Condemned by history (crosspost)

Oh, nonsense. There is no “Climate Crisis” other than the one foisted on us by the propagandist of the Left and their psuedo scientists and flunkeys in Academia and the Media.

You cannot come up with one, not one, empirical experiment that backs out these claims about “carbon”, “green house gas” and climate change–not one that would pass the rigor expected of Physics or real biological science. In fact, there is no real scientific discipline of “Climate Science”–it is just a hodgepodge of poorly understood physics, statistics and political opinion masquerading as science. If anyone in a real science made such unfounded claims and showed such a lack of rigor and such bizarre and emotional advocacy, they would be laughed of as the pseudo-scientific cranks that they are.

All you can come up with is some scientifically sloppy extrapolation of “radiation” of Co2 in very controlled environment completely removed from the reality of “climate systems”.

(In fact, a real testing of people in “Climate Science” would briskly prove that they as a whole lack the competencies in Math or Physics to make it in the real sciences–that is why they found the hiding place of “climate science” to begin with. They are so incompetent that, comically, reasonably intelligent non-specialist can take their logic and “science” apart in blogs. Their only response is to pout, control information and make these childish attacks on the morality of those who have found them out. That is what poor scientist they actually are. History will amply prove this, and loudly prove just how silly they were.)

The Australian Senate will come off as one of the few legislative bodies in the West with a lick of common sense. Let us hop that they are a harbinger of what is to come and not a last glimmer of sanity in the terminal decline of the West.

And no it most assuredly is not the case that:

“These men (in Australia and elsewhere) are committing crimes against future generations.”

Quite the opposite is true. It is the propogandists of the “Climate Change”, whose project here is merely a dodge for yet another Marxist attack on free peoples, free institutions, and Western Civilization in general, that are “committing crimes against future generations”, and have been doing so for nearly 100 years now.

And it is like you, sophist, who enable these monsters.

(and here, BTW, you show inadvertently just what you are about in your choice of monikers. I rather doubt you could get though an undergraduate Physics degree at a second rate school.)

Your charge here is pure character assassination and not based on any fact whatsoever.

You do this because you cannot argue rationally but rather spit back the indoctrination you have so eagerly imbibed.

Climate alarmist, when it is not an outright hustle, amounts to a sort of Leftist cult.

The Aussies have had a bellyful of neo-com nonsense; let us hope that the rest of the West is soon to follow.

Thanks for continuing to speak out , JQ. It’s a depressing time to be an Australian, in so many ways, but this is the worst.

“These men (in Australia and elsewhere) are committing crimes against future generations. I desperately hope that in my lifetime I will see these men brought to [trial]”

If you live in the US you could support/join this organisation doing just that

http://www.ourchildrenstrust.org

“The mission of OUR CHILDREN’S TRUST is to establish the legal right to a healthy atmosphere and stable climate for all present and future generations.

By supporting youth plaintiffs in strategic atmospheric trust litigation, OUR CHILDREN’S TRUST empowers youth to lead a game-changing effort to hold the ruling generation accountable and to compel governments in the United States and abroad to adopt and implement enforceable science-based Climate Recovery Plans.”

It’s time to go after the organ grinders, especially you-know-who*.

Corporations are not people: they are vehicles for the few to exercise power over the many.

1) All corporate political donations should be outlawed as they distort democracy.
2) Individual donations in any country should be limited to a relatively small amount (say £1000pa in the UK), and be by resident citizens only.
3) Foreign and non-dom (tax exile) owned media should not be allowed to takes sides in local politics. This should be enforced by the criminal law, and apply to media holding companies etc.

That will do for starters.

* Rupert Murdoch delenda est!

@2 Let us hop

Nobody’s stopping you from hopping, rabbit boy.

‘That is, there is no one, anywhere in the world, who has honestly examined the evidence, without wishful thinking based on ideological or cultural preconceptions…’

Are there such people? Almost everything I see on the Net, and in other media, on any side of this issue (as with many others) has consisted of appeals to authority, personal and generic attacks on the characters and interests of those with differing views, and arguments from ideology.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is on the net (http://www.ipcc.ch/). So I don’t know what Anarcissie is talking about.

Almost everything I see on the Net, and in other media, on any side of this issue (as with many others) has consisted of appeals to authority, personal and generic attacks on the characters and interests of those with differing views, and arguments from ideology.

I can appeal to the authority of science, or I can try to explain the science to you in blog comments and see if you understand.

“You can keep doing that forever, the dog is NEVER going to move.”

I think I’ll just appeal to authority on this one. If you want, you can explain how it happens that you understand the science better than they do.

I mean it seriously when I say that corporate funded climate denial is the best argument against free speech I have ever seen.

Sure, the science is there. It’s not what most people usually talk about, unless you count the aforesaid appeals to authority

Then I don’t see you have cause for complaint.

What is your complaint?

Plenty of science discussed here:

http://www.realclimate.org

“RealClimate is a commentary site on climate science by working climate scientists for the interested public and journalists. We aim to provide a quick response to developing stories and provide the context sometimes missing in mainstream commentary. The discussion here is restricted to scientific topics and will not get involved in any political or economic implications of the science. All posts are signed by the author(s), except ‘group’ posts which are collective efforts from the whole team. This is a moderated forum.”

The Australian idiocy comes two days after the Japan Meteorological Society graphed last month as the hottest global June since 1890:
http://equitablegrowth.org/2014/07/15/evening-must-read-joe-romm-hottest-march-june-record-globally/

Extremes are on the way. People concerned about the planet may have to adjust their explanations a little.

Now, for example, the southern hemisphere is reported to be cooling a little, Antarctic surface ice area growing slightly larger, Australia is dryer. At the same time, the western half of North America is hotter and dryer and Arctic sea ice is diminishing, but northern Atlantic seaboard winters are getting sharper with possibly increased precipitation (snow), and last year there was a notable seasonal shift downward of the polar vortex.

