowed itself by 2018 at the latest!
Well, six of my great-grandparents were “white” (although maybe one would have been acceptable to the then current versions of the Know-Nothings), and I am sorta old, but experience with silly world saving proposals does take time to acquire.
I am ashamed of some of the political views I had, (I voted for Jimmy Carter! worse, Jerry Brown!). The real pity is that old white guys like Carter or Brown seem to have become even worse, so one cannot generally blame old white guys.
http://www.azquotes.com/picture-quotes/quote-who-is-not-liberal-when-young-does-not-have-a-heart-who-is-not-conservative-when-old-winston-churchill-133-44-63.jpg
“Don’t believe everything you read on the internet.”
Abraham Lincoln
Except Churchill did not say that.
Chris. How can you know that?
The quote (or variations of the quote) seems to be attributed to several people. Go here …
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/24/heart-head/
Chris, he probably did say that, he just wasn’t the first. My mother also said it – usually after one or the other of her kids did/said something patently stupid.
No, Rhoda, you can’t just say “he probably said that, he just wasn’t the first.” There is no record of him saying it in a public speech, or in an interview.The Winston Churchill Society confirms this: https://www.winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/quotes-falsely-attributed
In fact, it’s the opposite. “There is no record of anyone hearing Churchill say this. Paul Addison of Edinburgh University made this comment: ‘Surely Churchill can’t have used the words attributed to him. He’d been a Conservative at 15 and a Liberal at 35! And would he have talked so disrespectfully of Clemmie, who is generally thought to have been a lifelong Liberal?’”
When I was a kid, socialism meant folks working together to improve their future. No doubt, it was a special time and place. The ideal was that everyone should have meaningful employment and be able to raise a family in safety and dignity. My elders remembered the Great Depression and WW2. They knew what hard times were.
Today’s coddled weenies are so fragile that literally anything can trigger them and they have to retreat to their safe space.
It suits some people that we should forget the things that made our society great. Jordan Peterson refers to The United States of Amnesia. Forgetting turns us into sheeple who can be easily manipulated.
The reason skeptics are grey haired is that they are the ones who remember when our society was great and they remember why it was great.
If you want totalitarianism, the first thing you have to do is erase people’s cultural memory. Jung
commieB
I heard a great quote today from a friend in Holland. He said, “Some people are sheep, some are lemmings.”
CAGW has lots of supports from both those camps.
CommieBob. Socialism/communism never meant, nor was intended to, working together to improve their future. They have always seen as a path to tyranny. And that is what they have always been and will be.
It takes on a totally different flavour when farmers get involved. After the dirty thirties, it’s understandable that folks would be cynical about unbridled capitalism. Saskatchewan already had a history of cooperation so it’s natural that Canada’s deepest socialist roots are there.
Early in Saskatchewan, the farmers were being abused by the grain companies and the railways. Sintaluta case The farmers banded together to ship their wheat to the lakehead and cut out the middle man. Farmers know the value of working together.
Every capitalist wants to be a monopolist and is quite capable of being a tyrant. In that regard folks can band together against tyranny. It can take many forms: cooperatives, unions, the election of Donald Trump …
Socialism has always meant taking from others.
The great depression was caused by socialism, not capitalism.
Many people’s brains ceased functioning when computers became ubiquitous. I’d say that was about 2009 or so.
“If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out of it but tomfoolery. But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow ennobled and no-one dares criticize it.”
– Pierre Gallois
That is a Christopher Moncton way of saying GIGO.
For crying out loud, every damned thing is the fault of old white people. I say we pack up all the stuff we’ve done and leave the know-it-all younger generation floundering without their computers, efficient agriculture, trains, planes and automobiles. They can also have the pollution that we cleaned up, go back to segregated washrooms and schools. Of course, they’d better start learning German pretty damned fast since they ‘ll be answering to a Feurer.
Making it a sex/race/age thing is setting themselves up for a major embarrassment when the truth finally prevails.
It’s also part of the reason they need so desperately to cling to a losing position.
Not that we aging white males feel the need to crow whenever we have a win, we’re used to it.
Trump just assured his victory in 2020 with yesterday’s comments on the NFL. Greatest. Popcorn. Moment. EVAH!
It’s interesting that you think there’s going to be some sort of final revelation and winners and losers declared in this. There aren’t. What we are dealing with here is a civilisational war and AGW is simply a part of the catechism of the left. There is nothing even in principle which could happen which would make the left back down on it. If a new ice age begins shortly that too will be blamed on human emissions. People like Stokes are literally religious acolytes and the entirety of academia, the once proud institutions and prestigious journals and virtually every politician in the Western world has backed this to the hilt. They cannot all turn around tomorrow and simply admit that they got it all hideously wrong and apologise for blowing trillions of tax-payer’s bucks on something which normal people had been telling them all along was a pile of male bovid ordure. There can be no winners here.
