Essay by Eric Worrall
“… If we use technologies like aircon to avoid dealing with the root causes of climate change, we are in denial. …”
The new climate denial? Using wealth to insulate yourself from discomfort and change
Published: February 7, 2023 3.48pm AEDT
Hannah Della Bosca
PhD Candidate and Research Assistant at Sydney Environment Institute, University of SydneyWhile the days of overt climate denial are mostly over, there’s a distinct form of denial emerging in its stead. You may have experienced it and not even realised. It’s called implicatory denial, and it happens when you consciously recognise climate change as a serious threat without making significant changes to your everyday behaviour in response.
Much research has focused on how we intellectually distance ourselves from the unpleasant realities happening around us. What requires greater attention is how we may engage in climate denial by seeking out spaces of sensory comfort and using them to shield ourselves as the world unravels outside our window.
Denial, thought of in this way, is entirely sensible. My colleagues and I asked residents around the Western Sydney suburb of Penrith – famously the hottest place on Earth during the Black Summer of 2019-20 – about their experiences during heatwave conditions. Unsurprisingly, sensory denial is central to how they cope with extremes – primarily by using air conditioning.
…
Why does this matter?
If we use technologies like aircon to avoid dealing with the root causes of climate change, we are in denial.
As the world heats up, demand for air conditioning has skyrocketed. The International Energy Agency has estimated that by 2050, up to two-thirds of the world’s households will have installed aircon, particularly in China, India and Indonesia.
…
Read more: https://theconversation.com/the-new-climate-denial-using-wealth-to-insulate-yourself-from-discomfort-and-change-199101
Is wearing clothes or lighting a fire to stay warm in winter also a form of sensory climate denial?
If we were all truly exposed to our local climates, without clothes or blankets or any other form of personal climate modification, I suspect most of us would rapidly conclude the planet is way too cold for humans.
Correction (EW): h/t Nick – The Conversation, not SMH. I blame Climate Change… 🙂
Flying in an airplane is a kind of you’re not a bird denial.
And if you’re wealthy, you get to argue that your personal private jet doesn’t contribute to glowbull warming because of your fame and fortune.
“SMH: Using Your Air Conditioner is a Form of Climate Denial”
WUWT has an annoying habit of attributing labelled opinion articles to the journal where they appeared.
But AFAICS, SMH did not have even that connection.
Thanks Nick, corrected.
And here I thought SMH just meant “shaking my head”, as in disbelief.
Whereas the CONversation is renowned for idiotic statements. !
In fact, 97% of their statements are complete idiocy.
I use an iOS tablet, while OpenAI programs require fully capable operating systems. Otherwise I would verify my suspicion that da Con is merely ChatGPT production.
Having lived 60 plus years on the Canadian prairies stories like this make me laugh. I suspect a lucky 90% of the world don’t have a clue about real winter. There is a lot of folk in the world that would LOVE it warmer but we spend inordinate amounts of time listening to the Ozzie whiners.
It amazes me that Canada has joined the climate change bandwagon. Canada would be one of the biggest beneficiaries of warming.
The joke in my family is my wife thought that she knew what wnter was until I moved he to Fargo, ND. She also learned that 70 miles away there was another form of winter(worse) where I grew up.
The writer predictably misses the point which, of course, is…
We should be investing in securing cheap and plentiful energy so even the poor can survive a warmer world in reasonable comfort.
Even if one accepts the dubious land temperature records, it has warmed less than 1.5 C, which is less than the variance on most cheap thermometers. Get real.
I feel like it’s a sad commentary on our society that whoever suggested this as an article idea wasn’t totally laughed out of the room.
That’s what I think too. Luckily we’re about to get some good answers on that from Dr. Spencer and his land thermometer project.
1.5 C is average. The SD of deltaT is +/- 90 C so of course the oceans are boiling and lizards are frying on rocks
Gads, but you’re ignorant! The seas are “…boiling with the power of 600 Suns…” and the lizzards are freezing their butts to the rocks.
Get it right, won’t you?
Geez!!!
That is a spurious correlation. People use A/C not because of a 1 deg C change in average global temperature over the last 100 years, but because their increasing standard of living, derived from fossil fuels, allows them to be able to afford a technology that buffers them from seasonal changes that are two orders of magnitude greater than the average global increase.
Just because someone is a PhD candidate doesn’t mean that they actually understand the things that they are talking about.
No. It means they don’t understand much at all. I’ve come across a number of them that are simply professional students.
And, many of those professional students behave very unprofessionally.
For shame, They have attended many sessions of repeating the truths until they have become automatic responses. That was a lot of hard work on their part.
