Guest essay by Eric Worrall
NPR author and psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett thinks the reason people don’t care about climate change is most people can’t imagine what 120F feels like. But the reality is that Lisa is demonstrating her personal lack of insight.
Simulating The Bodily Pain Of Future Climate Change
September 23, 20179:03 AM ET
LISA FELDMAN BARRETT
Lisa Feldman Barrett is a professor of psychology at Northeastern University and the author of How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. You can keep up with Lisa on Twitter: @LFeldmanBarrett.
Close your eyes and imagine a beautiful spring day in the forest. In your mind’s eye, try to see tall, green trees and smell the aroma of blooming flowers. Can you hear the gentle breeze rustling the leaves above you?
Most people can conjure up this mental scene without much effort, at least for a few moments.
Now, imagine that the temperature rockets upward. It’s 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Try to produce, in your mind, the discomfort you’d experience under that scorching sun. I don’t mean just the idea of being hot — actually try to feel the physical sensations of stifling, smothering heat. Can you invoke these feelings on demand?
Most people cannot.
…
If the sensory consequences of climate change are unimaginable to our government officials, what can we do? Perhaps we can help them feel those consequences directly. The next time a city like Las Vegas has a record heat wave, as it did in June of this year (117 degrees F), we could petition President Trump to travel there. Perhaps a three-day stay at Trump International Hotel — with the air conditioning turned off — would be swelteringly educational. Or shall we ask Vice President Pence to visit Nuatambu, one of the Solomon Islands northeast of Australia, where rising ocean levels have washed away half the habitable land and forced families to flee? Let him live there for a month or two. Or maybe Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, should survive on minimal drinking water for a few days, so he can understand viscerally what a drought feels like.
…
What our leaders cannot simulate, they can make themselves feel. All it takes is the courage to do so.
One of my first jobs was working in a poorly ventilated rubber factory, operating hydraulic hot plates to produce pressed plastic products. I don’t have to imagine what 120F feels like, because in Summer I used to experience 120F pretty much every work day. Some days the temperature inside the factory hit 130F.
My experience is hardly unique – anyone who has worked a factory job or mining job in a place with warm summers has likely experienced similar conditions.
My friends tell me that when they worked day shift in the mines in the scorching hot Marble Bar region, with outside air pumped straight in through the ventilation system, 120F would have been welcome relief.
120F simply isn’t terrifying, for anyone who ever experienced similar temperatures on a regular basis. Uncomfortable, moderately unpleasant, but not a reason for panic.
But Lisa obviously doesn’t know any of this. So she creates specious theories within the limits of her personal experience of the world, of why attempts to frighten people about the horrifying climate pain people will experience on a 120F day fall flat; especially I suspect with working class audiences.
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I do not believe simply because to me my yardstick is how accurate has the tipster been so far. Climate science is way below the racing correspondent of a cheap local paper. Once a group has a significant failure I demand external verification and examination of any work they do and they not only refuse to accept that but intimidate and have the media hound anyone right up to presidential level who asks for that.
They should be saying to Trump by all means have a red and blue team equally funded for a year and then we will have shown you we are right. They know full well they cannot do this and have to rely on blind obedience by the great unwashed public for their support as the science is hopelessly inadequate for the task of modelling climate.
Why can these so called super bright academics not understand something as basic as that?
To me climate scientists are bigoted brainwashed narrowly over educated half wits and no more than that. I have been in a hot chamber doing tests where you can only survive for ten minutes and have to take salt tablets and be monitored so 120F is just borderline cold in comparison. This makes me certain that if the system had positive feedback, or forcing as the technologically retarded like to would call it, we would have had unstable conditions so life would never have evolved.
This woman is a mere psychologist and that is a study I did for a second degree as entertainment so to me her opinion does not rate one jot on any scientific or engineering matter, having met the calibre of technical expertise in this group. When science became applied is should no longer have been allowed peer review it should have had to go through a proper certified quality assurance program with external quality control group which they have no influence over.
Eric…120F simply isn’t terrifying…for anyone who ever experienced similar temperatures on a regular basis..
Even to most Aussies, including those who live in such a climate, 120 F or 48.8C is just too bloody hot and is dangerous.
