Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Katharine Hayhoe seems to think it is pointless to argue the science, because scientifically literate skeptics “can muster evidence to explain why they’re right, too.”.
Katharine Hayhoe Reveals Surprising Ways to Talk About Climate Change
By Katie O’Reilly
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When it comes to climate change denialism, Hayhoe tends to defer to social scientists. “They’ve found that more education doesn’t change people’s perceptions—that in fact, the people with the highest degree of science literacy aren’t the ones who are most concerned, but rather, the most polarized. Because those people can muster evidence to explain why they’re right, too.”
Hayhoe vehemently advises against engaging with the “smokescreens” skeptics tend to offer as the reasons they couldn’t possibly agree with or act on the issue of climate change. “There’ll be no progress that way,” she insists. “It’s a lot easier for people to say, ‘I have a problem with the science’ than it is to talk about what the real problem is.”
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But of course, some of America’s most enduring values are prosperity and security—and climate action fits squarely into both of those. I think one of the greatest disservices ever done was framing climate change as an environmental issue. Because it’s an economic issue, a public health issue, a national security issue, a humanitarian issue. It’s an issue of whatever it is that any given person already cares about. So rather than feeling like we have to instill new values into people—and if you come at it that way, people sense subliminal judgment, that you’re saying they don’t have the right values and you do—you need to enter the conversation as if the person you’re speaking with has exactly the right values they need to care about climate change; that in fact, they’re the perfect person to care and act.
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What about when you get stuck? Say you’ve landed on shared values—you and a climate denier agree the weather has been wild, but they just insist, “Oh, it’s just part of the natural cycle.” What then?
Here’s where you pivot and move on, beyond what they disagree on, to something you both agree on. You might offer one phrase of dissent—perhaps, “According to natural cycles we should be cooling down right now, not warming.” But then, before the conversation becomes a game of whack-a-mole, change the subject. Try, “Did you know that China and India have more solar energy than any other countries in the world? I’m a little worried the U.S. is falling behind; aren’t you worried, too?” At this point you’ve moved the conversation beyond what they don’t agree on. Because whether it’s a natural cycle or not, a lot of people are worried about losing the fight in the nuclear energy field. You want to acknowledge what people have to say but not to engage.
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Read more: https://www.ecowatch.com/katharine-hayhoe-climate-change-2550366098.html
I personally found Katharine’s interview interesting, because it shed light on a reason why leftists and climate advocates seem to hate President Trump with such venom.
Katharine’s persuasion technique in my opinion seems to rely on making people feel bad about themselves, by playing on their personal insecurities.
President Trump doesn’t play on people’s fear, he engages people’s hope. People who believe in themselves, who believe they have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, have the confidence to make up their own minds, rather than simply accepting what they are told. They are harder to manipulate.
Church Lady
Dear Incorrigible Catherine,
William Shatner says it all in his vocal rendition “I can’t get Behind That” – William Shatner featuring Henry Rollins
¯
when in the last line he says “I can’t get behind a fat ass!” .
🙂
OOps that should be …
‘Dear Incorrigible Katharine,’
Funny how when her name is mentioned I think of Will Shatner’s “I can’t get Behind That”.
Last I heard, lying was un-Christian. Yet there she is, lying her little head off, and encouraging others to do the same. Nice.
The end justifies the means?
Lying doesn’t matter to her form of religion. Her pastor husband, Andrew Farley, teaches the gnostic hyper-grace heresy that essentially nullifies the issue of sin. The only real sin is believing one is sinful.
If you haven’t been following Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) explain politics and world events framed by his training as a hypnotist (seriously), then you owe it to yourself to become educated. His belief that the vast majority of choices that we make are not, in fact, cold/rational/vulcan-logical, but rather highly influenced by emotion. To expand on that, I suggest Win Bigly.
To understand Hayhoe (and her ilk), I suggest Robert Cialdini’s Influence or his Pre-Suasion which formed the basis of the 2016 democratic presidential campaign’s persuasion / psychological-warfare tactics. That the AGW “scientists” employ the same ops is unsurprising.
Unsurprising, but sickening nonetheless.
