Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Conversation asks why ordinary people are so hostile towards Extinction Rebellion, when the world is on the brink of a sixth major extinction?
In the face of chaos, why are we so nonchalant about climate change?
October 19, 2021 9.37pm AEDT
Tom Pettinger
Research Fellow in Politics and International Studies, University of WarwickThe dire state of the planet’s health was unambiguously demonstrated by the UN’s climate body, the IPCC, when it sounded a “code red” for humanity in its latest report.
Yet public involvement in environmental activism has consistently remained muted, particularly in the wealthier nations most responsible for the destruction of the environment.
In the UK, for example, peaceful protest by environmentalist groups like Extinction Rebellion tends to be opposed more than it’s supported. This is despite the limited disruption these groups cause in comparison to the extreme disruption already produced and threatened by climate breakdown, such as extreme droughts, wildfires and tropical storms.
Recent protests blocking British motorways to call for the government to insulate homes have been met not with policy reform but with outrage and proposals to increase police power to arrest protesters.
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So why do so many people oppose the call for change in the face of a sixth mass extinction? Why is there resignation, rather than resistance?
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And I think that the lack of widespread mobilisation is borne, not from outright climate denial, but rather from a more insidious climate apathy: what might be called “climate nonchalance”.
This nonchalance – recognising the impending collapse of our world and shrugging our shoulders – is made possible only by a profound separation between the comfortable lifestyles of the privileged and the consequences of those lifestyles elsewhere: including increased death rates, frequent exploitation and environmental displacement for the less privileged.
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Read more: https://theconversation.com/in-the-face-of-chaos-why-are-we-so-nonchalant-about-climate-change-166040
The author appears to suggest people are too comfortable to embrace change. We do not support Extinction Rebellion because we are selfish and lazy.
But I think the answer is far simpler – human belief is a continuum.
How can the answer to a true or false question, like “is climate change a problem”, be a continuum?
As a software developer, I see this odd continuum behaviour manifest all the time, when working with artificial neural networks.
Neural networks, attempts to create an artificial intelligence which mimics the architecture of the human brain, are not places where the absolute rules. If you say attempt to train a neural network to add two numbers, it is very difficult to get an exact result. Ask a trained neural net the answer to 2 + 2, and you will receive an answer like 4.1, or 3.9, or 3.5 – anything but 4, most of the time, unless the neural net is very rigorously trained.
Similarly if you ask a trained neural network if something is true or false, you are more likely get an answer like 70% true, or 48% true. An answer of 100% or 99% true is very unusual.
Computer scientists usually deal with this kind of ambiguity from artificial neural networks by interpreting the answer. So for example, they might apply a rule that if the answer is 70% or more true, report the answer as completely true.
Obviously humans are capable of concise mathematics, so our brains are not exactly the same as artificial neural networks, but in my opinion this neural net continuum of belief manifests throughout human behaviour when you look for it.
For example, many people when asked agree that climate change is a problem. But if you ask them if they are wiling to spend even one dollar more to fix climate change, agreement plummets.
Based on what I have personally experienced when working with artificial intelligence, I believe this strange belief yet not belief is a manifestation of the human brain’s neural net continuum of belief. People might answer they believe in climate change, they believe enough to say yes, but deep down they do not believe enough to commit actual effort to solving the issue they verbally agree is a problem.
Society’s current level of almost belief is precarious – a neural net which returns an answer of 70% true can easily be trained to raise that result to 98% or whatever. Getting to 70% is far more difficult than raising 70% to 98%. In my opinion there is a real ongoing risk that people who are mildly concerned about climate change could be rapidly tipped over into fanaticism.
But training an artificial neural network to such a fever pitch of compliance requires utter silencing of all discord in the training data. Even a few discordant training samples, a handful of voices raised in disagreement, is enough to introduce doubt, to nudge the neural network away from perfect compliance.
If you achieve perfect compliance, the end result of such rigorous training is surprisingly dysfunctional. Overtraining or overfitting as AI scientists describe it, creates an artificial neural network which is far less able to cope with ambiguity or new data, than a neural network which was less rigorously trained, or was trained using noisier, more discordant data. An overtrained neural network responds perfectly to its training stimuli, but does not respond well when presented with new data (see the diagram at the top of the page).