Sorry, Andy, you are the nail sticking out today…
Nobody asnwered my question the other day; Has anybody designed a Turing test to differentiate between a machine talking, and a libtard primed with soundbites and non-sequiturs?
Does it matter?
There is the old saying, “A PhD is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.”
Old saying, before pseudo science faux PhDs.
Many of the studies we see are PhD candidate studies using grade school logic and junior High School effort.
“you consciously recognise climate change as a serious threat without making significant changes to your everyday behaviour in response.” LOL.I dunno about “Implicatory denial”. A more likely explanation for most people who know they are not of the elite and therefore excused, is that it is self-protection. Go along with whatever this pain in the ar$e wants to hear, and avoidance of retaliation that the wokes might manage to inflict.
This has to be one or the most extreme articles I’ve seen in this climate change emergency saga. With each passing year, the extremism grows and becomes more apparent.
Desperation is what it is, Walter.
Desperation and wishful thinking.
I suspect it is part of the general conditioning plan. automobiles: bad; gas stoves: bad, air conditioners: bad. The plan is to drill it into your soul until you can’t doubt its truth (Truth, in the AOC sense, which probably only someone like AOC can possibly understand). This only apply to general population non-activists and non-politicians, of course.
What requires greater attention is how we may engage in climate denial by seeking out spaces of sensory comfort and using them to shield ourselves as the world unravels outside our window.
Oh! I get it! That’s why Indian tribes used to migrate from the central valley of California to the Sierras when the weather – oh excuse me, climate – got too hot in the valley. They were climate deniers too!
“My colleagues and I asked residents around the Western Sydney suburb of Penrith – famously the hottest place on Earth during the Black Summer of 2019-20 – about their experiences during heatwave conditions. Unsurprisingly, sensory denial is central to how they cope with extremes – primarily by using air conditioning.”
Shirley shome mishtake?
They are just getting the AI chatbots warmed up for April 1st. Right?
I have a hard time believing that Australia broke their summer record that year, as is the case with most articles I read concerning record high temperatures and months. Where exactly are these measurements being taken in the city of Perth? Where I live even milder Julys are shown to be on the really hot side.
Penrith.
Outer suburb of Sydney.
Pronounced “Penriff” locally.
Well, somewhere has to be the hottest place on Earth at any given moment, and somewhere else gets to be the coldest 🙂
The wind is always blowing somewhere…lol!
However, nowhere is it exactly average!
Hannah Della Bosca, another know nothing filling us with psycho babble and probably with a straight face. She is a disgrace.
disgrace is obviously relative. Ask James Gelick
“Much research has focused on how we intellectually distance ourselves from the unpleasant realities happening around us. What requires greater attention is how we may engage in climate denial by seeking out spaces of sensory comfort and using them to shield ourselves as the world unravels outside our window. “
Unless this so-called smart person is living in a mud hut in the wilderness, with no access to any technology from the last 1000 years, then she is a hypocrite of the highest order.
Very true. But it must be scary watching the world ”unravel outside your window”! I hope I never see that!
Hardly anything ever changes outside my window. I guess I should try to figure out where the excitement is happening.
Use of cars is a denial of the poor skeleton and limited muscular strength of humans.
Carry your damn cargo!
How about horses? The domestication of horses (for transport, hauling, plowing, etc) and other animals for various tasks I suppose was/is also a denial of the physical ability of humans to do those things…..
That’s a lot of denial, going back a long, long time! We don’t run fast enough to chase down game so we domesticated wolves and bred them to help us hunt. It is harder to digest uncooked food so we started using fire to cook things. We aren’t well adapted to traversing long distances of water so we invented boats. Holy cow! What a stupid woman!
Our species (and other hominids before us) have been coming up with ways to make life easier for eons.
And as is often said around here – when these clowns give up their AC (cars, heat, electricity, meat, etc, etc) then we’ll talk. Well, maybe…..
“we domesticated wolves”
We had captured wild animal?
Who authorized that?
Isn’t interaction with wildness potentially a crime?
And a denial that time is infinite
But it all began with CO2 emissions.
Ever since we invented fire.
” Unsurprisingly, sensory denial is central to how they (they, mind you) cope with extremes – primarily by using air conditioning.”
I wonder if Hannah (University of Sydney , Bachelor of Arts ) has an air conditioner?
BTW Hannah, The first modern air conditioner was invented in 1902.
Climate denial goes back a long way doesn’t it?
If that article isn’t satire her comments below it are.
Hannah can come spend January with me. I’ll give her control of the house temperature. If she does not change the thermostat setting I’ll give her $500. If she does change it, she has to give me $500.
