Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to UNSW psychology doctoral candidate Belinda Xie, everybody is somewhere on the spectrum of climate denial.
Climate change denialism is something we all suffer from
Twitter Facebook LinkedIn 07 FEB 2020 CAROLINE TANG
Even those who don’t question human-induced climate change can fall on the spectrum of climate denialism if they are all talk and no action, a UNSW psychology researcher argues.
Climate change denialism is something that applies to more than just diehard non-believers, a UNSW Sydney researcher argues.
The unprecedented bushfire crisis has strengthened demand for government action on climate change and galvanised Australians to take to the streets protesting against the nation’s reliance on fossil fuels.
Some Australians have taken more drastic action, such as actor Yael Stone who gave up the permanent right to work in the US.
But for many people, such action seems unrealistic.
“While we may know it is better for the environment to give up our car for public transport, stop using single-use plastics, or eat less meat — we do not always do all these things all the time.
“It’s almost impossible to live with zero impact on the planet, but it’s what we do when we recognise this that matters”, Belinda Xie asserts.
The UNSW Scientia PhD candidate specialises in cognitive science and researches the psychology of climate change.
“It’s important that we acknowledge we are all climate deniers, to some extent, and then understand how and why we reached this point,” Ms Xie said.
“It’s not simply because humans are bad or selfish people: there are a lot of external factors out of our control, such as the information we consume that can encourage denialism, or the way our economy is set up.
“So, we then need to ask ourselves: how do we overcome this denialism – what action can we take as a community and what can government and business do?”
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“Making behavioural change at an individual level is important, but it’s just as important for the people and institutions at the top to inspire and implement change for the good of our planet and future generations.”
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Read more: https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/climate-change-denialism-something-we-all-suffer
Belinda Xie’s paywalled paper is available here.
How can greens achieve that idealised state of society described by Belinda Xie, in which leaders and institutions inspire people to more fully commit to fighting climate denial, and inspire people to actively work to correct their personal climate behavioural shortcomings?
The problem Belinda describes is similar to the problem Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong faced when trying to consolidate the authority of their respective Communist states. In the immediate aftermath of the revolutions which propelled them into power, plenty of people claimed to believe in Communism, but on an individual level there was a widespread lack of wholehearted commitment to the actual practice of Communism.
The Communist solution was institutionalised “self criticism”; encouraging people to publicly confess their personal shortcomings and pledge to do better. According to The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks);
In order to be fully prepared for this turn, the Party had to be its moving spirit, and the leading role of the Party in the forthcoming elections had to be fully ensured. But this could be done only if the Party organizations themselves became thoroughly democratic in their everyday work, only if they fully observed the principles of democratic centralism in their inner-Party life, as the Party Rules demanded, only if all organs of the Party were elected, only if criticism and self-criticism in the Party were developed to the full, only if the responsibility of the Party bodies to the members of the Party were complete, and if the members of the Party themselves became thoroughly active.
“Climate change denialism” is not something I suffer from. Though change in climate is and always has been happening, I am deeply sceptical of the opinion that man is more than a bit player in the process. Knowing this causes me no suffering, no grief, no loss of sleep. It is actually quite satisfying.
To me Sina aged 14 from Germany is so much more mature and insightful than Belinda. I am referring to Sina’s interview with Grosse Freiheit TV (Great Freedom TV) about a week ago. You can read an English translation of the highlights from the interview at:
https://notrickszone.com/2020/02/05/former-fridays-for-future-teen-activist-reveals-cult-like-control-hostility-leftist-infiltration/
It is frustrating that all these articles and papers from the academic elite START with the assumption that we are heading for a “Climate Catastrophe” and the only issue is how do we change the minds of those too ignorant or selfish to drastically change their own lifestyle as well as the economies of every country in the world.
You would think there would be a contrarian out there who decides to test that assumption.
As we all know there is ample evidence to destroy the starting hypothesis.
Many have done just that, from several different angles and perspectives, and to various degrees of skepticism…from mild concern that the worst of the alarmists were slightly exaggerating, to assertions that at least some of the assertions were false (such as increasing numbers and severity of adverse weather events) while not disagreeing with the general premise…etc.
It matters not how mild the criticism from within the ranks is…they are vilified, scorned, called names, and drummed out.