The parallel with the human condition seems obvious.
They’re right. Stand up to extinction, dysfunction, and wicked solutions. #HateLovesAbortion
Ask that same Neural Net if it is likely that the Moon Landing was a hoax and it is likely to return a 70% yes as well. It s far easier and less dangerous to build a soundstage in a vacuum chamber painted Musou Black to eliminate reflectance and air resistance than it is to send 3 people 236,000 miles to a sphere with no atmosphere.
But man always does things the hard way
This is all poppycock. And the GW Alarmists don’t have a clue about the destruction they are creating. Everyone should watch Michael Moore’s documentary “Planet of the Humans” available on YouTube. Green energy, electric cars, etc. are NOT the solution even if you are a GW nut.
The 6th extinction would surely occur if CO2 was heading downwards by 100 ppm per century. We were at 280 and 150 would be curtains…..Fortunately it is going the other way, giving us time to determine if we are developing an excess CO2 problem or not.
If only there was 1,000 ppm to 1,500 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere, crop food supplies would well exceed demand world wide.
As the Delegation from China reported at the IPCC Copenhagen Conference, during 3,600 years of their civilisation records there were three warmer periods than present day and each warmer period brought greater prosperity as crop yields increased.
No wonder China is reluctant to cooperate with the climate hoaxers.
But they may be funding them 😉
I would like the food but all that extra growth will increase the oxygen levels and that could mean giant insects. I don’t like the thought of giant insects very much. 😱
Well, CO2 at over 5,000 ppm wasn’t killing anything so we have a long way to go.
Why should anyone believe we are headed for a massive extinction event at the same time the world population is higher than it’s ever been; people lead massively safer and more comfortable lives than ever before in human history; food production is the highest its ever been; and the most that the environmentalists can come up with is less than two dozen extinctions over the last 100 years out a total number of species on earth of greater than one million.
That last one is something only the scientifically literate would understand, but pretty much everyone personally understands and can attest to the former observations.
You kind of pose the real problem and that is more and more humans taking up more and more space. I am sure there are places where habitat has declined and certainly stressed the flora and fauna. Add to that the introduction of non-native species and we, as humans, certainly stress the earth.
Do I think “climate change” is doing any of this, a resounding no! I have not seen enough change in my location to adversely affect any but maybe the most delicate flora and fauna. This is the problem with the attention given to tenths or hundredths of a degree. It is meaningless to the things that dwell on this earth. Not only that, but one can not decipher what a specific region is supposed to experience. Scientists just can’t keep saying the Global Average Temperature applies to everything and everywhere. Talk about non-scientific.
I don’t think we bother the earth at all. Never heard it say a word. 7 billion of us. What are there, 300 trillion ants? 60 trillion trees? 500 Gorillion grass plants? We are a boil on the earth’s butt. If we blew every nuke on the planet at once, the earth would sneeze, say ‘oh crap was that another pesky rock from space like that one a little while (65 mya) back?’ Geologically we are spit.
An interesting exercise in overthinking a non-existent problem. Let’s re-examine the presupposition of the article: we’re all doomed <== The Big Lie.
Maybe, just maybe, no one is being fooled.
Extinction rebellion. Pffffttt! Everyone living on the planet knows they will personally go extinct long, long, long, long before any significant species do.
Yep.
I reckon we’re all over-thinking this –
When we used to see those weirdos shuffling along the sidewalk wearing a sandwich board declaring “The World Will End Next Tuesday”, we moved aside, trying to not make eye contact as we went about our normal business.
These days, we tend to take the same approach to climate doomsters.
Just human nature, and why that UN survey of millions of people rated concern about climate change last of all the things we need to worry about in life.
”An interesting exercise in overthinking a non-existent problem.”
I agree entirely. The reason most people don’t care is that the weather they remember when they were young kids was the same as it is today.
There is another reason. People are mostly non-argumentative. They can see that Mr Pettinger is a true believer, & don’t want to up set him. However when he suggests they should spend their money on the scam they then wonder if he is a full ratbag, or a conman after their money. They are right of course.