Fortunately this extreme is most often experienced in the vast, and low population, area of inland or outback Australia. In Summer.
The locals adapt and mitigate. Big Aussie cities would meltdown.
The author of the paper, Ms Barnett is pictured wearing a sleeveless dress and looks very comfortable in her workplace picture.
That means her office is air conditioned for cooling, heating or both.
Imagine that typical hypocrisy if you can but, given the side she is a cheerleader for, it is not that hard to imagine.
Hypocrisy is Par for their Course.
I baled and stacked hay in Florida.
I spent 3.5 years in a Main Machinery Room on a conventional Aircraft Carrier
5 years I taking and commissioned plastics extrudes in hell holes worldwide.
Now 18 years making steam with CoGens and boilers at a hospital.
I’ll take heat over the alternative any day.
Not sure why anyone would need to imagine 120F anyway… the IPCC is talking about a TINY change in temperature.
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-temperature-projections
“Results from a wide range of climate model simulations suggest that our planet’s average temperature could be between 2 and 9.7°F (1.1 to 5.4°C) warmer in 2100 than it is today.”
Even under the wildly exaggerated 9.7F change in 80+ years time, only the places that are already hot as hell would hit that. 2-4F is much more likely, and people have no trouble imagining that… they experience that change on a day to day basis.
For Warmunists, it’s all about the imagination, and about feewings. I mean, “think of the children” (or grandchildren) is one of their favorite refrains. “Save the polar bears” has fallen by the wayside much their chagrin, since even they finally had to admit the polar bears weren’t in any danger, and were in fact thriving. Of course their favorite one “save the planet” is still in vogue. Because, if you hate the planet, what kind of a monster are you?
I’m afraid of 120!
I checked the Weather Channel and they said 90 here Thursday, then a cool down this weekend.
Nothing about 120. What’s she going on about???
She jumped ahead to why we should fear 120, but never told us why we should believe it’s going to get to 120, nor where nor when.
Apparently Ms. Barrett does not have an attic in her house, or if she does she has never been in it during the summer.
This seems a very strange alarmist piece on climate change and hot temperatures. I can invoke these feelings on someone who doesn’t understand what they are on about.
If climate change was suppose to people experiencing temperatures of 120 degrees F outside, then 99% of the planet have never seen climate change. They will also never experience climate change during their lives unless they go to a holiday destination that might. Although a lot will have experienced these temperatures say in a car or small building without air conditioning.
The average temperature of the planet warming or cooling generally means nothing to local climate that people actually experience. Maximum record temperatures are generally going no higher than the global temperature rise observed. Imagine near record temperatures upwards of 1-2 degrees F, nobody will notice the difference to last time it was near that.
The UK will never see 120 degrees F over the next century and neither will most of Europe. The entire continent Antarctica and Arctic will never see it. Only the hottest regions on the planet may see it and some do yearly especially in the Middle East and around some desert regions.
For virtually all the planet they might at sometime experience 41c (106f) instead of 40c (104f), 35c (95f) instead of 34c (93f), or 29c (84f) instead of 28c (83f) or 19c (68f) instead of 18c (66f).
Typo – 28c (82f)
Also 19c (66f), 18c (64f)
Doing the weekly thermal scan on the industrial lime kiln I used to operate, at the fire end I scanned the building wall, 140f. Always fun when you had to unplug the lime crusher which was located at the fire end of the kiln.
If 97% of psychics believe the Earth will end tomorrow and then it becomes the day after tomorrow, people take note.
It’s been colder recently than the period 1980s to 2000.
There, I just imagined climate change!
Nobody told that poor lost soul that her nightmare is not going to happen. She’d better creep back under her stone where it is nice and cosy. She may tell her story to the centipedes and snakes. I doubt they’ll listen.
She’s a psychologist. Her concern is not with truth or facts or the good of mankind, but how to influence people to believe whatever she wants them to believe.
It is a ploy to make listeners FEEL like they are superior to those who oppose her policies. She’s implying that her opposition is ignorant and out of touch. She knows that most people will not even take the time to think through if what she is saying even makes a bit of sense.
It’s pure propaganda and it is very intentional. She has no interest in finding out if what she is pushing for is true or not.