Having failed to win on the evidence, the AGW turns to race baiting. Nice people, those.
Yes that’s seemingly the result of SJW (social justice warriors) methods seeping into the CAGW M.O.
SJW’s like losing (obviously, since they do so much of it). It enables them to feel more like aggrieved victims, which is their natural state. Also, to get more meds from their MD . . .
The AGW crowd
China is, by far, the largest polluter in the world — and by that I mean the water is not safe to drink, the food from wet markets are not safe eat, the air in major tier cities is not safe to breathe.
But of course this is all whitey’s fault.
What a load of rubbish.
And that is food when it is not fake food. The Chinese are good at making fake stuff, been at it for a few thousand years.
Do you realize that the United States Federal Government is, by many times over, the largest polluter of both air and water that exists in The United States? And that includes being by far the largest emitter of CO2 along with just about all of the other so-called greenhouse gases with the exception of water vapor — the dominant greenhouse gas.
Don’t you love how our diversity worshiping liberal friends launch an derogatory attack on a group defined by their age and the color of their skin.
Their hypocrisy is breathtaking.
I am olde, I am white, and all though NO fault of my own. Butt I change my climate on a regular basis, I fly south for the winters:-)))
Yep Mike, they are racist, sexist, and age discriminatory.
They are also ableist since they don’t like old-timers who are knowledgeable about things like meteorology or physics/engineering.
YES! That is what gets my goat about them, FLAMING HYPOCRISY !! It is surreal, and then they wonder why few take them seriously.
Matthew Schneider-Mayerson is talking about the peak oil theology here, but I think it applies to the CAGW theology too.
So the peak oil and CAGW theologies are connected at the hip, falling under the rubric of what Schneider-Mayerson calls “apocalyptic environmentalism.”
That the left would try to make it about identity politics comes as no surprise, since the left tries to make everything about identity politics.
As Schneider-Mayerson goes on to explain:
That quote is the typical bilge one gets from a dialectical materialist. It is a variation on the ‘unilineal’ approach to revolution: there is only ONE WAY! Even Karl Marx was a multi-linealist (many lines to the inevitable future). It is funny to think of CAGW and peak oil as Engels-ist unilineal theories. “Come the revolution, there’s going to be no gas!”
There may be no gas in their tank but there is no shortage of them passing it.
There is a reason that criminal defense attorneys are taught in seminars to attempt to use voire dire to exclude engineers.
When your case relies heavily on playing to the emotions because the facts and logic are against you, you don’t want disciplined thinkers on the jury or, if they ARE on the jury….. you do your best to make them seem like people who should not be listened to (because they just “don’t get this kind of thing”) when the jury retires to the deliberating room.
Thus, this article nicely makes the point that: AGW is based on *poof* nothing of substance.
********************************************
It’s really not about an accurate assessment of the situation at all — and the author (with no plausible to claim to being naive and ignorant) did not intend it to be. By twisting the truth about the demographics of science realists, the author simply attempts to get people to vote for AGW junk measures by appealing to the anger that the typical Democrat or “liberal” (in U.S.) voter has at “white, older, men” (from WHO knows where….. Dad? Grandpa? TV? shrug….. God? (many of them, while trying very hard to be an atheist, actually, somewhere in their psyche, hate God or the idea of God having anything to say about what they do….. and they subconsciously likely “see” God as an old, Caucasian, man, a la, Sistine Chapel ceiling or Santa Claus or whatever)).
Or, more pragmatically, by appealing to libs’ racist tendencies (remember how important it was to “vote for him because he is black?”…. Mm, hm.)
to provided cover via a duped public
to put them back into office/for passing fantasy science-based regs.
to do their AGW dirty deeds (delivering to their funders, the enviroprofiteers the tax subsidies/market share by regulation they need to make bucks).
In summary: follow the money.
An up to date, fashionable God is almost certainly a black, Asian, Australian Aborigine, Pygmy, Latina transexual, bisexual, pansexual, omnisexual Lesbian Queer Muslim single mom of a transexual baby.
“appealing to the anger that the typical Democrat or “liberal” (in U.S.) voter has at “white, older, men””
And the typical Democrat or liberal voter ignores the fact that their recent leadership was Bernie Sanders, Harry Reid, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton….rich old white men all.
