Here’s the latest paper decrying that we just can’t get the peons to do what we want.
The environmentalist narrative has become a staple of mainstream media coverage in recent years. From reports of melting glaciers to claims of record-breaking temperatures, it seems we cannot go a day without hearing about the impending doom that is climate change. But is this narrative being pushed upon us for our benefit, or is it a tool to manipulate public sentiment?
A recent study by the University of Lausanne, screen capped above, points towards the latter, It reveals insights about media coverage of climate change and its effect on public behavior. The researchers analyzed around 50,000 scientific publications on climate change from 2020 and found a noticeable bias towards natural sciences. The study suggests that the media tend to focus on large-scale, future climate projections and a narrow selection of threats, such as melting glaciers and polar bears.
Interestingly, the researchers found that these types of narratives do not inspire pro-environmental behaviors. Instead, they often provoke push back and avoidance, leading to a lack of engagement in climate action. This doesn’t come as a surprise to those who’ve observed the media’s tendency to lean towards sensationalism in their coverage of climate change.
The authors of the study, Fabrizio Butera and Marie-Elodie Perga, propose a solution-oriented approach to climate change communication. However, this proposition appears to be just another tactic to manipulate public sentiment and coerce compliance with the authors’ policy preferences.
As Butera explains, fear can lead to behavioral change, but only if the problem presented is accompanied by solutions. This statement implies an interest in the strategic use of fear as a tool to drive action. If the public is sufficiently scared and presented with a solution that aligns with the author’s policy preferences, they are more likely to comply.
This study reveals more about the methods of manipulation at play in the climate change narrative than it does about climate change itself. It’s clear that the focus is on influencing public behavior rather than informing the public in an objective, balanced way.
What’s missing in this study and in the broader climate change debate is the presentation of diverse perspectives, including those skeptical of the prevailing catastrophic narrative. Climate change is an intricate issue with scientific uncertainties and wide-ranging viewpoints, all of which should be fairly represented to ensure public understanding. The media, and those in control of it, should promote critical thinking, not fear-mongering and one-sided narratives.
As always, critical thinking and healthy skepticism are essential tools in navigating the complex world of media influence.
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Anyone seeking proper info about any topic should studiously avoid media releases to the establishment msm.
You’re just being fed an installment of “the narrative”.
I also would like to propose a ‘solution-oriented approach to climate change communication’: STOP LYING. Tell the unvarnished truth for once without a thick layer of deceit and bullcrap, and maybe, just maybe, you can rebuild trust then the public might begin to believe what you say once again.
Let’s look at some facts. The first major climate policy was introduced 26 years ago called the Kyoto Protocol. Since then, there have been millions of wind turbines, solar panels and and electric cars deployed to ‘fight’ climate change. Fossil fuel drilling and pipelines have been blocked. Coal mining has been crushed. Nuclear energy has been shat upon.
Those, among a multitude of other policies have cost many trillions of dollars. And yet, we are being told the climate (i.e. weather) is getting worse. Am I missing something here?
No, but many other billions are!
time to send quadrillions, not trillions- countless, endless quadrillions! /sarc
And atmospheric CO2 still continues to rise at an increasing rate. Now 424 ppm. It was about 421 a year ago. (Mauna Loa).
Yes –
“Whom the Gods would destroy they first make mad.”
Yes, you are missing something. Your missing you share of the filthy lucre giving to those who parrot the official narrative. Too bad your big oil check didn’t arrive in the mail.
The environmentalist movement has been predicting The End Times since the early 1960’s. So, for as long as I have been able to read, they have had much the same message (I was born in 1955).
Investigating the motives of the movement would seem to be more constructive than any of the varying “causes” of imminent doom they embrace.
“end of times” beliefs have been with us forever- probably reflecting the fear of death, which is generally not discussed- the end of everything is much easier, not so personal
Their message is nicely polished, missing only one last component: the TRUTH.