It could be that increase in earth’s energy flux, due to CO2, could sharpen the Dansgaard-Oeschger events, or, on the other hand, that D-O is a recurring cycle that dampens warming in some areas.

An interesting question is what cause the Medieval Warming Period to be followed by the Little Ice Age.

Can increased winter precipitation in mid-latitudes cause additional seasonal albedo to produce a cooling countertrend? It would be nice to know what was happening around the N. American seaboard in medieval times. And similarly, what is the nature of the slowdown in the overall increase of temperatures 1940-70 and the temporary little plateau now? Here are the GISS graphs:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/

I think we should fear accelerating the Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles. Before about 12000 years ago, temperatures could bounce 10 degrees C. (about 17 degrees F.) in as LITTLE as ten years. We may not be able to conduct agriculture under these conditions. Agricultural civilization developed entirely during an anomalous 12000-year period of rather stable climate. Before that there was a much longer period of quick extremes, and now we are adding heat energy.

PS Here’s a link to the story.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/feb/12/nigel-lawson-met-office-floods-global-warming

Nothing that anyone can write will change the minds (or paid-for opinions) of people like the commenter at #2. I’m more discouraged that I can’t change your, John Quiggin’s, mind.

I remember over the past 5 or 10 years, or however long it has been, arguing that carbon taxes and trading schemes don’t work. Why? Because if they ever start to matter, they will be repealed. The only thing that will work, I said, is locking in infrastructure building decisions that are not easily reversible by future governments.

Here is a post from 2011 in which we had this exact argument. You commented that “I also don’t think much of the style of argument ‘your policy proposal won’t work because, if it did, vested interests would stop it’. Maybe so, but you don’t give any grounds for supposing that yours would be any more acceptable to the same interests.” Does this event mean that you’re ready to reconsider that? Consider how much more difficult it would be to cancel built solar plants or to start to build multi-decade-service coal ones than it is to repeal a paper trading scheme.

My suggestion for what?

Maybe the fundamental problem is ideological. Capitalism lives on domination and exploitation to the detriment of its objects; the non-human environment is virtually defenseless (so far); therefore, capitalism will degrade and destroy it. Any effective move to protect the environment within the existing social order is inherently anticapitalist, so it will be diverted or stopped. Therefore, those who want to continue to have a liveable Earth to live on should start figuring out how to bring about a hopefully non-violent transition to post-capitalism, that is, communism. So maybe #2 was right about ‘Marx’ after all…. but the proper slogan is not ‘socialism or barbarism’ but ‘communism or annihilation’.

But within the existing system? I’m just pointing out that whatever you’re doing hasn’t been working.

Talk of the need for communism or socialism just plays into the denialists’ hands. It’s a bunch of over-theorization to begin with, and it confirms their puerile fears.

Do not misconstrue what is happening. The majority of people (around 60-70%) in every country think climate change is a threat. There is a 10-percent bounce depending on the recent weather and the recent propaganda, and the seriousness of the climate problem is always rated lower than more immediately pressing concerns, like the state of the economy and the need to put food on the table.

And of course we can always expect political back-stepping by politicians, because they are usually stupid and corrupt.

But as the climate communication specialists have been emphasizing, we need to look very closely at the 25-30% of the population who remain persistently out-of-touch. The evidence is mounting that they are of a certain cognitive bias which is both deeper and more complex than previously suspected. It goes not only into attitudes about science and economics, but also into biases concerning risk perception and existential fear.

They are “rightwing tribalists”, for want of a better term. Rightwing tribalism is social cognitive bias, not merely an ideology, rather more like a profound religious condition. It is deeper than we usually think, but it also affects only a minority of people, though they predominate in power and are at the heart of the austerity policies which are hurting peoples’ futures. Here is a list of observed attributes compiled from the social sciences, under another one of John Quiggin’s posts:
https://crookedtimber.org/2014/04/30/right-wing-tribalists-a-lost-cause/#comment-525389

This describes about 25-30% of the population, at least in the U.S.

Comment #2 above is a perfect rendition, right down to the implied instrumental division between technologically optimistic science and regulatory “impact” science, a division that emerged into politics in the 1970s.

And in turn, right-wing tribalists easily fall prey to:

2. big-money interests who can be either entirely cynical, or else share the rightwing tribal ideology themselves.

There are ways to counteract this. The thesis expressed in comments above — that it is futile to try — is straight out of The Rhetoric of Reaction, and plays into the denialists’ hands.

There appears to be a cohesive, pervasive social organism, with certain emotional and intellectual features. There may not be a good word or phrase for it, because “political tribalism”, “motivated social cognition”, “social cognitive bias” are all a little too tame. It has some sort of independent social ontology.

I had very little idea this existed, and I was surprised the the amount of good, solid social science which has gone into this area. I copied and pasted a bunch of stuff from various papers to form my own personal word document overview, so apologies to authors if I don’t have all the citations, but I will try to keep this within fair use. Some outstanding markers:

1. MORE KNOWLEDGE DOESN’T ALWAYS WORK: “There is a dominant, but demonstrably flawed, assumption that ‘if people only knew’ enough information about e.g., climate change, they would act differently. But a great number of climate deniers are citizens of wealthy countries and many of them are scientifically literate.” –[They already know about things like political propaganda, vested interests, and public relations and advertising. Clearly, something else is going on.]– “This result suggests that public divisions over climate change stem not from the public’s incomprehension of science but from a distinctive conflict of interest: between the personal interest individuals have in forming beliefs in line with those held by others with whom they share close ties, and the collective one they all share in making use of the best available science to promote common welfare.”

