Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to Psychology Today contributors Sara Gorman, Ph.D., MPH, and Jack M. Gorman, MD, psychologists are united in their determination to help climate “deniers” face the need for urgent climate action to prevent imminent human extinction, though they are uncertain about how to deliver group therapy to millions of people in the same session.
Climate Change Denial
Facing a reality too big to believe.Posted Jan 12, 2019
Sara Gorman, Ph.D., MPH, and Jack M. Gorman, MD
Denying to the Grave…
But there are also many points that are clear and not subject to legitimate debate. We can affirm without doubt that anthropogenic climate change is a real phenomenon that is already apparent and will, if not mitigated, cause terrible suffering and destruction before this century is over. A recent report from the United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tells us we can still hope to avert some of the catastrophic consequences of climate change, but only if we “abandon coal and other fossil fuels in the next decade or two.” Scientists may disagree about how fast the atmosphere is warming or what the best solutions are, but except for a small number of outliers, none doubt that we are rapidly approaching climate catastrophe.
That a few misguided politicians believe climate change predictions are exaggerated or even fabricated is lamentable. But perhaps more puzzling is the lack of alarm among the general public. As monumental hurricanes lash out in Houston and Puerto Rico and California forests burn out of control, it would seem that the evidence that climate scientists are right would be clear enough. Almost annually meteorologists tell us we have just experienced the warmest year in recorded history. Yet even people who experience extreme weather events often still refuse to report the experience as a manifestation of climate change. Polls tell us that many people are worried about climate change, but that does not seem to motivate much willingness to take action to mitigate it. Others deny that climate change is either occurring at all or that it represents any significant threat to civilization.
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Too Large to Believe
Among the myriad reasons that we shun this problem is its enormity. We aren’t “merely” being told that unless we take action our identities will be stolen, we will lose thousands of dollars, or even that it will take a few years off our lives. What the climate scientists are telling us is that if we don’t stop burning fossil fuels the human race faces extinction. The fact is that many people born this year will not survive global warming if it continues at the current pace and exceeds 3.50C by 2050.
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Climate change denial is in some ways a new mental process for psychologists to understand. Of course, the concept of denial itself is well understood. Psychologists consider denial—the refusal to accept facts in order to protect us from uncomfortable truths—to be a primitive defense mechanism.
But despite the fact that psychologists know a lot about denial, they have never had to face denial on this scale before. Millions of people share the phenomenon of climate denial. This is clearly not something that is amenable to individual or even group psychotherapy.
…
Organizations like Climate Psychiatry Alliance and Climate Psychology Alliance have been formed not only to point out the severe consequences of climate change for emotional and behavioral health but also to lend expertise in determining how best to overcome climate change denial. For these and similar organizations, climate change denial constitutes an emergency that demands immediate attention. We need urgent attention to developing and implementing the best practices for overcoming public despair and inaction and increasing the motivation to demand large-scale climate change mitigation action.
Read more: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/denying-the-grave/201901/climate-change-denial
If Dr. Sara Gorman and Dr. Jack Gorman had even the most basic grasp of the science, they would know that the “current rate” of global warming, between 1-2C / century depending on how you measure it, is not even remotely on track to hit 3.5C by 2050. An enormous acceleration of the current rate of warming would be required to hit 3.5C by 2050.
The evidence for imminent climate catastrophe is far from unequivocal.
Even the IPCC leaves room for doubt about the significance of global warming. The IPCC’s lower bound climate sensitivity of 1.5C warming / doubling of atmospheric CO2 would make global warming a complete non-event, even if we burned every scrap of recoverable fossil fuel on the planet.
There is substantial peer reviewed evidence climate sensitivity is even lower than the 1.5C lower bound provided by the IPCC.
By making unsupported assertions about climate science and the future fate of the human race, and by attempting to dispel legitimate doubts about the urgency of the alleged climate crisis, in my opinion Dr. Sara Gorman and Dr. Jack Gorman are potentially doing unspeakable harm to the lives and wellbeing of people within their sphere of influence. Let us hope Sara and Jack realise the enormity of their error.
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https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/robert_anton_wilson_178446
“Only the madman is absolutely sure.”
I’m not sure if this is a brainy quote?
I put it this way
“Only the completely insane are completely convinced of their own sanity.”
The last I heard, the psychologists were going on about all those people having breakdowns worrying about about global warming. I suppose they get their money either way.
The late, unlamented Soviet Union also used psychiatrists and psychologists to diagnose mental illness in dissidents.