Tom. thanks for that. I really did at least “chuckle” if not outright “laugh” out loud!
http://englishbookgeorgia.com/blogebg/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Albert-Einstein.jpg
They look amused…. 🙂
Janice you missed the picture of Hillary Tom alludes to? It would complete the joke…
Bartleby: My point was a completely different point than Tom’s (excellent) point. Also, please note the time I posted those photos….
The real issues are in the data and methods of climate science not in the psychology of age or skin color.
https://ssrn.com/abstract=3000932
It’s always the same – the absolute inability to even consider the remotest possibility that the sceptics might have a point. Hence the flailing around looking for explanations as to why sceptics are so mistaken.
I suppose it’s marginally possible that meteorologists might know a thing or two about climate, you know, weather and that sort of thing – it’s sort of related to climate isn’t it?. It’s even possible that they – good grief!! – might know more about weather and climate than John Gibbons, shocking as the thought might be. /sarc (I suppose the /sarc is necessary in these humourless times)
And what do engineers know about physical models and calculations with lots of variables? All they do is build stuff and predict consequences and lose their jobs of they get one tiny thing wrong.
Crispin, that is a twisted view and bears no truth in my experience.
As an engineer, I would like to know what you find wrong with Crispin’s description.
Leonard,
Perhaps you’ve never really seen a real engineer at work? I say this because Crispin, in my 35 years of experience working with world class engineers, has it exactly right.
. . . the absolute inability to even consider the remotest possibility that the sceptics might have a point.
There’s a reason for that. When your position is essentially sound, you can afford to concede a point. When what you are trying to defend is bollocks all the way down, the subconscious sends a strong message that once retreat begins, it can’t be stopped.
The Calvinists and Al Gore do have a pickle to solve. It’s Caucasian!
You see, Global Warming … Anthropogenic Global Warming …. Climate Change … Anthropogenic Climate Change … Carbon Anthropogenic Climate Change … is all about … Caucasians … The Chalk Peoples! Because it is the Chalk Peoples who gave us … arts … economy … industry … languages … laws … letters … logic … mathematics … medicines … sciences.
So to … cut-to-the-quick … Global Warming and all of it’s literary allusions and illusions … is just an exercise in Caucasian Hatred … which for most, even Albert P. Gore Jr, is nothing more than self hatred projected onto others of the Caucasian Peoples without pity or thought or understanding!
That means that Albert P. Gore Jr …. will soon become a … Black Man!
Al really needs help … but then … He’s shelling out millions of dollars for this and that. Who cares! As long as he is spending his money! Let The Man Spend His Money! And then get caught being masturbated by Nancy Pelosi in a “Peep Show” on Market Street, The Tender Loin, San Francisco, California. Ha haha ha
“…an audience largely composed of male engineers and meteorologists – mostly retired.”
So, he is describing senior, experienced experts with a long history of studying the very questions climate concerns highlight. Hmmm…. sounds pretty good to me. When the subject it controversial, seek the sober and the experienced.
What does that say about those who are off-white, un-aged and working in irrelevant or tangential fields?
I do not believe that common sense is limited to old white men. I have met many thousands of non-white, non-male sensible people. Based on the ignorance and bias evident in the Guardian piece, it is difficult to include the author in that large mass of humanity. Pity.
“an audience largely composed of male engineers and meteorologists – mostly retired.”
They can now speak freely if they can’t be fired. A no-brainer.
Gibbons’ screed ignores any notion that wisdom comes with age. I guess having been around the block quite a bit in life doesn’t help one learn any of life’s lessons. I am not saying that all older people are smarter than their younger counterparts, but their are no doubt many cases where it is true.
His rant also appears to me to be yet another attempt at the blending or merger of Marxism or Socialism with environmentalism and climate alarmism. This of course is something that has been going on now for quite some time. Marxist-Socialism hasn’t really proven itself with a great deal of success in history when compared with the free markets and democracy (with some socialism blended in), so they have to go in through the back door of environmentalism and climate alarmism to get to the elevator and the top floor of political power.
I’m sorry Gibbons, but the snow on my roof means that I’ve learned enough of life’s lesson to know that it is just plain stupid to blindly climb on board the bandwagon of mass hysteria and group-think without asking any questions — and a lot of them. Those who are still questioning the climate alarmist hysteria and group-think have waaay too many issues and unanswered questions for the alarmists. I’ve seen science get things wrong initially (the now dwarf planet Pluto for example as well as the cause of stomach ulcers) and taking years and decades to get it right.
And please excuse me for working hard much of my life and saving and investing to earn the net worth that I now have. Gibbons, your screed demonstrates that YOU are the one who have much to learn about life, about science and how it works, and about the pathways to success. I strongly recommend that you start learning rather than preaching your garbage to others.
