Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Conversation author Ryan Weber is worried that efforts to insert a mention of climate change into every remotely weather connected news story might not be as persuasive as he hoped – though he suggests being more sneaky about inserting climate messages might yield better results.
Extreme weather news may not change climate change skeptics’ minds
Ryan Weber Associate Professor of English, University of Alabama in Huntsville
March 27, 2019 9.33pm AEDTThe year 2018 brought particularly devastating natural disasters, including hurricanes, droughts, floods and fires – just the kinds of extreme weather events scientists predict will be exacerbated by climate change.
Amid this destruction, some people see an opportunity to finally quash climate change skepticism. After all, it seems hard to deny the realities of climate change – and object to policies fighting it – while its effects visibly wreck communities, maybe even your own.
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But a recent study from Ohio State University communications scholars found that news stories connecting climate change to natural disasters actually backfire among skeptics. As someone who also studies scientific communication, I find these results fascinating. It’s easy to assume that presenting factual information will automatically change people’s minds, but messages can have complex, frustrating persuasive effects.
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It turned out that climate change skeptics – whether politically conservative or liberal – showed more resistance to the stories that mentioned climate change. Climate change themes also made skeptics more likely to downplay the severity of the disasters. At the same time, the same articles made people who accept climate change perceive the hazards as more severe.
…Given this resistance to news, other approaches, such as avoiding fear-inducing and guilt-based messaging, creating targeted messages about free-market solutions, or deploying a kind of “jiu jitsu” persuasion that aligns with pre-existing attitudes, may prove more effective at influencing skeptics. In the meantime, social scientists will continue to investigate ways to combat the stubborn boomerang effect, even as the consequences of climate change intensify all around us.
Read more: https://theconversation.com/extreme-weather-news-may-not-change-climate-change-skeptics-minds-112650
My old English teachers would have understood the problem immediately.
But modern English professors like Ryan Weber appear to be genuinely puzzled when skeptics react negatively to reporters interleaving shaky climate claims with their allegedly objective descriptions of weather disasters.
Because we can always trust the objectivity of weather reporters, right?
Most of the Climate Clownery is fueled on the media by useful idiots that in the best case do not even take the time to verify basic arguments before babbling all nonsense, and in the worst case, are blatantly fraudulent.
I’m guessing the English Professor doesn’t know the difference between weather and climate then…
Give him another thirty years.
Simples: mentioning ‘climate change’ is shorthand for ‘I am a gullible reporter and what I write is fake news’.
Dear Dr. Ryan Weber: Defective products fail in the market, even if oversupply drives the price to zero. Clever advertising will not change that.
“….just the kinds of extreme weather…’ Define extreme weather. My mother who is 97 said all you needed to get in OSU was an umbrella and a fee card. They must have had more raining days in Ohio when she went to college. Now they call that weather extreme.
From the article: “The year 2018 brought particularly devastating natural disasters, including hurricanes, droughts, floods and fires – just the kinds of extreme weather events scientists predict will be exacerbated by climate change.”
In 2018 we had “normal” weather. In 2019 we will also have hurricanes, floods, droughts and fires. This happens every year. It’s no worse now than in the past. That’s what the statistics say.
Now you say ” just the kinds of extreme weather events scientists predict will be exacerbated by climate change.”
Well, most climate scientists used to say “will be”, in other words, CAGW’s effects will be evident in the future, but it seems some climate scientists are now moving up the scheule and claiming to see CAGW in every storm front. They are moving the goalposts. And you, my friend, have bought into the hype.
Skeptics should study how to get Alarmists to stop drinking the Koolaide. That’s the real problem in climate science.
It is really quite amusing. His blind determination to believe that weather events are getting more severe and that this proves climate change shows his lack of judgement. It obviously hasn’t occurred to him that there is data on such events and the evidence does not support the claims.
But what is really funny is that all of this nonsense means that he has reached completely wrong conclusions within his own discipline. It looks like failure all round.