Rachel Carlson’s book “Silent Spring” came out in September, 1962. That was the start of the environmental scares. As a high school freshman, I was impressed by the book, and I wrote a book report on it for my biology class. I was just a kid, and I didn’t realize that the book was full of inaccuracies and poor research and that banning DDT would result in millions of deaths from malaria. Later in college I was forced to read Paul Ehrlich’s dire forecasts of mass deaths and of how we were running out of raw materials to sustain our way of life. Then the Club of Rome forecast mass starvation. Then we moved on to mass extinctions, to global cooling (Yes, they were seriously forecasting global cooling!), to global warming, to rising birth rates and then to falling birth rates, to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists with their silly dooms day clock, and God only know what else.
At 72 years old I think I may have seen it all.
Right there with you Marty. In retirement now, working in a bookstore and laughing at the cocky assuredness of the current school children, High through Grad School. The difference is that today they have them convinced to cut off their nose to spite their face.
Marty, The Big Guy 10% Joe Brandon says in response: “Hold my beer.”
YES! It is a religion, and the Rapture (climate catastrophe) will soon come, so repent!
One of my friends in grade school was a Jehovah’s Witness, and I noted the similarity in mindset.
Motive = Control.
Each succeeding generation is becoming more brainwashed to the point of resembling BORG drones, dispersed to assimilate.
I listen to NPR when I drive my car (Know thy enemy). A game I play is “How often does the phrase “Climate Change ” occur in one hour”. The record is around 20 or once every 3 minutes.
Thanks
+50
Best comment of the day
I certainly hope you are driving an EV!
You can’t drive an EV and listen to NPR on the radio at the same time.
If you do, the car pulls so hard to the Left that you will subsequently drive into the oncoming traffic.
(At least for Americans. Brits, on the other hand, would wind up in the ditch.)
If only they had some facts and real evidence then they would know what the (real) problems (if any) were and present the solutions in a rational way.
If the evidence is believable and provable then you don’t need to try to convince people. The longer they keep at this brow beating the more people will turn away from or ignore the desperate and lame conjectures.
all the public needs to do is watch Al Gore say the oceans are boiling- that should be shown every day on every conservative media- it’s certainly never been showing anywhere in the MSM
The two hallmarks of far-leftists – often displayed on steroids by mainstream media reporters – are intellectual dishonesty,and how they routinely project their own state of mind and actions onto our side as accusations of what we think and do. So, from not far within the paper’s Introduction is the following:
Meaning: the science about CAGW is settled. It is intellectually dishonest of the researchers to arrive at this conclusion. Science-based skepticism exists; the news media does not tell the public about it.
And there is the psychological projection of enviro-zealots. We read, analyze, and discuss both sides. Ask any enviro-zealot if they have ever read anything in depth from the skeptic side, and you can pretty much guess with 97% accuracy what the answer will be.
This playbook worked very well with COVID for at least the first year. It is still working with some people, if the number of folks still wearing masks continuously is any indication.
I see an occasional mask-wearer. There may be a reason that makes sense. I don’t ask. Likewise, I don’t ask a person why she/he/it wears a sign that says: “I’m stupid.”
Search string: here’s_your_sign
There are videos by Bill Engvall.
My hair dresser wears beautiful masks that are colour coodinated with her purple and aqua hair. She took it off at the cash register once and the reason was obvious – her teeth would easily grace a cigarette packet.
Hi Charles, thanks for another interesting post. I was wondering if you know the source of the three headed image toward the bottom. Thanks.
I used AI tools to create it myself.
Artificial Insemination?
I gotta learn to do that. Any suggestions? Web sites? Or is it software you install on your PC? A hint would be helpful. I have lots of ideas for visual items but zero art skills.
Nicely done.
Top Image: I thought the small animals trailing mama bear look like Red Pandas
While I was in the financial business ( financial advisor) we were taught and instructed to disturb our clients, i.e. provide or promote a financial crisis or tragic event to inspire them to buy a specific financial product. The same thing is being done by the media and of course by our beloved politicians! As is most always the case…….to understand something, follow the money.