Well done! The problem I have with these people is that even when they are wrong they just won’t go away. I think one problem is truly that there a lot of fairly stupid, poorly educated people out there who actually think they are smart. They’ve been told their whole lives they’re special and smart, and the only thing they do is parrot smarter people while never truly understanding anything. They’re argument is often “well, you don’t have a degree in’x’ , so therefore your argument is invalid, even though I don’t have a chance in hell at even understanding your argument because I have a social work degree, but it’s from college so it proves I’m smart. 97% of something proves me right!” If there weren’t so many of them it might be funny, but sometimes I wonder where the actual smart people have gone on the left. I voted democrat many times but there’s no way in hell I can do that now because whatever they are it ain’t democrat.
Where have the smart people on the left gone? Good question.
My view; all smart people who experience psychological emotional problems suffer tremendous mental impairment. Today’s left is driven by emotion, their arguments are based on emotion. Their education is based on appeal to emotion. Identify politics is based on the principle of ” divide and conquer” Not one high school student in my son’s class could name ONE benefit of CO2. But all could endlessly fret about polar bears, ice loss, SL rise and hurricanes. And today’s snowflakes run to their safe spaces when anyone makes reasoned rebuttals to their trigger issues. All their issues are trigger issues. And they love pot and so ignore scientific evidence that MJ lowers IQ, and like all dependency drugs, has many adverse psychological affects.
Additionally many of those that reject all religion have a tendency to want to be God. Most everyone that wants to be God, (desires power over others, the basis of most crime) tends to be a leftist statist.
In short their intelligence is crippled by their psychological issues and their emotion charged biased education.
@David A
I don’t think this has anything to do with ‘left’ or ‘right’ in the political spectrum – it is tied more with individual and group psychology. Most of the people who indulge in the kind of relentless identity politics you describe might identify as left wing, but are by and large ignorant of the mechanisms and history of social and political systems. The like to wear the clothes of a social group that makes them identify with and feel like the historically ‘oppressed’ as this is a good vantage point from which to channel their own feelings of bitterness, unfulfilled entitlement and anonymity into attacking others while protecting themselves from retaliation by characterising anyone who disagrees with them as ‘the oppressor’ (in a way a failure to escape a stage of development that is normally confined to childhood years). Meanwhile the construction of an ideological belief system – a simulacra of reality populated by idols of altruism, social concern, compassion, guilt about inherited status – worshipped at a superficial level with no understanding of these concepts that doesn’t spring from the internal references of the belief system itself – helps to further this self-characterisation and also allow for the compensatory suppression of the real motivating core of this newish brand of Guardianista politics: a form of pure authoritarianism and often a manifestation of deeply buried prejudice (including social and racial) which laid bare would be in open conflict with their stated beliefs.
Put simply, these are people who have found a way to legitimise bullying to make themselves feel better about failure to reconcile with who they really are, and failure to be who they would really like to be. Amongst the many other idols they have appropriated for themselves, the most crushingly ironic is the term ‘liberal’. They should be called out for what they are and branded authoritarians.
“there a lot of fairly stupid, poorly educated people out there who actually think they are smart”
Zackly.
Where have the smart people on the left gone?
By definition, there’s no such thing.
JJB MKI wrote:
“it is tied more with individual and group psychology…”
Wow, great summary and I think you’re correct. But explaining this takes so long that you’d be hit with at least 7 bike locks and 3 bottles of urine before you’d be one sentence in.
Reading earlier up thread, the answer appears to be that as they get older the smart people move to the right.
SteveT
Good observation, ChilemIke I have been telling family and friends that the parties they traditionally voted for on the left are that in name only. They’ve outsourced their real constituency. The vote gets you global elitist gov, regulating you without your being able to do anything about it.
I don’t let the right off either. Were it not for Trump, the GOP was headed in the same direction. The swamp is full of in-name-onlys. Indeed, had Hillary won, we would have ended with 8yrs of more designer-brained millennials, and that would have removed the only roadblock to the global elite gov of the western world.
I was cheered by Brexit, but now I see all parties have been homogenized. What happened to UKIP? I don’t know. They engineered Brexit and then seemed to disappear when Farage retired, losing the clear edge. Are UKIP and Donald the best thing ever? No, but they are the only ones who dont think any enterprise is too big to fail and they know turning this mess around is going to be fought tooth and nail – the swamp is a perfect analogy.
So for a couple of terms, you need crocodile wrestlers instead of Rhodes Scholars.. If they can fix the economy while they’re draining the swamp for their own citizens, it would evolve back to a good path on its own.