She is simply describing what anyone who has had sales training already knows. Find the emotional hot button and frame you presentation to show how what you offer satisfies that emotion. Most people buy into things with emotion not facts. Cuddly polar bears going extinct, children never going to know the joy of snow,
the Earth has a fever, and right on down the list of emotional examples of how we will ruin the Planet if we don’t do as they say.
+1
Marketing majors rebranded and salaried
Now we’re making progress . . . let’s just drop all the pretense about climate change and go straight to the real deal: the unfair distribution of wealth or the fact that not all people are equal. As soon as we fix that technicality the world will enter utopia. Some countries have already started down that brave path, consider Mexico and China. They are building the cities of the future in which everyone is equal witness:
https://tinyurl.com/yaze2g6l
We too can do this. Just remove the people’s ability to resist the government and move them into their glorious new communities.
Cultural marxist: “I’m worried about ‘blank’.” Or, “The government needs to start paying for ‘blank’.“
“I’m worried about ‘blank'” courtesy the genius writers of futurama:
(worth 20 seconds of anyone’s day!)
+100. Love Futurama.
“Somebody ( not me, surely the government) should do something about that!
Right. And that may, in fact, be, because there’s nothing to be concerned about.
Or we(!) should turn to people with the lowest degree of science literacy. Not.
What an air head for someone with an PHD. She’s just using AGW to promote here socialist agenda.
With her, PHD stands for Piled Higher and Deeper.
LMFAO – and unfortunately that is the “correct” definition for far too many of today’s leftist-polluted educational “institutions” as well.
I once interviewed a lady who was applying for a position to head up an environmental clean up project (heavy metals in a lake). She had a phd in “Environmental Sciences”. No chemistry, math or physics. I have learned over the years that anyone can get a degree in any area of study no matter how intellectually deficient they might be if they have the time and money. There are schools out there which care not at all about actual education. And it is getting worse.
And society demands higher education. So a steady stream of very average ( or below) young people parade off to university to put in time and get a piece of paper as a passport to employment.
The photo of this poor woman just screams “condescending, liberal, airhead”! It is remarkable that anyone would take her seriously.
I think she got her degree in Smugocity, from the University of Smugness.
She still comes off as I’m correct and you’re not. She uses an example of “natural cycles” saying it is warming when it should be cooling. Interesting, since when it is cooling the cause is ALWAYS warming according to alarmists. I’ve already seen numerous stories about global warming causing the snow fall and cold temps in the US and Europe.
Obama – flouted red line. Trump – 59 cruise missiles
“Don’t engage d*n*ers on the basis of the scientific evidence, they’ll just interpret it differently,” i.e. wrongly.
Do such people have any self-awareness at all? For being so “woke”, they seem to never catch the extreme irony when they say such things. It’s like when they bemoan the deplorable bitter clingers in flyover country who are constantly “voting against their own self-interest.” NOBODY votes against their self-interest. They vote for what they believe is the best choice to get done what they want to get done — but since the coastal elites have decided that those things are “bad”, they can only interpret it as being too stupid to know what they really want.
I remember watching the 1940 movie “Sergeant York,” and how the people in their remote Tennessee holler were gobsmacked to find out there was a war going on in Europe, and that America was going to join in. Sometime I wish we still operated at that level of news penetration. You don’t always need to hear about everything going on everywhere.
As long as I still had YouTube…
Prior to Pearl Harbor, the war was just another one of those European fights that the US had nothing to do with.
Is it any surprise that people that had little contact with the so called national media wouldn’t have heard of it?
It was a different time, but before Pearl Harbor I was reading local newspapers a little and knew about the problems, although education was not trying to frighten everybody. However, my family was connected to the military. and we probably had better news then. Two major newspapers there in military town of San Antonio. One barely survives, but lots of other venues.
WWI less known, but probably more connections to military than today, in percentages. York was in WWI, not so numbered at the time. Flu killed more than war.
Insults of this nature have no place on WUWT content deleted. Mod
Shouldn’t that be in square brackets?
How can one possibly consider themselves to be an objective scientists and not a political hack for advocating positions that they know are disprovable by informed scientists?
Furthermore, how can that same individual claim to be “evangelical” Christian while admittedly using their faith as a platform to manipulate public opinion? Shameful.