Just watch TV. Then ask yourself why all the advertisements are the same on every channel.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” — H.L. Mencken
But is this narrative being pushed upon us for our benefit,
Of course not. With progressives owning nearly 100% control our ‘news’ media and government agencies and Universities (who live on grants from those agencies), this is pushed on us to adjust public opinion in the direction of submittal to the NetZero crowd and all the governing bodies who’ve kissed its rings.
Not for our own benefit. For our own good. They are do-gooders.
“Media Bias””
Wot? The BBC, C4, Guardian, Independent etc etc
Shurely shome mishtake?
No, no mishtake. Mish Funnyfanny
Yes, the incessant drum beat of “climate change” – you just KNOW that the people beating that drum are not themselves making any sacrifices (for “The Cause”), I know these types and they always have some pretzel logic such that it does not apply to THEM.
Did you see the video of the woman on the jet airplane who was scolding the MAGA hat wearing guy about climate change? She is sitting on a JET AIRPLANE grousing about climate change. WTF!? And then they wonder why ordinary people are not doing anything. Massive denial.
Too true!
Just recently I was in a group where 2 of the women were expounding on their personal efforts to “sustain the environment and the climate” – recycling, vegetarian diets, public transport, etc etc.
Next breath, they’re complaining how post-pandemic airfares are too expensive for them to reinstate their frequent holiday travels.
I quietly slipped away, lest their stupidity was catching.
I think that any article reporting on modelled futures that depend on RCP8.5 should be labelled
For entertainment and Hollywood script writers only
Followed by the sentences from the IPCC about the low probability of such scenarios.
The MSM is the driving force behind global warming hysteria. I call it a press riot, because it is a riot. The MSM is out of control and doing untold harm. A prime example is/was the reporting on “unmarked graves” at a Kamloops residential school, “revealed” by a ground survey by radar. Three years later – no graves, bodies, bones have been found, but no retraction by the NYT for example.
News report this week indicated the Canadian gubmint is proposing to make skepticism of “unmarked Graves” a hate crime.
Lets not forget that media is getting their ammunition from academics
Failed but Winning?
Who expected a transparently stupid climate change threat narrative cycled ad nauseum and escalating would be effective? Is it an accident that the narrative management intervention had the opposite outcome; or at least a mixed outcome? Deep pockets do not tolerate bad outcomes. Yet the climate change narrative cash keeps flowing.
Could it be be that the narrative of the true climate change believers has been leveraged by deep pocketed carpet baggers ,,,like a sophisticated false flag? Or has the effort been undermined by deep pocketed believers in an attempt to morph it to their advantage…. with an eye to a newly integrated political movement? I have no answers but the questions are worth asking. The big question is ‘who is bankrolling it’?
Political movements based on fear and propaganda ae easily leveraged by many strange bedfellows. Seems we are now living in an era where a sophisticated psychological warfare approach is normative. We’re all glued to our phones, apps, social media…. this is how powerful psy-tech has become. Since 2007 psy-tech designed devices have captured us all. Quantum generative AI will be psy-tech tool on roids.
The problems is us…. the big money is on how get us to pay more for stuff we need. What we ‘want’ is a fluid conditional state. No one starts out sure what they want. We are social creatures and need social structure to shape our wants beyond the stuff we need to live like food. So getting us to want more, pay more and consume less is key. Meanwhile, they want us to quietly stop procreating to make room an entirely new global economy run by AI/robots.
Who really wants a robot until the guy down the street has one? The guy who didn’t want a robot bought the robot so that the guy down the street would covet it. Eventually, everyone on the street with have robot they don’t need. The household robot is not actual capital, it is a marketing ploy for investment dollars to build an alternative empire to replace us. LOL
I never needed or wanted a PC, the internet or my smart phone. What I did need and want was the damn battery and cheap energy.
Cynically, A truly viable battery is simply too dangerous for the masses to get a hold of. The last thing they want us to have is empowering real capital in our hands… doing our own thing with our own electricity. This is the reason the US oil companies lobbying for Carbon taxes on the state level put riders in the legislation prohibiting or making it far less profitable for families to produce, store and distribution their own electricity, (from any input).
JC, your rambling paranoia is particularly bad today.
“The media, and those in control of it, should promote critical thinking, not fear-mongering and one-sided narratives.