I remember seeing films of the rainmaker telling people pay your money and I will make it rain – but if there is one non believer I will fail
always guaranteed success as always one non believer
Actually, not true. It was certainly colder in the 60s and 70s. My greatest fear is that we are headed back there.
Not my experience. Winter of 62/63 was bad, ditto 81/82, 97 (I think), and again 09/10. Both summers of ‘75 and ‘76 stand out. Not much else apart from ‘03.
Take a look at some long-term graphs (as opposed to computer-generated guesswork!). Weather is doing nothing that it hasn’t done time and again over centuries. Where there aren’t reliable temperatures there is reliable historical or biological evidence.
And my fear, a bit like yours, is that we are in grave danger of being caught “looking the wrong way” when the next downturn does come. My only “consolation” is that I probably won’t be here when it happens!
Newminster: here are the graphs confirming your comments:
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/uk-temperature-rainfall-and-sunshine-time-series
My experience matches David’s, but it seems we are at the end of a multi decadal cycle. Gotta buy some hockey skates! And split more firewood.
You are here, and it’s already happening. Ran the heater again this morning, 4th day in a row. Usually didn’t need to do that before Halloween. This is only the beginning of the coldening. Might be time to buy some new long johns. 🙂
I have a longer memory and I remember warmer summers and colder winters. During the same years. I believe the weather has only moderated, probably due to local human influence.
Of course memory can be faulty and I only remember specific instances of summer highs exceeding 100 F and winter lows under -45 F in central Alberta.
Canada still used Imperial at the time. that indicates how long ago this was.
Yes! And the same on the east coast. The sixties,seventies and into the eighties were often just that, though I would prefer more temperate than more moderate…potato..pahtato.
There is a difference however. When I was a boy the winter snow reached up to my stomach. Now it is below the knees.
I used to tell my children about walking to school though snow that deep.
🙂
And when I go to the beach, I see it is still where it was 40 years ago.
Pretty sure everyone realizes they are going to die. So it becomes a question of do you want to die eating vegan food and doing all that net zero junk or live it up and die happy. We are just all selfish by nature.
Now there is a small self guilt minority like Galfrut, Loydo etc who can’t understand how we can be so selfish and they struggle to understand why we don’t care.
Also, so many of the Elites who are preaching the extinction due to fossil fuels are not giving up on any of their jet-setting, conspicuously extravagent lifestyle. The common person notices that–they’re not as stupid as the Elites think. I’d say more people would worry if Algore, De Caprio or Greta moved into a tiny shed and walked/biked everywhere they went.
As Instapundit has said for years: ‘I’ll believe in Global Warming when the people who are telling me about it act like they really believe in it’…
Obama believes in it so much that he bought a multi-million $ estate on Marth’s Vineyard just a few feet above high tide. The UN believes in it so much they spent over a Billion $ rehabing their headquarters in NYC, just a few feet above high tide. And no, the price of Malibu beachfront property is NOT dropping like a rock.
If we keep building Wind Power we could start pushing important small birds to endangerment, allowing insects to become a problem, spreading disease, killing humans.
Extinction rebellion has a persuasion problem and don’t see the disconnect. I don’t see how it follows that; gee I block this highway and everyone will believe like I do. Most affected people are going to get angry and not appreciate the movement that much, if not actively hostile.
As soon as people hear apocalyptic phrases like “6th mass extinction”, “code red for humanity”,”‘last chance to save the planet”, etc., they get their guards up because they suspect these are just gimmicks so beloved by governments that want to impose new restrictions and higher taxes and private corporations trying to peddle Green products and lifestyles.
I invoke ‘social distancing’ out of concern that whatever they have just might be contagious.
Unfortunately, what “the people” think is of little or no consequence. It’s the lengths to which the government will go to ruin our lifestyle, culture and well-being on a pretext such as this, which is the worry.
Yes, there might be something to that. I have always thought (since my conversion) that they were trying to “engineer” an artificial case of “mass hysteria”, and that appears very difficult to do:
What Is Mass Hysteria?
https://www.scienceabc.com/eyeopeners/what-is-mass-hysteria.html
And if you read that article carefully, there are certain characteristics of mass hysterias that need to be emulated, for example: population isolation, initiated by older adults, the correct gender ratio, etc.