Isn’t the “evangelical” tag pretty well synonymous with cramming your beliefs down other people’s throats? Can’t have people thinking for themselves. They might reach the “wrong” conclusions.
Many like to believe that, and some evangelicals are pretty rude too. But please don’t allow yourself to generalise to the whole, what this woman presents.
It never ceases to amaze me how little most people know about the groups they hate the most.
It is all going to come crashing down on them. This year is the year the climate should start to turn and AGW theory starts to run into more and more trouble.
By decade end we should have a clearer picture but this theory is wrong and has never had anything to stand on, other then fantasy.
I think you’re probably right but the great tragedy of this is that a warmer world would be better for almost all life and CO2 has nothing to do with it. Yet we are wasting billions of dollars that could be invested in actual,worthwhile endeavours.
…. relax, they have it covered. They’re building a new Cold War with Russia, although I think that bogeyman is a bit more dangerous than carbon dioxide.
Indeed. When the climate begins cooling, they’ll be wishing for the good old days of “global warming.” Of course, they’ll just come up with some new pseudo-science to claim it is all humanity’s fault, specifically the burning of those evil fossil fuels (just like the last time, see the “global cooling” scare). The goal has always been to CONTROL energy sources and energy use, because when you’re in control of energy, you’re in control of *everything.*
Translation: “My livelihood is no longer secure.”
Winning at Whack-A-Mole is a lot easier than responding to perpetual CC shaming from the radical left. Temperature could go flat for another 20 years but that is not going to stop the members of the CCCC “Catastrophic Climate Change Cult”. They need a sound ignoring…
Where have I seen that expression before?
Is that Dolores Jane Umbridge?
Yes. The expression of imagined superiority.
She also looks a little bit like Dana Carvey’s Church Lady.
She exuded self righteous behavior onto the kid wizards with lies and attacks against a class of people, the muggles.
The actress gave the single best acting performance of the entire movie series, yet she seems to have copied someone who is real…………..
Or just doing their best to hide how s_ faced they are.
You nailed it.
You beat me to it.
– Child, don’t do drugs. Whatever your friends tell you, it’s dangerous. Don’t follow the group when the group does back things.
Also, don’t fall behind. Don’t let you fall out of the group. Follow the group. In every case.
– What?
– OK, do drugs. Whatever. Don’t be alone when there is 97% consensus. That’s more important.
Like France. They have a popular President (elected with less than 1/5 of the electors on the first turn and with just over 99,9% of supports from newspapers – the magazine on fishing was neutral). French people are advanced. There was a hacking of the “En Marche!” (“let’s go”) party (party of the now elected President) and they refused to look at the data dump. That hacking was from Russia, tracing back to the “Russia frontier”. Well actually from IP addresses in Ukraine but they guys understand Russian too so I guess it’s all the same. French people are too clever to look at a data dump of emails hacked from Ukrainians Russians.
Also, voter ID is bad. Don’t fall for for it. It’s racist. You see French people show their official photo ID to vote. They are horrible people. Proof is: they have a military parade every year. They can even vote with an official military ID. Just like North Korea and Russia which is not democratic because Vladimir Putin is extremely popular. Don’t follow North Korea or Russia or France. They are nationalist people. Always have been. France bad!
Dr. Hayhoe has been a frequent guest at Climate One-
https://climateone.org/search/node/hayhoe
In 2012 she stated this:
“Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe discusses the emotional ties connected to climate change and people’s understanding of climate change at Climate One. “I don’t believe that facts are enough,” says Hayhoe, “this is not necessarily an issue of facts, it’s an issue about fear. There’s an enormous amount of fear that we are dealing with an issue where the impacts are distant and far away, but the solutions are imminent and people fear them as being very costly and that they are infringing on our freedom, our economy, and our rights.””
https://climateone.org/video/facts-versus-fear
It doesn’t sound like she has made it over to the Engineering department recently, but she might want to ask them about how to measure if actions (when putting weight on FEAR) have worked out for say Ivanpah or Crescent Dunes….
Hayhoe could teach engineers a thing or two about Irrational Risk Analysis!