The average minimum temperature is 15.8°F [ -9°C ]
I’ll trot out another 1984 quote.
It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.
The defenseless employed to perpetrate the indefensible, standard Bolshevik morality.
That is, of course, politically incorrect today. 🙂 That is the crux of the modern problem. There are social pressures to deny reality.
As usual in these climate-carping pieces Hanna adopts the majestic plural: 14 ‘we’s and 17 ‘our’s.
Incidentally the reason “when we use our air conditioners to fend off a heatwave we can overwhelm the power grid and trigger local blackouts” is because cheap and reliable concentrated sources of power generation are being replaced by unreliable dilute sources that cannot meet the demand when required.
Nothing the good people of Penrith can do will affect the climate in the year 2090 and if the projections of the CSIRO and BoM are to be taken seriously 😂 aircon looks absolutely essential.
The real “climate denialism” is how much I had to run my heat this winter when I was told by the smart people years ago that winter was going to be something of the past by now.
You got me. I am a denier. I deny that that warmunists like Ms. Bosca are correct in anything they believe or say.
I deny that CO2 is anything but beneficial. I deny that a warmer world is a problem for anyone or anything. I deny that wind mills and solar panels can run an industrial civilization.
Is the Conversation’s concept of an air conditioner somehow different from their concept of a heat pump?
Sep 07, 2022 “Heat pumps are smart use of physics:”
https://theconversation.com/heat-pumps-can-cut-your-energy-costs-by-up-to-90-its-not-magic-just-a-smart-use-of-the-laws-of-physics-185711
If heat pumps are smart physics.
And if heat pumps are indiscernible from air conditioners.
And if air conditioners are climate change denial,
then per The Conversation, “Climate change denial is smart physics.”
ROFL 🙂
Brilliant!
Since about 1950, my family has had a heat pump disguised as a refrigerator. 😊
I use aircon in summer, typically on sunny days (that’s when it’s hottest). It’s a perfect fit with the solar panels on my roof – the times I have the aircon on are almost exactly the times that the solar panels are generating electricity (the solar panels are virtually useless in winter). If in someone’s mind that makes me a climate denier, then that person’s mind is seriously disfunctional. Summers have been hot most of the time where I live in Australia, since records began. It would make more sense to try to persuade people to install solar panels because they are brilliant for aircon. If they then keep quiet about solar panels being just about useless for anythjing else, well, that’s advertising for you.
Perhaps Sydney Environment Institute, University of Sydney, should rip out their own A/C and see how they feel about it
Hot under the collar?
Loneliness: It’s an awful thing. it really is.
Look what its done to that young woman.
The things that aren’t already wrong, the ‘strong’ things & the reasons for life itself, are unravelling very very quickly now.
Typical ChatGPT errors. The OpenAI website has a ChatGPT detector.
Hannah Della Bosca is obviously a, “True Believer,” who has been writing and rewriting the same tired drivel since she was in second grade. Hannah is a, “Catch 22.”
Gaia: What have you done today to earn your place in this crowded world, Hannah?
Hannah: I died.
Man discovers fire.
Fire makes steam engines go.
Productivity skyrockets.
Fossil fuels enable astounding mobility.
Electricity changes everything for the better, including heating and cooling.
Coincidentally, the world emerges out of a cold spell.
Man blames himself, hating even the core reasons for his good fortune.
Things go badly off the rails for man.
It shouldn’t have to end like this. So let’s keep pushing back against the insane denial of the benefits of modern appliances and the sources of energy that make it all possible.
(And yes, I am using “man” in the sense of all humankind. :))
Is this a dare for skeptics in the Huxley science tradition?
Making and consuming clean water – denying the reality of infections that kill young children
Industrial agriculture – denying hunger
Having children – denying death
Making fine art and music – denying futility of life
Building relationships – denying loneliness
Making peace – denying the inevitability of war
Exploring space – denying our powerlessness
I could go on and on – denial is an appropriate motive force of positive change when paired with good intention and critical thinking. It makes us human.
So I suppose that to avoid engaging in sensory denial she goes outside and stands in the rain?
today I denied the hot and humid air mass outside by turning on my air conditioner.
The Nut: “… If we use technologies like aircon to avoid dealing with the root causes of climate change, we are in denial. …”
Eric: “Is wearing clothes or lighting a fire to stay warm in winter also a form of sensory climate denial?”
Only using AC is “denial”. But it is selective denial. Just like Climate “Justice”, Racial “Justice”, etc.
They get to define the terms and select just what supports or hinders The Cause.
apparently carved this into a self-dug sandstone block using her glue-on fake fingernails…
Pure dingbat through and through.