2. IT IS PARTLY ABOUT RISK PERCEPTION: [A major entry into studying the subject is risk perception]: “the tendency of people to conform perception of risk and advocacy of various ways to deal with it, to their preferred understandings of how society should be organized”: [Dan Kahan’s definition of “cultural cognition”.]

3. IT IS PARTLY ABOUT POLITICAL BELIEF: [Another entry is political belief. It maps somewhat over the “group/grid” axes of Douglas’ political quadrants: the “group” pole goes from individualist to communitarian; the “grid” pole goes from hierarchical to egalitarian. This is also related to risk perception.]

4. THERE IS AN ENORMOUS “IN-GROUP” COMPONENT: “Individuals, as a result of a complex of psychological mechanisms, tend to form perceptions of societal risks that cohere with values characteristic of groups with which they identify.” — “Communication research in the social sciences shows that technical knowledge is only loosely connected to collective decisions and to individual preferences. Many members of the public lack either the ability or the motivation to be well informed about the technical details of the science of climatology, choosing instead to rely on social identity, cultural traditions, personal experience, localized knowledge, and/or the popular media…” — “For the ordinary individual, the most consequential effect of his beliefs about climate change is likely to be on his relations with his peers…” — “Our data, consistent with that observed in other settings, suggest that those with the highest degree of science literacy and numeracy perform such tasks even more discerningly… For ordinary citizens, the reward for acquiring greater scientific knowledge and more reliable technical-reasoning capacities is a greater facility to discover and use—or explain away—evidence relating to their groups’ positions.”

5. IT IS PARTLY ABOUT JUSTIFYING THE STATUS QUO: [There is also a component that needs to justify the current system]: “Whereas most social psychological perspectives assume that needs to manage uncertainty, existential anxiety, and social cohesion should motivate any form of ideological zeal, System Justification Theory [Jost et al.] predicts that these needs are positively associated with the endorsement of system-justifying beliefs, opinions, and values but negatively associated with the endorsement of system-challenging ideological outcomes… …a national survey of 182 Americans…found that, as hypothesized, lower need for cognition, greater death anxiety, and a stronger desire to share reality each contributed significantly and independently to economic system justification, which, in turn, contributed to support for the Tea Party (a movement aimed at restoring America’s “traditional values”) and opposition to Occupy Wall Street (a movement seeking to reduce social and economic inequality and minimize corporate influence on government).”

6. THERE ARE CERTAIN COGNITIVE AND EMOTIONAL CORRELATES: “The emotion norms come into conflict with the troubling emotions created by the perceived threats… i.e. fear, helplessness, and guilt. In response to the felt clash of values and beliefs, individuals manage emotions through the use of selective attention (focus on something they feel comfortable to know or can do) and perspectival selectivity (de-emphasizing their own responsibility).” — “Research conducted over the last decade or so has provided support for the notion that epistemic, existential, and relational needs are all disproportionately associated with the endorsement of inherently conservative, system-justifying beliefs, opinions, and values. For instance, individual differences in the need for cognitive closure (i.e., the desire to “seize and freeze” on a given conclusion rather than tolerating or prolonging uncertainty) predict anchoring on the status quo, political conservatism, authoritarianism, stereotyping, and rejection of opinion deviates… Similarly, low need for cognition (i.e., possessing a low level of motivation to engage in cognitive activity); is correlated with political conservatism and harsh punishment of those who threaten the social order.” — “With respect to existential motives, the fear of death and perceptions of a dangerous world are associated with political conservatism, right-wing authoritarianism, stereotyping, and support for discrimination against same-sex couples…” — [Relational]: “…individuals who feel that it is especially important to ‘see the world as others who share their beliefs generally do’.” –[However]– “it is not our view that high system-justifiers always oppose social change… On the contrary, they frequently embrace forms of change that are either incremental—and therefore designed to forestall the demand for more radical changes to the status quo—or retrograde or restorative in nature, that is, designed to return the country to some prior idealized state of affairs…”

7. THERE IS A VERY ROBUST “WHITE MALE EFFECT” IN THE U.S.: [Not racist, something else] — “Past research on perceptions of technological and environmental risks in the US has documented what has been termed the white male effect, whereby white males are found to be more accepting of a wide range of risks than are other adults.” — “caused by a subgroup of white males who reported high levels of risk acceptance—30% of the white males in their national sample. This subgroup of risk-accepting white males had an affinity for hierarchy, had greater trust in authorities, and opposed democratization of risk management” — [Not a biological phenomenon]: “Rather, these scholars have put forth three sociopolitical explanations: the vulnerability thesis, the cultural worldview thesis, and the identity-protective cognition thesis.” — “More generally, conservative white males are likely to favor protection of the current industrial capitalist order which has historically served them well. Fiscally conservative white males have disproportionately occupied positions of power within our economic system, controlling stocks and flows of various forms of capital and benefiting from ample amounts of prestige, status, and esteem… Given the expansive challenge that climate change poses to the industrial capitalist economic system, it makes sense that conservative white males’ strong system-justifying attitudes—triggered by the anti-climate science claims of the conservative movement…—may drive them toward climate change denial.”

8. IT IS PARTLY ABOUT THE PUBLIC POSITION OF SCIENCE: “…public trust in science has not declined since the 1970s except among conservatives and those who frequently attend church.” — “…the public defines ‘what science is’ in three distinct ways: (1) as an abstract method (e.g., replication, empirical, or unbiased); (2) as a cultural location (e.g., takes place in a university or is practiced by highly credentialed individuals); and (3) as one form of knowledge among other types such as commonsense and religious tradition… Interestingly, conservatives were far more likely to define science as knowledge that should conform to common sense and religious tradition. Relating to the second pattern, when examining a series of public attitudes toward science, conservatives’ unfavorable attitudes are most acute in relation to government funding of science and the use of scientific knowledge to influence social policy… Conservatives thus appear especially averse to regulatory science, defined here as the mutual dependence of organized science and government policy.”