I wouldn’t say that older people are any smarter than any other group. However, having been around the block a few times gives us a perspective that younger people lack.
That is, it’s hard to scare us with environmental ghost stories, because we’ve seen it all before.
New nonsense crops up every couple of decades. Acid rain, nuclear winter, ozone, global cooling, now global warming.
“I wouldn’t say that older people are any smarter than any other group. However, having been around the block a few times gives us a perspective that younger people lack.”
Give me wisdom over intellect. Wisdom is better than silver or gold.
It’s much more than that though. There is a generational difference which transcends age. The difference between how those who grew up in the 50s – 70’s and later generations is a stark one and involves the fact that, in general, we were taught how to think, not what to think.
Oldsters may not be smarter that the youngsters, but they 1) were educated at a time when educational rigor and standards were valued, 2) probably spent some of their lives reading books that broadened their perspective and 3) had years more experience in dealing with the do-do of fad movements.
My grandfather on my mother’s side only had a 6th grade education, but he likely knew more about the world and how to live in it than a football field full of today’s college grads.
“Acid rain, nuclear winter, ozone, global cooling, now global warming”
and then after that came an inconvenient pause
which gathered steam till there was no way of stopping it,
so round and round we go until we’re back to global cooling …
Old, white men are most unlikely to be naive.
Not only that, they are unlikely to be neurotic, while at the same time having been taught and used the testing of null hypotheses.
Al Gore films look like neurosis on steroids.
Basically the climate is dangerous and alarmingly so, and we caused it.
https://www.google.com.au/search?q=photograph+of+Al+Gore&tbm=isch&imgil=XBeV4A38anGveM%253A%253BjZwNmRxBbnjzPM%253Bhttp%25253A%25252F%25252Fwww.gettyimages.com%25252Fphotos%25252Fal-gore&source=iu&pf=m&fir=XBeV4A38anGveM%253A%252CjZwNmRxBbnjzPM%252C_&usg=__BEaE4cl9snF4TT4kKLMjSPRI-50%3D
Al Gore is, however old and grey, but one would not want to press that point.
The scientists that opposes the consensus is independent, so retired and beyond reach of financial threats.
They have time to sort out data.
As soon as they retire they speak up.
They do so brilliantly.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/09/21/welcome-to-australia-where-its-always-warmer-somewhere/
Its good to know someone cares enough to sort out this mess of science, particularly the data.
Climate scientists following the consensus, remind me of the doctor struggling with a diagnosis which may not be falsifiable, yet predict grave outcomes, but the patient fails to follow prediction and stays healthy.
Al Gore is the Prophet who, in a counter intuitive manner from Biblical history, is actually listened to in his own times.
He gives life to those in need of a faith that cannot be denied.
His media appearances and film are Sacramental, in that they ‘give grace’ to those true believers who want to save the planet, of itself a noble cause.
However it is the old and wiser who seek knowledge of itself, in the old scientific culture.
That was where scientific research at universities was seen as an end in itself.
Looked at dispassionately, CO2 science ‘needs more work’.
The old and grey are prepared to do this holistically and humbly.
‘We don’t think we know the answers’.
CO2 climate control with accelerated warming is a hypothesis in search of validation.
The Al Gore narrative is like a sacrament in search of a theology.
It remains a theory in search of a science that is falsifiable.
As such it has entered the realm of revealed truth.
Hard to be naive when they’ve been exposed to the Chicken-Little prophecies for 30 years.
You MUST be an old guy.
You spelled ‘bated’ correctly.
Indeed. There is something fishy about the other spelling.
Cruel Clever Cat
Sally, having swallowed cheese,
Directs down holes the scented breeze,
Enticing thus with baited breath
Nice mice to an untimely death.
Geoffrey Taylor: 1933; in A Dash of Garlic
It is amazing how racist “progressives” are. Then again, I don’t know why I’m surprised. Progressives also stood behind another scientific “theory” that was “proven” through scientific consensus 100 years ago. Fortunately, not-so-progressive forces finally pushed eugenics into the dustbin of history.
A foundational principle of modern Progressivism is separatism; whether that “separateness” is race, income, class, sex, your brand of corn flakes, etc.
It is required that some sort of grievance be alleged with whatever group you can find/create in order to justify your existence. Otherwise, your existence is unnecessary and hence there’s no way for your to enrich yourself with the money of those who are “grieved”.
They’re obsessed with Otherness. Spending Other People’s Money, Finding Other People’s Faults.
They do seem to want everyone on a plantation. I suspect they see themselves as, if not the plantation owner, at least the overseer riding around a horse with a bull whip.
One of the dumbest things I have ever heard was the claim that black people can’t be racist.