Only be excluding contrary opinions completely and immediately can any issue have anything like widespread agreement among diverse individuals…even if an idea is without evidentiary contradiction.
How to get uniform head-nodding towards a false premise?
That takes a process and people that are outright corrupt.
Maybe she has a future in writing commercials for Gieco?
Question for the Doctorial Candidate: Is an aboriginal individual living in the deep Amazon, with no exposure to the academic construct of Anthropogenic Climate change a “denier”?
Pretzel logic, an unpolluted mind is a terrible thing to assess without predjudice.
Science deniers are disturbingly common in academia. She just assumes that climate alarmists are right without bothering to investigate the science then bases her entire paper on that incorrect assumption. Never bothers to even question the assumptions she makes. Of course the dunces in the media applaud here because she’s demonstrated that she’s one of them: ignorant.
Send in the psychos. A veritable Ouroboros. To clarify, we are still talking about [catastrophic] [anthropogenic] [global] cooling… warming… change, right?
This woman is repeating the plot of a book written in 1949 , titled 1984. In the book the authorities were successful. Substitute the war with the East in the book with co2 caused climate catastrophe and the plot is the same.
Australia relies in large part for its wealth, on the massive harvesting of mineral resources for sale to places like China. One has to wonder if Ms Xie and her parents would find it such a desirable place to be were the clock turned back to say the 20’s or even the 50’s ? If I were a cynic, I might be tempted to think that what we have here is a very good example of cognitive dissonance. 🙂
She doesn’t realize that when you run with the herd ( unless you are a leader ) you are running in poo …
maybe she is used to it ? Likes it ?
Psychology and witchcraft are equally scientific. The fact that people are so uneducated, lacking in intelligence and gullible to believe this crap should terrify those on the outside. The climate that will destroy the planet is the degradation of human evolution and a return to the prehistoric magical thought patterns.
I was majoring in psychology for a while but after numerous courses on the subject I realized that it is nothing more than a bucketful of theories wrapped tightly in used toilet paper. Certainly nothing that a rational mind would choose to unravel. I dropped the major when it became apparent, from my professors that Psychology only existed to keep the mentally unstable occupied.
The blanket criticisms of psychology are unjustified. Sadly there are the legions of Belindas, but at the top of the profession are people like Daniel Kahneman, the late Amos Tversky and in the current generation Daniel Ariely, whose scientific approach demonstrates show easily we are mistaken in our perceptions and the need for honest scepticism.
A scientific approach that demonstrated that we are mistaken in our need for honest skepticism?
Or did you maybe omit a needed comma?
Rob, With all due respect to you as a human being, your comment reads like the musings of an unstable mind. I would suggest you see a psychologist but fear that might only exacerbate your condition.
Unless of course my hypothesis has some validity, in which case I suggest you consult a mirror for psychotherapy.
So Stalin and Mao thought what was needed to straighten out the realm was Party criticism and self criticism! Yeah right! Criticise the Party, that’s the ticket. Even self criticism would label you as guilty of something. The wiser populace in cheek to jowl communal flats chose to never speak above a whisper!
PhDs (like this one for Climate Change psychology) are doled out by the millions for ‘disciplines’ that didn’t exist a few decades ago to a populace that’s been tricked, cheated and dumbed down in schools and universities for service in a new centrally planned order (that’s the real battle being fought).
I remember my father helping my sister with her grade nine Latin (!!) and he a product of 10 years of education in a single schoolroom school on the prairies that he went to on horseback. He’d be horrified to see what’s happening in education.
Every time there’s a flood or a bunch of wildfires the citizens all clamor for more action on climate change. The vast majority of these folks seem to think that if, for instance, Australia reduces its CO2 emissions, the Australian forests won’t burn so easily. Don’t they realize that the earth’s atmosphere moves across the entire globe, and that the CO2 in Australian atmosphere likely came from a wide mix of sources including India and China and Russia as well as the US, and Australia’s fraction will be tiny, like ours (Canada’s). Canada or Australia could shut down their entire fossil fuel consupmtion and it would make no difference to climate change, even if CO2 was a real threat.
So, either: rational, educated people do not believe in at least some aspect of manmade climate change; or, there are no rational, educated people.
I’ll go with the first option.
I will take the second. Never bet on rationality or education. Always take the under.