9. THERE IS A DIVORCE IN THE INSTRUMENTAL ATTITUDE TO SCIENCE: [Starting around the time of the cigarette cancer denial, the rise of environmentalism and Reagan’s “Star Wars” initiative: technological optimism (we can fix anything) vs. “impact” or regulatory science (protect the environment).]

10. THE POLARIZATION IS MORE PRONOUNCED AMONG THE ELITES AND POLITICAL ACTORS, THAN IN THE GENERAL POPULATION: “There is virtually full agreement among scholars that political parties and politicians, in recent decades, have become more ideological and more likely to take extreme positions on a broad set of political issues… Though many observers have concluded that a similar polarization process has extended to public opinion at large, scholars have shown that, over the last 40 years, American public opinion has remained stable or even become more moderate on a large set of political issues, while people have assumed more extreme positions only on some specific, hot issues, such as abortion, sexual morality, and, lately, the war in Iraq… More systematic polarization appears in mass partisanship: those who are politically active or identify themselves with a party or ideology tend to have more extreme positions than the rest of the population.”

@ 36 Lee “political parties and politicians, in recent decades, have become more ideological and more likely to take extreme positions on a broad set of political issues… “

This smacks of false equivalence. It is my perception, that in Britain and the US anyway, this apples only to politicians on the Right, and that those on the Left are wimpish and centrist. The policies of past UK Tory PMs like Macmillan and even Heath would be denounced as rabidly socialist by today’s Right politicians, especially US ones.

‘… What is your complaint?’

Well, for one thing, I read that fewer people now believe in anthropogenic climate change, and in doing anything about it, than ten or twenty years ago.

‘What’s your suggestion?’

My suggestion for what?

For how to correct this problem that you are complaining about.

I’m just pointing out that whatever you’re doing hasn’t been working.

But it might be working as well as possible, against a lot of big-spending liars. And it might work increasingly well as the lies start to catch up to them, and their budgets need to keep getting bigger at a faster rate. At some point they are likely to decide it isn’t worth the expense.

http://news.yahoo.com/climate-change-disbelief-rises-america-180339949.html
This popular report says that 63% of Americans “believe in” climate change, steady for six months, but 12% are certain it does not exist and 15% are doubtful. This rose 6% in six months, as people who before said they did not know, made up their minds.

I am not convinced that this is meaningful. The study was done November-December 2013, while the previous study was done April-May. Fewer Americans believe in global warming during the winter.

This study covered a short time. Which longer-term study were you looking at? 63% does not seem like a bad result to me, though it will get better. Nowadays only 4% of Americans doubt that smoking causes cancer.

Part of the problem is that a lot of Americans are unaware that there is a scientific consensus. somebody keeps lying to them that the scientists disagree among themselves.

Sasha Clarkson #37: “This smacks of false equivalence.”

You could be right about that. I don’t have the citation for that quotation in front of me but I think it was a survey article for an Annual Review. It has seemed to me too, since I first started watching it in the Reagan years, that it is the right pulling the whole thing more rightward, and the so-called left is really more diffuse and diffident. Not least because the left & center’s understanding of economics is almost equally as inept.

Brett the Brit #37: “Not a single climate model foresaw the current ‘pause’. Mankind will adapt, as it always has.”

While I would agree that technological change is going to reduce carbon dependence sooner rather than later, the rest of this is misleading propaganda.

One, the “current pause” looks like the natural variability produced by any other type on N-compartment system; it is well within the predictive margins of current models; and finally, it appears that the pause has ENDED and we are resuming the climb upwards.

Two, “mankind” has benefitted from about 12,000 years of unusually stable climate, and now depends upon a widespread agricultural civilization that has never existed before. Humans may only be able to adapt to gradual change, not drastic. The real evidence is that whole species can be wiped from the planet. If there are a few years of heat spikes that hurt world agriculture, we are going to see civilization-wide, global mayhem.

#37 Brett the Brit

Not a single climate model foresaw the current ‘pause’.

Do you believe in any school of economics?

Did your school of economics unanimously predict 2008?
Did they get the date correct?

If not, do you consider your school of economics disproven?

The climate skeptics don’t actually have that much money behind them. The Heartland Institute is one of the key groups pushing climate denialism and their leaked budget for 2012 only allocated about a million bucks towards climate.

The real problem is somehow global warming has become a partisan/tribal issue, at least in the United States. It wasn’t always so. Once upon a time Newt Gingrich co-sponsored the Global Warming Prevention Act of 1989, and it wasn’t that long ago that you could find Republican supporters of cap-and-trade. You can see some of the partisan divergence in these polls by Gallup and Pew. If my memory is correct back in the early nineties the partisan difference was actually quite small.

“One, the “current pause” looks like the natural variability produced by any other type on N-compartment system; it is well within the predictive margins of current models; and finally, it appears that the pause has ENDED and we are resuming the climb upwards.”

I thought the party line was that there wasn’t any pause. Funny that it takes fifteen years to admit there was a pause, and a few months to decide that it has ended.

Bruce Wilder #48: “Are you denying that there have been campaigns to promote understanding of the climate change threat?”

Except for James Hansen, who conducted a sort of one-man campaign, climate scientists have been under criticism for not been advocates enough, and within their profession they have resisted advocacy, at least until very recently.

I don’t know whether there’s been a pause or not. I’m not a climate scientist although I have a chemistry degree and a few maths degrees.

However, I know enough about thermodynamics to know that concentrating on temperature misses part of the picture: anyone who does not understand entropy too has no right to an opinion on the matter – at best they have a right to an opinion as to which experts they trust.

“Brett the Brit #37: “Not a single climate model foresaw the current ‘pause’. Mankind will adapt, as it always has.”
….
[Lee A Arnold] One, the “current pause” looks like the natural variability produced by any other type on N-compartment system; it is well within the predictive margins of current models; and finally, it appears that the pause has ENDED and we are resuming the climb upwards.”