Yes! And this is where we’re at. Elites – govt, universities, media, leftists telling us what our realities should be, and need to be. This is more than an argument of science.
This is mindfull of the predictions of the archetypal Hanrahan,
“If we don’t get three inches, man,
Or four to break this drought,
We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,
“Before the year is out.”
http://users.tpg.com.au/dandsc/job/job01.htm
The catastrophe ideation affects the mentally compromised and is discussed in this abstract.
Abstract
Skills to refrain from catastrophic thinking were negatively related to worry and a wide range of psychological distress. Repetitive negative thinking (including worry) is proposed as a common etiological factor for a wide range of psychological distress. Therefore, reduced repetitive negative thinking would mediate the negative relation between refraining from catastrophic thinking and psychological distress (depression, social anxiety, phobia, generalized anxiety, and obsessions and compulsions). As an overlap between five indices of psychological distress was expected, we first computed latent factors underlying them, which were then predicted by refraining from catastrophic thinking and repetitive negative thinking. Cross-sectional questionnaire data from 125 nonclinical voluntarily participating students (M age = 19.0 years, SD = 3.6; 54% women) supported the predictions: refraining from catastrophic thinking was negatively correlated with depression, social anxiety, phobia, generalized anxiety, and obsession and compulsion. Repetitive negative thinking mediated the negative relationship between refraining from catastrophic thinking and latent factors underlying psychological distress (Fear and Distress). Refraining from catastrophic thinking may be negatively correlated with psychological distress due to its negative relation to repetitive negative thinking.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0033294116663511
This is my own observation particularly with street people.
My attitude is to follow the data.
Its simpler.
We are well below the Roman warming, which led to the spread of commerce and civilization.
A big component of the modern warming could be natural so outside all but adaption.
Best work on the problems that beset us now which are fixable.
These psychologists should contact their counterparts in China, India Japan, Korea and Russia
to obtain a bit of feedback as to the living conditions they are aspiring to achieve.
If climate change were real, I wouldn’t care. I live in Canada and would love to have warmer winters.
If climate change were real, wouldn’t all the people screaming “we must do something” actually do something serious themselves? And I’m not talking of buying carbon credits. The climate change advocates must stop flying, stop using internal combustion engine vehicles, and convert their houses to electric heat. And for those in warmer climes, set their air conditioning to 80 deg F.
Plus for all those advocates who make more than 100k a year, please take 50% of all your income over $100 and send it to India or Africa, plus each year send 10% of all your wealth over one million, to the same.
Once all climate change advocates do this, then I”ll consider climate change.
“Too Large to Believe” – actually works both ways. But there’s worse.
I dare a psychologist, a panel of psychologists, anything of the trade, to provide a clear set of rules & algorithms upon which a fully functional & working computer model of the human brain can be built.
Until then, psychology will remain a set of assumptions and beliefs based on the unknown.
It is not even that. It is an attempt to quantify and constrain what the norms of a society are at a point in time. As society changes, what is normal changes. So psychology has no baseline. It is just a means to justify current social views. In other words, it is just made up shit and is always retroactive. However, if you define it as the study to identify sociable versus unsociable behavior, then it may have some small value.
Oh, gosh, observe the results without a clue on the “computing” underneath. As good as a science gets.
Must be pretty boring, lol 😉
“In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrent violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happenning. By lack of understanding, they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.”
George Orwell. “1984”
Written in 1948. Considered a warnng by sane people. Used as an instruction manual by the “progressives”.
“1984” was the first thing that came to mind, having just read this post. But I hesitated to comment, first searching to see if someone had already done so. I read Orwell’s book the year of its title. Perhaps it is time to read it again.
During the 20th century a number of political leaders (I can think of three prominent ones) were convinced their views of society were correct. They also believed everybody had to follow their ideas to avert problems. I am sure they all could “affirm without doubt” their views were the only true way to go. Unlike our Psychology Today contributors, these political leaders had no such problems about how to re-educate their masses. They all had rather direct ways of convincing the public to follow their rules. 150 million human lives and many failed political systems later…..
As was evidenced in the days of the USSR, when a belief system turns to the Psychologists and Psychiatrists,to support its principles and advocacy, resulting in the jailing of those who do not conform with the state’s philosophy or objectives in asylums, you just know, the end of their flawed/false paradigm is imminent.
I just wonder who will be the UN state’s first climate realists, they decide must be locked away? Who will be our Solzhenitsyn?