Given that, I think many WUWT readers can see for themselves what the inconsistencies are between a real mass hysteria and how the alarmist community is trying to engineer one. The youth approach is wrong, and the open internet is a hindrance, etc.
If you are inclined to assign things to conspiracies (no put down intended, sometimes we need to) I think the COVID19 outbreak would be a far better vehicle for re-engineering society than CAGW, if that were your goal. IMHO
PS: I would be interested to know what the AI folks can teach us about mass hysterias.
My neural network, based on an excellent grounding in historical geology tells me that our current climate change is due to the planet still emerging from the Little Ice Age and that human emissions of carbon dioxide are having zilch effects outside of urban areas. On this basis I feel entitled to don some outlandish outfit and then go and crap on the roofs of members of Extinction Rebellion.
Film at 11!
Hit the nail on the head.
I’d like to crap on their shoes
Let me fix that for you …
I feel entitled to don some outlandish outfit and then go and crap on
the roofs ofmembers of Extinction Rebellion.Urban areas are heat islands created by bitumen and concrete
yes humans definitely created these
as far as away from these concentrated areas I remember reading that the pacific highway in south america created a fantastic heat curtain causing desertification on the inland side and increased rain on the seaside
again a human artefact
as for natural cycles of the sun moon etc
we give ourselves way to much credit – these happened before homosapien’s arrived and will still occur long after we are extinct – maybe in our own extinction by running out of resources with over 8B of us
A single road is not going to have enough of an impact to measurably change rainfall patterns near it.
I think it could given the possibility of trees being cut back and a strip of asphalt in the middle. Less transpiration and less night time cooling would be my guess as a cause.
In northern climates a road dramatically affects snow melt nearby.
Maybe because these groups are only paying lip service to the idea of a ‘climate emergency’ themselves? These minority groups are more about changing the whole of society to suit their minority view than anything else. They’re using climate change as a convenient excuse to force the majority to knuckle under to what they want, not what the rest of us want. Maybe, just maybe, some people have seen through their deceit.
Have to laugh when these Eco-nuts park their own ICE vehicles blocking the freeway, because they are opposed to ICE vehicles.
What an interesting analysis. It answers, as well as anything can, my puzzlement at the widespread acceptance (among even my conservative friends) that global warming is causing bad things to happen, but at the same time there’s a lack of interest in doing anything in particular about it.
It makes me think that most people intuitively understand that global warming really isn’t a big issue, although they couldn’t tell you why they think that. And it gives me hope that when they get some real information they’ll start questioning the basic premise of CAGW.
Yes. Our brains are pretty good at keeping us safe from harm, including the harm of committing effort to a useless activity. It takes a lot of training to overcome our natural protections against false narratives.
Because no one wants to be called a “denier”, which can have real life negative consequences. Everyone knows they have to pretend to believe. Once you start asking them to spend their own hard earned money, it’s “wait a minute, I said I believe, isn’t that enough”?
Why are climate alarmists so naïve and gullible?
That will give you the answer.
Bad training data.
They have blind spots like all of us.
They are all pessimists.
Everything that is being said has confirmed that their lifestyle (and diet) is the only way to survive and their deeply held fears were correct all along – it’s total, extensive confirmation bias. Having said that, it’s a hard core minority – for the rest of us, who don’t have that lifestyle, it doesn’t resonate well or mean anything. That’s why a lot of the hard core minority are surprised that everyone else isn’t getting it – are we blind? Why can’t we see what is glaringly obvious to them? If it wasn’t so painfully serious, it would be hilarious.
They’ve been told for years to do good for the world, and that liberals have good intentions. People that oppose that must just be evil capitalists, and there’s no reason to listen to evil.
Eric,
I am surprised you did not have to take some recuperation time after reading all that Climate PORN in the conversation!
And I think that is more to the point, the average Joe Blow has a memory and if you tell him Climate PORN all the time and the disasters never happen, he eventually knows it is BS and he tunes out! A simpler summary of overtraining?
I think the alarmists are doing a good job of discrediting themselves, especially with older people who have seen it all before.