Brad,
I was lost for a long time- as far as trying to understand how the precautionary principle could lead to ignoring the feedback loop(s) that most scientists and engineers back in say 60’s or early 70’s use to use to find out how things worked in the real world- but I think I get it now. Good intentions are what counts these days it seems.
A few generations ago my ancestors left Europe and the UK when the likes of Dr. Hayhoe said we couldn’t and shouldn’t read various texts and we should tithe to those in the know. This didn’t help keep toilet’s running back then and it certainly won’t keep my well, and then the toilet, operating today.
I am too old to figure out if a paper noted here- http://www.nusap.net/ entitled- “Engineering ethics and post-normal science: A French perspective .“ by Fanny Verrax would help Dr. Hayhoe see the light, or not, on why I will not be tithing at her church.
Just wait until they see the cost of failures of the 100’s of million of installed solar panels as they start aging,
MTBF of a 10 panel system of 40 year panels is 8-12 years.
There are going to be (tens?)millions of bad, or low output panels per year, as they start aging.
And that’s just the panels, the converters will have an even higher failure rate, and batteries, lol, laptop batteries still only last 3-5 years.
Idiots, the whole lot of them.
As for evidence
https://micro6500blog.wordpress.com/2016/12/01/observational-evidence-for-a-nonlinear-night-time-cooling-mechanism/
I lived in Southern California for 28 years. Back in December of 2005 (IIRC), we had a week long stretch of calm, cloudless nights. Three of those nights, the temperature dropped to 38 F. The morning after each such night, our pool had a 3/8 inch thick layer of surface ice. After a bit of measurement and calculating the view factor, it was straightforward to calculate that the pool had to be radiating to a sink no warmer than -60 F. That assumed an 8 hour cooling period. If one assumes radiation to space (at 15 K), the cooling period is reduced to 4.5 hours. Either (or anything in between) is physically reasonable. It tells me that there isn’t much impeding the earth’s loss of heat via radiation.
Nope. The really cool thing, is it changes in the middle of the night under clear calm skies. That is cool. But it also controls what temp it is in the morning, and is mostly invariant to changes in co2.
California has pretty dry air, so it cools a lot, but you have low dew points. The noncondensing GHG’s control how fast it cools at dusk, in Oh I see a lot of about 4F/hr rates, then when rh goes up the rate changes, slows, and can stop the temp from falling. But the optical window is still bleeding about 30% of the energy at that delta, but that doesn’t change all that much.
“Did you know that China and India have more solar energy than any other countries in the world? I’m a little worried the U.S. is falling behind; aren’t you worried, too?”
LMAO Clearly these people have never looked at an air quality index.
Even if it were true, why would I worry about another country hobbling their industry so that it can’t compete with ours?
“Should be cooling down right now”…according to whom?
Why yes…according to *models*, once again. Models which are not empirical evidence, for which we don’t get to examine the code , which are not based upon any published, cohesive single theory we can examine. The entire idea is enough wrong results will average to a correct one. Which is valid when measuring *empirical* things using the same method and averaging errors out because you’re using the same methods to measure something real and the errors will (generally) average out.
Anyway, her evasion tactics are insupportable. IF someone else can come up with their own reasons that they don’t agree and you cannot falsify their reasoning…then actual science demands you examine your OWN claims. Not being able to falsify a counter assertion means it is very possible *you* are wrong, Katherine.
My most effective argument yet is this…pointing out that there is no actual empirical evidence that AGW exists to the degree stated …other than CO2’s behavior in a bell jar on a lab bench or in a closed system. All the millions of ‘it’s warming’ studies are consistent with…natural warming. The *sole* differentiator between AGW claims and natural variation isn’t even empirical. It’s models…and that’s IT.
I suspect that the original study was trying to verify that skeptics were more ignorant than the CAGW gullible. When it turned out that skeptics were slightly MORE knowledgeable when it came to science, the paper went off on that “polarization” nonsense.
No studies have been done on polarization per se; Are people more informed about politics more polarized than those who never vote, never watch TV news on politics, never read the papers?
Are sports fans more polarized on who the best all time players were than those who never watch sports?
I suspect that the answer is “yes” in both cases.