“I am of course confident that I will fulfil my tasks as a writer in all circumstances — from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death. But may it be that repeated lessons will finally teach us not to stop the writer’s pen during his lifetime? At no time has this ennobled our history”.
Rug up you psych folk. The Ferbil Coldening is here now, just as the Climate Scientologists predicted back in the 70s. Dress warm!
Really, the paper shows the level of development of the field of psychology, full of cliches, propaganda, loaded words (those with emotional impact but no meaning), and media hysteria, and attempting to codify it into a field of study as something real, real meaning repeatable amongst a group of people studying the same phenomena.
They are a gullible lot aren’t they?
These psychologists are obviously suffering from a severe dose of the SatanicCO2 viral Meme. A daily dose of WUWT et al is to be recommended. They should heal themselves first, before pontificating rubbish.
“A daily dose of WUWT et al is to be recommended.”
That would be good therapy! And it’s free! 🙂
Ah yes, psychologists. Bat-sh*t crazy the lot of them.
Something worries me.
They may be right in observing that some problem may be ‘too large to believe’ by Joe Bloggs.
Could there also be hoaxes ‘too large to believe’ by psychologically challenged psychologists?
Hysteria. This is not about a hoax, somebody just misleading some other people. This is a hysteric moment, where large masses of people start to believe in radical means in order to reach a utopia – here a more liveable planet without fossil fuel.
There are fraudsters and hoaxers always around and active, making money on the hysteria, but the hysteric people mostly run their hysteria on their own. I have been optimistic, and willing to believe that this is just the zeitgeist, and it will go away and be replaced with something more sensible, something more feasible and constructive
I disagree. Catastrophic Climate Change is the biggest scientific fraud in all of history!
“We need urgent attention to developing and implementing the best practices for overcoming public despair and inaction”
Wrong!
We need urgent attention to developing and implementing the best practices for overcoming (some) social scientist’s gullibility, scientific illiteracy, prejudice and arrogance.
We’re looking at Psychology Today?
What next, the Fortean Times?
I have a terrible feeling that somehow you are being grossly unfair to the Fortean Times by even mentioning this group of Psycho-delusionists in association with the former.
This journal doesn’t even appear on my list of acceptable journals to reference in Masters grade assignments. What is it, something to put on a shrink’s coffee table?
Everything is wrong in the comments. There is no need for evidence for just one percent probability, because the danger is so great.
Speaking of numbers. 99% of certitude to destroy all we have to eventually prevent something that could putatively destroy a part of what we have.
What a deal !
Well said.
Danger of WHAT?! Better weather?!
History shows us that “warm” climate is the BEST climate, and that “cold” climate is what brings misery and suffering. So you’re afraid of what, insufficient misery and suffering?!
The Climate Change CONsensus Cult are uniting into a Climate Liar United Bullies (CLUB).
Has any one seen Gerald Kutney’s twitter propaganda – it’s relentless.
Mind you, he has a vested interest as MD of the Sixth Element Sustainability Management, renewable energy technology consultancy!
These people cannot prove a single thing. They should be charged with menace or a similar crime. Psychology on steroids. This is proof that things have gone too far (and that psychology is a really stupid profession). Let’s take no prisoners from now on, we’ve been far too accommodating and tolerant with these idiots. Derision and ad hominems is all they deserve. It’s late but I need to have a drink after reading their cr@p.
If you have ever had a consultation with a psych professional, you may quickly realise that they are more in need of therapy than you are.
It is undoubtedly a mental ailment to practice medicine and say that opposing mass genocide in the Middle East shows mental ill health.
You can of course believe Western propaganda whole, just as Global Warmers believe the IPCC.
But if you actually interrogate evidence critically nd reach radically different conclusions?
Definitely off with the fairies!
The medic says so, so it must be true….
For a bunch of supposedly highly educated individuals, how did these brainless wonders pass 9th grade Earth Science?
When these Eggheads start living in conditions prior to the Industrial Revolution and live in squalor, then I might take them seriously.
Clients. They want clients – and psychologists know how to get them. This is malpractice. Never mind that psychiatry and psychology are questionable professions. Psychiatry for sure. Nothing that’s “mental” is an illness, although there are illnesses that can stem from physical illnesses like thyroid problems, but in those cases, the thyroid problem is treated. There is no pill to “treat” the mind. This is insanity.
“Let us hope Sara and Jack realise the enormity of their error.”
Not while it is so obscenely profitable.
If I could speak to these psychologists, I would recite Luke 4:23. But they are not physicians, and, as evidenced by their posting, their science is more like alchemy.