That is very true Eric. Particularly for those of us that were climate warriors in 1970 reading Ehrlich and fighting global cooling. 😒
But clearly you valiant warriors against global cooling succeeded in your efforts, just appears that you overshot the mark a bit. So now we need to carry the battle in the other direction until we can reach equilibrium…then perhaps everyone can STFU about climate and concentrate on the more important things like why is Kanye West so insane?
The other reason or doubting groups like Extinction Rebellion is that they very obviously have other goals, like a more socialist economic system.
Their Ecofascism is enough to ensure a negative reaction.
Most people see the BS and react accordingly, but they want to appear concerned
Perhaps people have learned to discriminate and reject dishonest narratives. This proves that people do learn.
If you see an article comes from The Conversation you can skip it and you won’t be missing anything. It’s full of unsupported assertions.
Yes, and it is only accepted for publication if it is supportive of the liberal agenda of the editors. Any comments that point out inaccuracies can and will be deleted, assuring that the entire article promotes the agenda.
People actually get paid a buck a word for that CC sh1t…
That is better than I ever got paid for solicited Op-Ed pieces for my local newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News.
I guess no one on this site grew up in a dictatorship or religious theocracy. Once Putin, Shi, Mullah Mohammed, or Chairman Kim decrees something to be the truth, you don’t question unless you have a death wish.
Wrong-O, Mohatdebos! Ideology can suppress open dialogue, but people continue to think. It requires absolute control to kill everyone that openly disagree. But absolute control is local and relatively fleeting. Repressive social or economic ideologies eventually fail because their repression of evolving human progress results in economic failure and societal collapse.
Since I can read, reason and understand, over a relatively long lifespan I’ve come to the above conclusions. With short socialist ideology-inspired deviations, humankind continues to progresses with the imperative of individual freedoms to experiment. Authoritarians of any stripe try to suppress that. They just come up with new memes and slogans to advance their manipulations.
Since you brought up Extinction Rebellion I will highlight one Billionaire (Oligarch) Sir Chris Hohn who helps fund the rebellion while making immense profits in coal related industries. You can bet there are many billionaires lining up at the climate change trough.
Yes, it’s like short selling stocks.
Get the price of fossil fuel companies down and then clean up.
“The dire state of the planet’s health was unambiguously demonstrated by the UN’s climate body, the IPCC, when it sounded a “code red” for humanity in its latest report. “
They made no such demonstration. They simply made gratuitous assertions, which can be just as gratuitously ignored.
The political “Summary for Policy Makers” certainly sounded the code red.
From my partial reading of some of the technical reports, the code red is pretty much all yellow and shrouded with significant uncertainty.
If they included any uncertainty, you can bet it’s ten times more than that.
…”the code red is pretty much all yellow ”
Nope . Brown .
Eric
it is much simpler than that)neural analysis).
Most people are endowed with common sense. To test the hypothesis is actually quite simple in layman’s terms and if the boffins can’t pass the pub test they haven’t any hope of convincing the broad population. This applies to older wiser people and not to indoctrinated school kids. I believe the pub test is very useful… you only need look at the scores of failed predictions with not a single truthful outcome since the 1970’s….that’s fifty continuous years of total failed predictions to realise surely that something is wrong.
Then move onto every claim which they make is also wrong.,,,. There is no mass extinction looming, floods,droughts,cyclone, rainfall earthquakes are not being made worse by climate change..,,, sea level rise has been constant for thousands of years, we have had higher co2 and temperatures in the recent past,,,, the only support for co2 warming comes from computer models which are so far proving to be useless)even the IPCC admits this).
i don’t think you need to over think this question.
That would be some of the discordant training data I mentioned :-).
I agree I could have written this piece without mentioning neural nets, but I added the neural net musing because I hoped people might find it interesting.
We met a couple of Californians on holiday in Spain. They had a complete set of beliefs which were opposite to mine. So who is right?
Well, obviously me, I’ve read and listened to the end of the world scare and it’s nonsense as are the proposed solutions, but if you just get information from the MSM then it’s reasonable to get stuck in the other side.
Iit will take a major failure to shake people back to reality. Me or them? If the UK Grid hits the wall this winter then they are in for a shock.