“Global warming has not stopped. People should understand that the planet is a closed system. As we increase our emissions of greenhouse gases, the fundamental thermal dynamics tells us we have added heat into the system. Once it’s trapped, it can go to a myriad of places – land surface, oceans, ice shelves, ice sheets, glaciers for example.”
– Matt England, UNSW, interviewed, The Guardian

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2014/feb/12/global-warming-fake-pause-hiatus-climate-change

Scientific paper : http://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~paulspence/hiatus.pdf

ZM #56 — Exactly. What Brett the Brit would have us forget is that the so-called “pause” has been in the surface temperature graphs ONLY, and the increasing heat energy can go into other forms, including icemelt and kinetic energy redirecting air and ocean currents. The climate is an N-compartment system with multiple reservoirs to sink energy and create an even more dangerous condition. So it’s always this verbal shuffle, a switcheroo, that works on denialists because they are predisposed to believe it, and now the Australian government has taken an embarrassing plunge.

“So it’s always this verbal shuffle, a switcheroo, that works on denialists because they are predisposed to believe it, and now the Australian government has taken an embarrassing plunge.”

This government in Australia is more likely to be the switcheroo-ing duper rather than the embarrassed dupee given its comprehensive action on the environment, education, welfare, refugees, foreign aid, spying and surveillance etc

Lee A Arnold:

The majority of people (around 60-70%) in every country think climate change is a threat. There is a 10-percent bounce depending on the recent weather and the recent propaganda, and the seriousness of the climate problem is always rated lower than more immediately pressing concerns, like the state of the economy and the need to put food on the table. . . . But as the climate communication specialists have been emphasizing, we need to look very closely at the 25-30% of the population who remain persistently out-of-touch. The evidence is mounting that they are of a certain cognitive bias which is both deeper and more complex than previously suspected. It goes not only into attitudes about science and economics, but also into biases concerning risk perception and existential fear. . . . They are “rightwing tribalists”, for want of a better term. Rightwing tribalism is social cognitive bias, not merely an ideology, rather more like a profound religious condition. . . .

I’m asking, why does it matter?

Why does it matter if the 25% of the population you term, “rightwing tribalists”, can’t or won’t wrap their minds around the science of climate change?

If you want it phrased differently: What would you have the dissenters do? Or, what would you have us do to the dissenters?

It would be unusual to get more that 70% of the population to agree on anything, let alone something that they, individually, don’t know enough about, to form an independent judgment.

I cannot think of any political issue where the dissenting opinion of 25% of the population would be considered a critical problem. It’s perfectly normal for one-third or one-quarter or one-in-five or one-in-ten to have a strongly held minority opinion, which may be scientifically baseless or otherwise apparently at odds with a majority sense of consensus reality.

As noted, having a substantial majority polling position just doesn’t translate into policy. I think this is caused by two factors. The first is that the average level of support isn’t very high, not too many people change their voting based upon this issue. The second, which is somewhat related is that politicians are dependent of big money donars, which in the US are dominated by hardcore carbon interests. So if the politicians need to go against a widely but weakly held public position in order to secure funding, it is a win for them to do so. We see this even more strongly with renewable energy: it polls very positivily even with Republicans, yet in several state conservative governments are doing all they can to stop/delay the renewables.

the economic theories of rightwing tribalism = capitalist ideology ?

If the “mentality” has that much overlap with power structures and interest in fossil fuels, then maybe it is, socialism or barbarism, and what is required is overthrowing the 1%, so many of whom have lost their grip on reality.

Jim Henley

Was Jim ever a climate denialist?

Thornton Hall #69: “… just path dependence…?”

I think the 27% crazification factor is close. On some specific issues it may go as high as the mid-30’s.

Path dependence is not an ontological category, it is just a description. Certainly rightwing tribalism follows a path. But I think we would still have to explain the really high scores of respondents on the group/grid axes and on the cognitive and emotional correlates (the paragraphs numbered 3 and 6 in the collection from the literature at comment #36 above). I find this to be pretty striking stuff. It’s almost like a kind of socio-emotional organism that is strongly attuned to perceptions of risk.

In one way it is strongly path-dependent, for at least 2500 years. Rightwing tribalism seems to be strongly allied to a change in public attitudes in the mid-18th century, regarding a much older religious conception called “the great chain of being” (the name of the book by Lovejoy) which descended from Plato and was unified by the Neoplatonists. For millennia, the public mind operated within the ideas of a static cosmic hierarchy: God-angels-man-animals-inert objects etc. But in the middle of the 18th century, new ideas of science and discovery forced a radical change in the public conception of this, to a non-static hierarchy in which individuals could ascend through personal merit upward. This coincided with ideas about the end of aristocracy and the rise of the merchant classes, etc., and thus validated the new power structures. So it’s a kind of religious path-dependent thing, with an extremely long lifespan.

Lee Arnold’s #36 is a wonderful summary. Unfortunately, denialism isn’t limited to the usual 30% of crazies; it’s the more or less official position of the Republican Party, at the moment, which for various reasons has a controlling position in the American legislature.

The problem, simply put, is that nearly half the American public is not subject to persuasion by means of rational argument. This is true of evolution as well. People do understand the scientific consensus, but they simply reject it out of faith and tribal solidarity. Trying to understand what ought to be a matter of science and public policy goes off into the weeds of motivated reasoning and cognitive dissonance.

There does seem to be an association between ambient temperature and acceptance of global warming, but, given the planet’s axial tilt, temperate zones will continue to have cold winters for quite some time to come, which limits the weather’s ability to change minds.

I think the 27% crazification factor is close. On some specific issues it may go as high as the mid-30′s.

