Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Psychology Today author Patricia Prijatel thinks the silence of Germans oppressed by the NAZIs is comparable to not talking about the alleged dangers of anthropogenic climate change.
Can We Break the Spiral of Silence on Climate Change?
There’s only one way to find out: Talk about it
Posted Mar 30, 2018
Patricia Prijatel
What can ordinary people do to combat the extraordinary problem of climate change? Talk, and keep on talking. Yet, that’s a step some of us are reluctant to take.
According to a report by the Yale Program on Climate Change(link is external), 69 percent of respondents in the United States believe global warming is happening, and 56 percent are worried about it. But (link is external)fewer than a third of those (link is external)ever talk about it to family or friends. Why not? Often because nobody else is talking about it.
The Spiral of Silence
Researchers call this the spiral of silence, a term coined by researcher Elizabeth Noelle-Neumann(link is external) to explain why Germans did not talk about the rise of Hitler and his related atrocities before and during World War II. They echoed the silence around them. Meanwhile, those in support of the Third Reich spoke loud and clear. In so doing, they controlled the discussion, no matter how many people might have disagreed with their opinions. Because the pro-Hitler voices were heard most, they were accepted as public opinion. Early in Hitler’s rise to power, when talking could have done the most to change history, those who broke the silence were faced with social isolation. Later, of course, breaking the silence could be deadly.
This has clear application in our current political climate, although fortunately the risks of speaking out don’t include concentration camps. Those who talk loudest now deny climate change, or at least the human involvement in it, calling it a natural progression of eon’s old environmental change. This makes it appear that climate change denial is a more popular sentiment than climate change acceptance. It is not. According to the Yale program, only 34 percent of those surveyed (link is external)in the U.S. deny the role of humans in global warming. Yet, those who have both the science and public opinion on their side remain astonishingly quiet.
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What a bizarre conflation of ideas.
Scientists who criticise climate dogma sometimes face serious risks to their careers. For example, Peter Ridd is facing a lawsuit because he defied a gag order from James Cook University in Australia, after he criticised climate hype.
Outside academia, where there are real penalties for criticising the scientific claims of colleagues, I suspect the reason most people don’t discuss climate change is most people find it boring.
Sensible Germans kept silent. Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps “for enemies of the state opened within months of the Nazis taking power. Dachau opened in 1933 and Buchenwald in 1937.
People imprisoned in them effectively disappeared. so it is little wonder there was no discussion as Ms Prijatel proposes. You keep silent on something—anything—if your life depends on it. She needs to read some History. Better yet, she should visit the sites of Dachau, Buchenwald and Auschwitz, their Memorials and Museums, to see for herself why people didn’t talk.
Her idea shows her gross ignorance and naïveté … The attack dogs of the Anthropogenic Global Warmers have had a chilling effect on debate as it is.
Patricia Prijatel: ID-10-t.
Or the Soviet “re-education” camps.
On the other hand, it’s been the warmists who have actually been talking about jail and re-education camps for those who disagree with them.
The only evidence she offers FOR her thesis is various “X% believe…” statements. Does she know what science is?
I suggest she sorts out the problems with her own profession, before she meddles in another pseudoscience.
https://www.nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology-studies-fail-reproducibility-test-1.18248
What a pile of **** It’s only the alarmists that are heard shouting. Can she really believe what she has written? She seems to believe a few bloggers out shout the entire mechanisms of virtually every government and msm broadcaster. Incredible.
Does anybody know who funded her “studies”? Big Oil? Improbable. The taxpayers? Gotcha…
OK Let’s talk about it. The reality is that the climate change we have been experiencing is so small that it takes a very sophisticated network of sensors decades to even detect it. Please do not mix up true climate change with weather cycles that are part of the current climate. Based on the paleoclimate record and the work done with models, one can conclude that the climate change we are experiencing today is caused by the sun and the oceans over which mankind has no control. There is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate and plenty of scientific rational to supprot the idea that the climate sensivity of CO2 is zero. Heat transfer away from the Earth’s surface in the troposphere is primarily by conduction, convection and phase change and not by LWIR absorption band radiation. H2O always provides a negative feedback to any possible CO2 based waming because the wet lapse rate is significantly less than the dry lapse rate. The temperature profile in the atmosphere has nothing to do with the LWIR absorption properties of so called greenhouse gases. Adding CO2 to the atmosphere has the effect of slightly lowering the dry lapse rate which is a cooling effect that almost eliminates any warming that could be caused by CO2’s LWIR absorption bands. After more than two decades of effort the IPCC has been umable to measure the climate sensivity of CO2 because there is nothing to measure. The AGW conjecture is based on a radiant greenhouse effect provided for by trace gases in the Earth’s atmosphere with LWIR absorption bands. Such a radiant greenhouse effect has not been observed in a real greenhouse, on Earth, or anywhere else in the solar system for that matter. The radiant greenhouse effect is science fiction as is the AGW conjecture. It is all a matter of science..