JF
“”Why are People so Climate Nonchalant?””
Pretty simple. Ask anyone to show you exactly how “the effects climate change” has actually impacted their life for the worse (or even catastrophically) and you will either get crickets or some vague unsubstantiated BS how it is affecting “others”.
No actual impact >> no need to be concerned
Isn’t that the purpose of Al Gore’s “Climate Reality” training?
He wants to ‘radicalize‘ people to the cause.
https://www.climaterealityproject.org/training
This opinion, offered by someone who has a nebulous expertise in “Politics and International Studies,” and has managed to convince himself that he is also an expert in climatology, physical geography, history, and psychology, explains a lot about why the public isn’t getting as excited about the climate as he is.
I found this sentence to be pretty revealing, “How can the answer to a true or false question, like “is climate change a problem”, be a continuum?”
Its way too broad a question. Of course the answer is true. Climate change (be it positive, negative, a lot or a little) requires change and that is easily defined as a problem. Especially when the “problem’ is not defined.
Better questions are a lot more specific.
Is climate change a problem where the costs of “fixing it” outweigh the benefits?
Is climate change a problem caused mostly by man?
You see it in the “surveys” when people respond to airy fairy questions like “Do you support action to stop climate change” in the inevitable high positive responses. Then as soon as the questions start being more specific the “Yes” answers evaporate. Witness the tiny amount of money most Americans are willing to spend to combat climate change.
I find the lack of self awareness with these sorts of writers very amusing.
The go to great lengths to describe how the majority of people seem to be rejecting the consensus and they can’t work out why these fringe minority denier types who are rejecting their completely rational calls to action to save the planet seem to exist in such large numbers.
Almost as if they were actually the majority or something…
Maybe it’s because mentally balanced people don’t believe that ‘the planet’s health is dire’, and that ‘a “code red” for humanity’ is nonsense, that ‘extreme disruption already produced’ ‘ecological and societal breakdown’ and ‘collapsing world’ are ridiculous hyperbole and typically the products of a fevered doomsday-cult mindset.
Thanks Eric … you made me realize climate is not a binary problem. The problem lies in that some people are stuck in inflexible binary thinking.
Such as consider careers. If you ask yourself: “is software development with a focus on artificial intelligence the only career choice available?” This is a binary question, such is climate change bad. These subjects are not conducive to binary thinking … at least they are not conducive to binary thinking for mature people. The options for career choice are linear fields. maybe you’re a 90% fit for software development in artificial intelligence, but 80% good fit to volleyball coach. 70% fit to veterinarian.
Back to climate change, I live in California. Is fire a bad thing … again this is not a binary question, forest fires are a weighted thing. A moist season low cool fire which consumes tree litter, damaged or dead trees, stays out of the crown, and refreshes the land; this is a good fire. A hot summer season crown fire—not so much. But for people with little exposure to the natural world, stuck in binary thinking—all fire bad.
Sea level rise, 130m of sea level rise in a person’s lifetime, yes this is a bad thing—but not real. What about at the current rate of 2mm/year, its 200mm across the life of a very long lived human … about 8 inches—is this bad? … not so much.
The problem lies in binary thinking. Small scale change is not a binary question for well adjusted people. For someone such as “The Rainman” on the other hand …
Agreed. An overtrained neural net, a fanatic, and people with some forms of mental deficits often exhibit bizarre binary behaviour, and inappropriate responses to new stimuli.
I think it is important to note that the parts of our brain we understand cannot be the full picture of what happens inside our heads. The fact we so readily impose an illusion of binary structure on issues which are clearly not a binary experience for most of us, is evidence of computational processes occurring in the human brain which we can barely glimpse, let alone understand.
“about 8 inches—is this bad?”
I’ll ask the wife !!
The majority of people live ‘in the now’. Pay packet to pay packet. Their idea of the future is several months. Why would any of them care about the climate 50 or 100 years out? That’s right. They don’t care. Most surveys show that.
I gave no thought to mortality until as I was growing older people around me died, and by the time I reached retirement I was well aware of my limited future.
The best fighter pilots are late teens to mid twenties, and by thirty most have changed.