The thing you have to remember is that the 27% was based on votes, and the turnout in that particular election was actually quite low, 50% or so. I actually checked this a few years back, but can’t remember the exact results.

[I suspect that even this one-in-six is inflated by institutional groupthink, that the one-in-six is maybe itself one part core true believers and five parts “oh, if you insist”. The craziest person out of thirty-six is going to be pretty crazy, so multi-level indirect representation combined with group loyalty can cause some serious moral tensions.]

Bad Jim “The slippery slopes are predominantly to be found in one corner of the American psyche …

And the American Right psyche is unique: the views of many Republicans would make them unelectable and unselectable in Europe – at the moment: but one always worries about the stronger madness crossing the Atlantic.

Eg this: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19303-emc2-not-on-conservapedia.html

There is no one, anywhere in the world, who has honestly examined the evidence, without wishful thinking based on ideological or cultural preconceptions, and concluded that mainstream science is wrong.

For what it’s worth: I am not an expert –but no crank either; I guess I could legitimately call myself a “scientist” given my academic work, although in an unrelated field–, and I only have a passing familiarity with the field: but to me the preponderance of evidence so far, as alarming as it is, is not yet as smoking-gun clear cut and overwhelming as it needs to be to unambiguously warrant urgent, major societal changes at a global scale –like, for instance, cigarette smoking and lung cancer or, more recently, fracking and earthquakes.

Climatologists like to say this ambiguity is unescapable due to intrinsic complexity / data limitations, but to me some of their modeling choices and overreliance on toy simulations is rather problematic and smacks of complacency, in what is already an insular field. The result is a whole bunch of “exploitable” weak links and gray areas for opportunists to grab to and politicize.

Perhaps this is just the way it is, and again I am no expert, but unfortunately there is indeed such a thing as a perceived gradation within the natural sciences (as #2 so odiously pointed out), with heavily “applied” fields like seismology or climatology at the bottom considered the least rigorous and easiest to get into. Add to that an insular academic culture, and a (otherwise completely reasonable) deep suspicion of outsider criticism, which perhaps explains their characteristic lack of interdisciplinary collaboration –as compared with other fields. As a result, sadly, it is not uncommon to see things like awful physics or blatant statistical malpractice in published journals… So perhaps climatology methodology has room to improve, and with it the strength of the evidence.

@Lee A Arnold
I think we sometimes miss some radical post-war changes and don’t include them in our investigations of post war pathologies. For instance, the connection between antibiotics, gut flora, and obesity.

Similarly, “objective” journalism that reports both sides (and exactly 2 sides) of every story. This is a radical ideology in the 500 year history of mass media. How much insanity in the States is the result of oligarchs exploiting the fatal flaw of “objective” media: the transmission of well crafted deception as “the equally valid opposition” to the truth?

Brett: “Funny that it takes fifteen years to admit there was a pause, and a few months to decide that it has ended.”

It’s supposed to be 17 years, or something like that.

To any others who don’t know I and Brett are referring to – 1998 was an unusually warm year, with an unusual El Nino. This spiked it above the trend, and the denialists immediately started measuring things from that single outlier. They’ve never heard of curve fitting or smoothing.

Brett claims to be an auto engineer, who apparently doesn’t know who to deal with noisy data.

Anarcissie @82 quoting Lee A Arnold: not realizing that “too big to fail” means they will bring down the rest of the economy too, and put all of us out on the street.

As A says, we all do our share of wishful thinking. One popular technique is to import pseudo-facts thru counterfactual assumption.

When oil execs get together to fund pr that undermines popular understanding of climate science, and pours the whine (sic) into the old reactionary and populist tea party bottles, I imagine their immediate concern is to preserve their place in the world. Their concrete, immediate concerns seem more real than the abstract and idealistic fears of climate science or aware activists.

The facts of climate science do not dictate how we respond, but the reality of climate change seems almost designed to prove a fatal challenge to normal political process. As ZM says, “‘Liberals’ in the US sense are just about as reluctant as ‘conservatives’ to talk about the appropriate changes to our societies and laws that would sufficiently and in a timely manner enable us together to alter how we undertake production and consumption and distribution and waste management and mobility to halt and remedy our contributions to climate change.”

The irony, unintended or not, of the example of the GFC, created by the abject failure of neoliberal policy, stands as a rebuke to the complacency that finds so much interest in the craziness of the 27% and places so little responsibility for the policy of the elites anywhere.

We are looking at our reflections in a fun house mirror, hoping that what we see is attributable to the mirror, but it is not.

No one wants to face the cost of collapsing a civilization we enjoy. We can calculate that we only need to collapse it a little, or very gradually, or that a bit of collapse would be good for us, reducing the cost of excess. But, we are reluctant to act to dismantle except in a panic, and reluctant to accept dismantling in a panic — we’re addicts seeking any excuse.

The normal emergence of a useful range of opinion on what to do is inhibited by this common reluctance to accept that none of the realistic options preserve enough to satisfy those invested in what exists. Conservatives are engaged in wishful thinking, and we are all conservatives.

Our leaders need to be able to manipulate us.

It is basic social organize.

Thornton Hall, I’m glad you liked my 2011 post. As is usual for CT, we’ve gone off in various directions without seemingly thinking about whether the repeal of Australia’s carbon price/tax/trading scheme is supposed to teach us anything, or whether it’s just an occasion for condemnation with no broader meaning and soon everything will be put back like it should be.

J Thomas, Lee Arnold is just repeating some scolding that people like to give environmentalists. “You’re doing it wrong, because science shows that we shouldn’t scare people, that just makes them more conservative.” Whatever the merits of that, the important failure is the failure of mainstream politics. We’re never going to get those 25% in the U.S. no matter what we say. Why can’t the majority push rational policies through despite those 25-30% and their industry funders? They are going to have to figure out a way to do it despite opposition, or it isn’t going to happen.