As always, critical thinking and healthy skepticism are essential tools in navigating the complex world of media influence.”
**********
Therein lies the root of the trouble. There is way too much effort these days to tell people what to think instead of showing us how to think. From grade school all the way to adulthood, we are just programmable robots instead of human beings with a brain and an intellect. Do our programmers actually believe that we actually like a constant barrage of gloom-and-doom?
I should consider myself fortunate that I do not live in the UK where the Just Stop Oil people appear to be engaging in disruptive climate protests nearly every day this summer with their blockage of Britain’s roadways. If they actually believe that they will accomplish their goals that way, their critical thinking skills are sadly lacking. Motorists are annoyed by them more than anything else.
George Orwell’s Oceania from Nineteen Eighty-Four is alive and well here in the real world.
I especially appreciate the comments on NPR. At one time I was a big supporter of NPR. We spend a lot of time in our vehicles and in job sites in my business. Then I detected the “ signal”(in 1990s Clinton era) – the signal of false credibility established ,then used to push a secret agenda by some really radical useful idiots. The Trump derangement syndrome at NPR eventually made it impossible to listen even for entertainment and enemy intelligence gathering.
I am curious as to how NPR is going to rationalize away all the things they have been slanderously wrong on( reference Durham report among others) But I can’t take the stress of tuning into this propaganda unit funded partly by my tax dollars.
I do listen to NPR since they have good weather coverage in my area, especially in bad weather. The best time I had listening to it was in the aftermath of the 2016 election when the announcers literally did not know what to say.
Yet another example of experts and professionals yapping about how much more they know than the rest of us dullards and if only they used different words maybe they could make us understand. They have nothing to back up their doom and gloom claims and they know it.
the focus is on influencing public behavior rather than informing the public in an objective, balanced way.
Those doing the influencing aren’t interested in resolving a debate. The mastodon media can’t describe or analyze various problems without assuming the reality of AGW. It’s an available villain that has been accepted by much of academia and the state so there’s no need for an objective, balanced presentation. It’s easier than actually going into the nuances of the factors, many of which have yet to be investigated, that may or may not have an effect on climate.
“The researchers analyzed around 50,000 scientific publications on climate change from 2020 and found …”
This gobsmacking revelation that there are ‘around’ 50,000 clisci publications from 2020 (this is 250 per academic work day) is the real story the analysts didn’t get. At the time Einstein published his giant contributions in the early years of the 20th century, a sedulous, intellectual could read every scholarly work in all fields from the span of the Enlightenment to present.
Today, even the in the narrow field of climate science, there isn’t chance that anyone could read 1.0% of a years output. What purpose does such chaff serve? Who are all the peer reviewers (at 3 persons per paper)? Sight unseen, it can be confidentally concluded that this collection can be simply thrown in the trash without humankind losing a jot of useful knowledge.
And what of the climate consensus spawn of 2021 and 2019? And all the years going back four decades to the beginning of this contrived endeavor?
“This gobsmacking revelation that there are ‘around’ 50,000 clisci publications from 2020 (this is 250 per academic work day) is the real story the analysts didn’t get.”
That kind of stood out to me, too. Think of all the grants that represents! There’s lot of money in climate science research. If it’s bad research, no problem, they get paid anyway.
it seems we cannot go a day without hearing about the impending doom that is climate change.
Here’s a typical example-
Lost Fiordland penguins found in Esperance, far from New Zealand breeding site, raise concerns for seabirds (msn.com)
The surprising poor condition stragglers might well be an indication that the breed is now more prolific and widespread than previously understood. Nup for the sad sacks it’s a sign of the dooming when we really have no idea. That’s the way the dooming works.
It seems to me that when you push a narrative that promises catastrophe “by the end of the century,” when almost everyone alive today will be dead, it doesn’t really inspire a lot of confidence in “climate action.”
What does the average person get out of it? Increase the cost of energy to save the planet, for the sake of preventing some ephemeral ill-defined thing that might (but probably won’t) happen 80 years from now…
Seems like a hard sell to me.