From the article: “ut a recent study from Ohio State University communications scholars found that news stories connecting climate change to natural disasters actually backfire among skeptics. As someone who also studies scientific communication, I find these results fascinating. It’s easy to assume that presenting factual information will automatically change people’s minds, but messages can have complex, frustrating persuasive effects.”
The problem is you and all the other CAGW advocates are not presenting factual information, you are merely making assertions about the Earth’s climate that have no evidence to back them up. Skeptics can tell the difference between facts and speculation.
So, he is suggesting that the ALARMISTS get even sneakier with their gloom and doom climate ALARMISM.
From the article: “Given this resistance to news, other approaches, such as avoiding fear-inducing and guilt-based messaging, creating targeted messages about free-market solutions, or deploying a kind of “jiu jitsu” persuasion that aligns with pre-existing attitudes, may prove more effective at influencing skeptics.”
No, facts are what will influence skeptics. Face it, the CAGW promoters don’t have the facts to back up their claims.
Skeptics say this all the time. If the science is so settled, then it ought to be easy for alarmists to present enough facts to convince the skeptics. This author could do that himself, if he could find the facts, and then that would be the end of the story. But he doesn’t have the facts and the people he listens to don’t have the facts, so skeptics remain skeptical.
Alarmists need to produce CAGW facts not propaganda ploys if they want to convince skeptics of anything.
I would think that increased greenhouse gasses should REDUCE cyclone energy and extreme weather events. Specifically, the energy for heat engines comes from temperature DIFFERENCES, not just from high temperatures. In the case of tropical cyclones it’s the water being warmer than the air that supplies the energy.
But with global warming, the air wouldn’t be getting as cold as quickly in the fall, so the energy for tropical cyclones should be reduced . This is counter-intuitive to folks who don’t know physics, but it’s why refrigerators consume electricity instead of produce it, and why tornadoes tend to be associated with cold-fronts.
Based on these stories, it looks like I’m right, and those who cry about warming increasing the frequency of extreme weather are wrong.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/2015GL064929
“Recent review papers reported that many high-resolution global climate models consistently projected a reduction of global tropical cyclone (TC) frequency in a future warmer climate, although the mechanism of the reduction is not yet fully understood. Here we present a result of 4K-cooler climate experiment. The global TC [tropical cyclone] frequency significantly increases in the 4K-cooler climate compared to the present climate. This is consistent with a significant decrease in TC frequency in the 4K-warmer climate.“
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X06009186
“Our record demonstrates that the frequency variability of intense landfalling cyclones is greatest at centennial scale compared to seasonal and decadal oscillations. [T]he period between AD 1600 to 1800 [Little Ice Age] had many more intense or hazardous cyclones impacting the site than the post AD 1800 period.”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379115301335
“A comparison with North Atlantic and Western Mediterranean paleoclimate proxies shows that the phases of high storm activity occurred during cold periods, suggesting a climatically-controlled mechanism for the occurrence of these storm periods. … Periods of low storm activity occurred from 560 cal yr BC to 140 cal yr AD (SP9 and SP8, Roman Warm Period) and from 820 to 1230 cal yr AD (SP4, Medieval Warm Period).”
http://www.sciencemagazinedigital.org/sciencemagazine/30_january_2015?folio=540&pg=98#pg98
“Our work illustrates a major constraint on the large-scale global atmospheric engine: As the climate warms, the system may be unable to increase its total entropy production enough to offset the moistening inefficiencies associated with phase transitions. … On a warming Earth, the increase in perceptible water has been identified as a reason for the tropical overturning to slow down, and studies over a wide range of climates suggest that global atmospheric motions are reduced in extremely warm climates.“
So IF weather were becoming more extreme, it would be an indicator of global COOLING and NOT global warming.
“Communication scholars”
Hmmmmmn
Dr. Goebbels?
Evidence changes minds, and you have none. End of Story.
When every kind of “bad weather” is said to be “caused by climate change,” even types of weather diametrically opposed to one another, it’s easily recognized as bullshit. And no matter how you “package” bullshit, it still stinks and skeptics will still be able to sniff it out.