Rich Puchalsky 07.18.14 at 3:55 pm @ 91 —
In the US, in the present, in the short term, the majority doesn’t matter politically. You have to convince the ruling class. Who, as widely noted, are pretty impervious to the desires, interests, and ideas of those below them on the food chain.

Thornton Hall @ 91: what is unique about this moment in time?

As ZM @ 81 put it, it is the scale and scope of the thing — climate change is one sustainability issue among many, and together, they require a vast change, though not so fast a pace of change that it could not be accomplished if we could fashion the political will and imagination.

In the early decades of the 20th century, the world faltered, seemingly unable to keep up with the pace of change that it was imposing upon itself with the Second Industrial Revolution. Social and political institutional change did not keep pace, did not adapt fast enough to the power and potential created by rapidly advancing industrial and technological change. Politics and culture lagged behind the economic potential, struggling to catch up, frequently prodded forward by the crises, wars and depression that followed from the failure to make the appropriate political governance changes in a timely fashion.

Technological and industrial change has continued apace, but now we’re running into resource limits, and the declining productivity that approaching those limits will impose. If civilization was on the way up a mountain in the 19th and 20th centuries, then civilization has reached the resource peak, and is now facing the problems of descent, with the weight of vastly greater population and production infrastructure. (If you are looking for what is unique to our time, that’s it.)

As Rich says, the failure of mainstream politics to find and focus a political will is the main problem, not the inevitable intransigence of a nutty 27%. I would go further, and say that weakness of the various lefts — including that pusillanimous centrist portion who scorn any talk of political will as Green Lanternism as well as the considerable fraction who think we will be rescued from any hard choices by technological miracles (“electric power from solar will soon be so cheap that coal will uneconomic even without a carbon tax!”) — is way more important than tea party antics.

The weakness of the left means, as Anarcissie observes, that the ruling class is left alone, unresponsive to any below them in the food chain. A frightening image in the circumstances. Human societies have rarely been without ruling classes in historic time, so hardly unique to our moment in time. But, when the problem is a limited or shrinking resource base, a decline in the global carrying capacity as it were, a ruling class that doesn’t feel dependent on those below, or responsible for those below, suggests solution sets, that might emphasize eliminating “excess” population, or at least increasing poverty, as a way to reduce overall resource consumption, without interfering unduly with the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

A carbon tax or emission trading regime seeks to impose costs and the expense of change and adaptation on “Supply”, and particularly on the private, for-profit portions of the industrial structure. As Rich hinted, another approach is to change the public infrastructure. A third approach is to impose consumption repression. Sooner or later, all three things have to happen, under any rationally adaptive regime. But, a greedy, self-serving rentier elite would prefer to emphasize disinvestment over investment, and poverty for the masses. That appears to be what we are doing, anyway.

Mass media is tasked with disguising the policy, and with maintaining the insulation of elites from the complaints of the masses. I think the sensible interpretation of the tea party, as a creation of pr professionals, would emphasize that function. “Objective balance” in the ideology of “practical” journalism does seem to serve that function.

J Thomas @86 — You are one of the few I think who has arrived at the basic problem. Your question was explicitly anticipated by Murray Gell-Mann in the book, The Quark and the Jaguar (1995), when he asked, “Is there a moral equivalent to belief?”

I think you have written a good precis, except that I am not proposing a model, I just pulled together strands out of models that have been tested by others. Here is the bibliography:

Farrell, Henry, “Epistemic closure — climate change edition.” The Monkey Cage, March 9, 2011.

Feygina, Irina, et al. “System justification, the denial of global warming, and the possibility of ‘system-sanctioned change’.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 36:3 (2010) pp. 326-338.

Hennes, Eric P., et al., “Not all ideologies are created equal: Epistemic, existential, and relational needs predict system-justifying attitudes.” Social Cognition 30:6 (2012) pp. 669-688.

Hetherington, Marc J., “Resurgent mass partisanship: the role of elite polarization.” American Political Science Review 95:3 (2001) pp. 619-631.

Jost, John J., and Orsolya Hunyady, “The psychology of system justification and the palliative function of ideology.” European Review of Social Psychology 13 (2002) pp. 111-153.

Jost, John J., et al., “Ideology: its resurgence in social, personality, and political psychology.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 3:2 (2008) pp. 126-136.

Jost, John J., et al., “Political conservatism as motivated social cognition.” Psychological Bulletin 129:3 (2003) pp. 339-375.

Jost, John J., and David M. Amodio, “Political ideology as motivated social cognition: Behavioral and neuroscientific evidence.” Motivation and Emotion 36 (2012) pp. 55-64.

Kahan, Dan M., “Ideology, motivated reasoning, and cognitive reflection.” Judgment and Decision Making 8 (2013) p-p. 407-424.

Kahan, Dan H., et al., “Cultural cognition of scientific consensus.” Journal of Risk Research 14 (2011) pp. 147-174.

Knight, Kathleen, “Transformations in the concept of ideology in the twentieth century.” American Political Science Review 100:4 (2006) pp. 619-626.

Lahsen, Myanna, “Experiences of modernity in the greenhouse: A cultural analysis of a physicist “trio” supporting the backlash against global warming.” Global Environmental Change 18 (2008) pp. 204-219.

McCright, Aaron M., and Riley E. Dunlap, “The politicization of climate change and polarization in the American public’s views of global warming, 2001-2010.” The Sociological Quarterly 52 (2011) pp. 155-194.

Oreskes, Naomi, et al., “From Chicken Little to Dr. Pangloss: William Nierenberg, global warming, and the social deconstruction of scientific knowledge.” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 38:1 (2008) pp. 109-152.

Rich Puchalsky #91: “Why can’t the majority push rational policies through despite those 25-30% and their industry funders?”