The usual way, that I was taught, to sort out effects from random noise is factor analysis. Psychologists seem to delight in making up answers and then trying to figure out if people can make sense of them. “affective, cognitive, and socio-cultural factors”. Assuming you know how”cognitive” factors can be defined in a specific brain, how do you measure them? Grid Group Theory splits everything psychological into 4 groups, for many, many studies.Does it work? Maybe. It’s taken since the late 19th century to figure out that IQ has 5 major facets that describe most of the mental ability differences between people.
“Factor analysis is a way to take a mass of data and shrinking it to a smaller data set that is more manageable and more understandable.”(https://www.statisticshowto.datasciencecentral.com/factor-analysis/).
Ms. Xie’s paper seems to take the shortcut of modifying and older model of climate risk using new terms. They they explained 72% of the variance. Strangely they gave no numbers for the “strong” risk perception and willingess to change.
I strongly suspect that taking the same experiment to a dozen countries across the globe would wipe out any real result.
Sinners in the hands of an angry god. We have all sinned, we have all fallen short of the glory of Gaia.
Why does anyone take these children seriously.
She would have done better if she had concentrated on the belief aspects of climate change. Then, she could have followed that up with the obvious parallels with the belief systems of the world’s major religions. And how, like climate change, they all believe in something that isn’t true.
Nup.Shes wrong.There are climate sceptics and then there are hypocrites.
I wouldn’t say I suffer from climate denialism.
In fact, I enjoy it immensely.
First of all, what is with these people that they’re too lazy to include all the necessary words in their key phrases? (Can they not pronounce the word “dioxide? “) “Climate denier?” What could that possibly be?
And of course, she is speaking to people for whom the label “denier” is an insult. I’m a climate change catastrophe doubter. (Notice that I used enough words to be understood. Also words that have meanings that are impervious to political labelling.) But wait, I can explain. Except that Ms. Xie here is not going to wait. After you have conceded your doubt, Ms. Xie is no longer interested in hearing why it exists. Some psychologist.
Wait ten years. Carbon dioxide concentrations will increase, but the skies won’t rage and the seas won’t rise. Doubt will creep in. After twenty years, Ms. Xie may find herself quite a bit more denying than she is now.
An Appendix listing all of the biggest climate alarmist hypocrites and their carbon footprints would provide credibility to her paper. Divide them into categories including politicians, movie stars, musicians, rich people, companies claiming to be green, climate scientists, UN employees, and psychologists. Maybe if Belinda tries really really hard, she will top the psychologist list!
It’s hugely ironic that it is the greenies who are the true climate change deniers. The climate has changed continuously since the earth was formed, yet greenies claim that climate change didn’t happen before human influence, and must somehow be stopped.
Neither I nor anyone I know, *suffer* from the imaginary affliction of ‘climate denialism’.
As defined by the lucrative, incoherent, alarmist ramblings of its acolytes – and Belinda Lie is clearly one such – we simply dismiss it as a load of old codswallop; that’s all.
I thought you were living in a different universe Belinda but then I read this in the abstract “We discuss the need for future research to develop a comprehensive model of behavioural willingness, and the need for public communication to combat mitigation response inefficacy.” Ah! You are like most of them – send more money for climate change related research.
It’s worse. Not a mention of climate. All about governmental brainwashing though.
With an Antarctic yacht cruise in their $225k gift bags, every ‘environmentalist’ Oscar nominee leaves a winner – and a hypocrite
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/480386-environment-oscar-nominee-hypocrite/amp/?__twitter_impression=true
Twenty-four nominees in acting categories – including the likes of Joaquin Phoenix, Leonardo DiCaprio and Renee Zellweger – will receive opulent gifts worth over $5 million collectively, each including 24-carat-gold bath bombs, a custom stained-glass portrait (vanity knows no bounds), a certificate for a ‘one of a kind’ cannabis-infused chocolate culinary experience worth $10,000, a 24-carat-gold vape pen, five-star breaks in Ibiza and Waikiki, and – most bafflingly – a 12-day trip for two on the world’s first ultra-luxury expedition yacht, the Scenic Eclipse, valued at $78,190.
The diesel-powered yacht boasts eight restaurants, a spa sanctuary, helicopters, a submarine capable of depths of nearly 200 meters to allow for explorations ‘far beyond any done on expedition ships to date’, indoor and outdoor plunge pools, butler service and an almost 1:1 guest-to-staff ratio.