“Dr Ryan Weber, Associate Professor, English Department Director of Business and Technical Writing”, …
Given the failed AGW thesis of anthrophobic climate-change (which geo-historicaly occurs on the scale of multiple centuries (where ~250 years between data ‘points’ is typical), what would any mere noise-level major weather event have to do with a climate change signal, which would take a minimum of 250 years to begin to show, i.e. 1950 + 250 years brings us to around 2200 when we’ll be able to look for any emergent trace of a multi-century planetary climate trend change signal.
And there’s no certainty there will be one, even at that point. In fact its more or less 2 to 1 that there still won’t be. The objective observations can be positive, negative, or neutral, even at that point. More than likely you would ‘like’ the result in 2200 AD.
Does Ryan not know the difference between a noise-floor and a signal? No concept of scale and proportions? No grasp of the difference between weather and climate, at all?
So do you really consider yourself qualified (in any way) to comment on such things Mr Weber? Any idea why you might feel you are, given the obvious evidence against?
Science is not interested in the “People’s Champion”, Ry-Ry, they’re only interested in signal. Not in mere weather noise. And I really hope you’re not even now thinking of citing a climate model’s output as ‘evidence’, as that would be much too silly.
“If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed.”
― Mark Twain
No single weather event, journal article, news story or opinion article will convince me. English professors are supposed to be skilled in the use of language. This one is pretty dim.
No single weather event is more than a data point, however scary, in the pursuit of climate truth. The truth is that we don’t know what drives global climate with any precision or confidence.
The Conversation needs to change their name to honestly reflect their true values and principles. I would suggest welcome to “The One-Sided Conversation”.
Amazing that every single idea these people have is some form of trickery.
Here is my hint regarding communicating better: The term denier/skeptic is used as a blanket term to cover a wide variety of positions on climate issues. While it can include people who are genuinely misinformed, it is also used to describe the positions of very well-informed persons such as Roger Pielke, Sr. and Jr., Richard Lindzen, Roy Spencer,John Christy, Judith Curry, Steve McIntrye and many others. The communication strategy that would be effective on the genuinely uninformed would not be at all helpful in discussing climate issues with well-informed scientists and laymen. The fact that the climate alarmists do not recognize the difference between these types of “deniers/skeptics” causes them to almost immediately shut down fruitful communications with well-informed people who take a skeptical view of climate alarmism.
Downplay? Uh…no. Put the hype into perspective? YES!
Those who perceive the event as more severe have swallowed the hype.
That a strong hurricane came ashore, or a tornado was spawned from a thunderstorm, that’s a fact. Saying it was “caused” by “climate change” is a conclusion. CAGW skeptics don’t disagree with the actual facts (weather events), just the conclusion that these events were caused by “climate change”. As long as the alarmists don’t understand this simple truth, they will continue to be baffled as to why their messaging is failing.
You guys are still all assuming that any of this is about honestly informing the populace. It isn’t. It’s about clicks, eyeballs, ratings, and advertiser $. That’s why everything is framed in the most breathless, dramatic, apocalyptic, “unprecedened! historic!” terms possible. The TV audience is now addicted to drama–EXTREME drama is what it takes to break through the ordinary buzz of ennui. The laughable fact that the Weather Channel now names every rain cloud, and Weather Underground (if you scroll down far enough) will sift the earth’s entire surface to find “inconvenient” weather to attribute to AGW should surprise no one. The answer is to turn all the garbage off and go outside. Develop your OWN predictions–with practice, they’ll be as accurate as anyone’s.
Or listen to meteorologist that make their living forecasting THE WEATHER as accurately as they know how AND reporting it as what is … THE WEATHER.
PS The Storm Channel, if I’m not mistaken, bought Weather Underground some years ago. That explains its issues.
My brother in law says that the purpose of advertising is mainly to
reinforce your belief that the product you bought last week is the best.
While advertising can also make you look at the items on the shelf and
possibly pick one, its reinforcement that is the important factor.
The same goes for the constant stream of climate “Facts” that we are bombarded with. Its repartition that imprints the message.
MJE VK5ELL