https://youtu.be/-LsttRlIBtQ At Easter Time it is interesting to see this interview in which the other secular Religión of our time also challenges for the Replacing of Calvary by some other Iconic catastrophe
You got that right. If you ever get cornered by one of those types that will talk your ears off, just start talking about climate science.
http://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.se/2018/03/has-holocaust-replaced-calvary-at.html
“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Obama, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.”
http://oestrem.com/thingstwice/2013/09/this-machine/
Poor ignorant Patricia. 20 years behind the times. She just hasn’t noticed how things have changed. She should do some reading and catch up.
I’m astonished that Brad Keyes hasn’t commented! I sincerely hope he’s at least working something up on this person over at https://climatenuremberg.com/ . She belongs in the Pantheon of his Climate Universe, perhaps as the love child of Naomi Oreskes and Stephan Lewandowsky. I’m keeping my fingers crossed!
In the same vein as the “light-bulb” jokes….
Q: How many psychologists does it take to change the climate?
A: Only one. But it has to really want to change.
You would think a psychologist would understand the impossibility of people sustaining a panic over climate change over the space of decades. People get bored. People move on to other things.
Follow the Yale link and check out the interactive maps, the questions etc.
This is the title:
Estimated % of adults who think global warming is happening, 2016
So, Anthony Watts is her hero?
fortunately the risks of speaking out don’t include concentration camps.
Yet.
When Prijatel prattles on about the need for people to “talk about climate”, she actually means she wants them to proselytize about it, like the Gore-bots who’ve trained at his klimate boot camps. She mistakenly believes that if enough people went around spouting the klimate gospel, it would turn things back around for them. The Climatists know that their movement is dying, and they can’t understand why. Their tactics just become increasingly desperate, and ludricous, like this climate cuckaloo’s.
It’ll be interesting if/when the final straw grasped at for them is a sudden about face concerning the 2nd Amendment. Or at least that it’s ok for it to remain for those who vote and/or speak the “correct” way, not not for “denier” types. These are some weird times we’re in.
The old saying goes: “Never discuss politics or religion in polite company.”
Climate Science ticks both of those boxes.
Six comments under the article itself, none of them falling in line with the group think theme of her opine.
It is interesting that her article has had no one agree with her. Do you think there is any chance she will check some of these suggestions out or is she permanently attached to the dogma?
no.
Totalitarian Despots have always relied on Psychology to persecute political opposition. 1984 is a world run by Psychologists.
The N@zi’s prosecuted anyone disagreed with the government.
Does the not so good professor actually believe that the German government is going to prosecute people that agree with it?
Survey shows 60% of Australians want to phase out coal by whenever we can manage it-
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/mar/29/majority-of-australians-support-phasing-out-coal-power-by-2030-survey-finds
A hot topic in South Australia is the price of electricity and that’s spreading by all accounts-
http://joannenova.com.au/2018/03/surprise-australia-closed-a-cheap-coal-generator-and-electricity-got-85-more-expensive/
Seems lots of people can talk a lot but fail to hold sensible positions.
This article has been submitted to the Godwin’s Law Hall of Fame for a 4th place Honorary Mention of Hitler, Germany and the Third Reich in the shortest possible amount of characters. Of course, !st, 2nd and 3rd place honors are all held by critics of President Trump.
The alarmists simply cannot understand skeptics. Like Hillary, they grasp at anything that does not lead to questioning their self-image as “good”, i.e. morally superior, citizens of the World and shepherds of the biosphere.
But ignorance cannot be the cause because the alarmist explanations are so darn well crafted – more self-image protection. An external malevolent force MUST be at work. Hence, fear.
This is beyond observation bias from inside the echo chamber. The witch mania must have been similar – so obviously a problem, those objecting must be working for the devil also, so burn them too! (Which was done.)
Climate alarmism vs skepticism needs a psychological study. As if! Maybe Hillary also.
In the opinion of this author, that is what she just provided.
I just treat it as luddite ignorance and educate people about how shoddy the “statistical techniques” they’re using to make their claims are.
Its really simple… I stood there with one of my customers and explained how there were two people under her driveway awning and across the street there were none, so according to “climate science” it meant that there were two people “here” and one person in the middle of the street. That they’re using that shitty of a system to “average” temperatures between sensors at an airport in a city and reports from 200 miles out in the country and for more than 20 years have denied that cities are unnaturally hot due to energy consumption.
And a 72 year old biddy who has to keep a chart of the ml/cc measurments of all the imperial measurements and graduated high school without taking a science course immediately understood that “climate science” is a scam.
Its not hard to explain!