I think this is a good question. The usual response is that the good guys are being outspent by the bad guys. But I have conversations with self-described “independents” (basically, middle-of-the road US Republicans who thought Romney was too creepy, and voted for Obama) and what emerges is a little different. There is lip service to the economic tenets of rightwing tribalism, and they tend to go with their own emotional feelings as primary indicators, and they go with the majority belief as being probably true (the “wisdom of the herd”). But also, they don’t like dissension; they prefer comity, and they take sustained dissension as an indicator of an underlying realworld problem. So as soon as a very vocal propaganda campaign starts up (such as policy to mitigate climate change), and if it appears to have an element of truth on the surface of it (as Climategate did, until you got down into the technicalities and the details where it was obviously a false accusation), then independents will start to withhold their support, to wait to see what develops next. And much of the US population follows this “can’t we all get along” pattern. In a way, propagandists get to rely upon the good natures of much of the weakly-ideological public.

Rich Puchalsky @ 96

Yes to all that.

The so-called “market economy” is a vast, decentralized system, enabling specialization in production and creating a network of exchange to support that specialization. It depends on a public goods architecture provided by government and various non-profit organizations. A key issue is minimizing the costs of transactions across the network of exchange, so that specialization can do its productive work.

The whole system is geared toward amplifying the productivity of specialization and minimizing the costs of transactions across the network of exchange, and energy plays a key role in solving both those problems.

It’s not crazy to think that the vast, de-centralized system would adapt to the increased cost of even a key input, by trying to better control consumption of the input. What is a little crazy is imagining that the whole system, including the political parts that deliver and manage the public infrastructure, won’t go right on pressing to reduce transactions costs, by any means necessary. It isn’t just a failure to have a theory of politics; it’s a failure to see politics as an essential part of the economic system.

It’s all too late anyway. The denialists won.

I recommend David Archer’s The Long Thaw as a geological-time overview of global warming. The IPCC reports for 2100 are really talking about the early consequences of climate change. There is no particular year where humans can’t make the next century’s climate problems even worse with bad choices, or avoid some future pain with better choices. Human effects on the atmosphere and climate are going to remain politically relevant for hundreds if not thousands of years, barring some extreme stabilizing factor like human extinction or the development of non-fossil energy cheaper than the dirtiest coal plant.

If denialists were currently losing we wouldn’t just assume that the issue was going to be permanently solved, because there’s always the chance that the next generation or the one after that would abandon GHG-stabilizing policies. Likewise, barring final ends like human extinction, just because the denialists are currently winning doesn’t mean you can assume that the politics are settled forever. Even after tipping points have tipped human action can still make the future relatively better or worse.

There are two big problems with any environmental issue. The first is that we have to admit that we’ve been doing something wrong, and people will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid acknowledging that.

The second is that it requires collective effort, and that goes against the individualism of conservative ideology, the preferred narratives of sin and virtue. The thinking goes that we ought to rely on private charity instead of public assistance, for example. Al Gore is derided for his lifestyle, although he’d also be mocked if he’d chosen asceticism instead.

Thanks to Lee Arnold for citing his sources. The name Naomi Oreskes caught my eye, and at Mother Jones there is a short review by Chris Mooney of a new book by her and Erik Conway, “The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future”.

Jimmy Carter made a speech in 1977 in which he called for energy conservation as the Moral Equivalent Of War, suggesting people turn down their thermostats and put on sweaters. Headlines abbreviated the phrase from William James to “MEOW” and his cardigan became a punchline.

“… standard left analysis …” ?

What does being “Left” even mean? I would define is as people with a commitment to common humanity, who are prepared to work collectively to advance its cause. But despite what the right-wing press would like to think, “the Left” is not a uniform body of people with a commonly agreed set of truths – and Amen to that! We are not sheep baa-ing uniformly “Four Legs good – two legs bad!” (Of course, entryists and “modernisers” like Tony Blair did try to get us to chant “Four Legs good – two legs better!” instead.) We need to be able to think for ourselves, recognise false friends as well as enemies, and advance common understanding by constructive debate.

Serendipitously, I came across a quote yesterday which describes what we are up against: “This is … not the age of reason, … it’s the era of flummery, and the day of the devious approach. Reason’s gone into the backrooms where it works to devise means by which people can be induced to emote in the desired direction.” (From John Wyndham’s 1960 novel Trouble With Lichen. )

As others here (I think) have implied, the big question is: how can we persuade people effectively, and be honest at the same time?

#103
It’s all too late anyway. The denialists won.

It depends. They don’t think they’ve won.

It isn’t at all certain that humanity will go extinct in the next few thousand years. Humans are surprisingly adaptible. They survived in small numbers from the hot arid lands of australia to practically the north pole, without metal.There will likely be pockets where humanity can survive a whole lot of climate change. We might go through another population bottleneck, where the world population goes to less than 100,000 or maybe 10,000, but we can bounce back from that given the chance.

There’s room for doubt how bad it will be. If we lose 99% of our population and we wind up with a feudal system where a few people get to be aristocrats who can still have a somewhat hi-tech lifestyle and most people are peasants, that might not be so bad for the aristocrats. Some wealthy conservatives are probably planning how to get that result. Climate change isn’t so bad if you’re on top and you stay on top — unless it *does* get really bad.

OK, we didn’t get enough agreement to do the decisive measures it would have taken to prevent a lot of climate change. But that doesn’t mean all hope is lost! We won’t know in our lifetime whether humanity will go extinct soon. We can’t know for sure because if there’s a great big die-off while you are still alive, the communication net will break down and if there are isolated communities that are hanging on, you won’t know about them.

So there is hope. And it isn’t too late to increase that hope.

Perhaps I should explain what I mean when I say “the denialists have won”. I mean they’ve succeeded in turning climate change into just one more partisan political issue, like gun control and health care and education. Political parties will have “policies” about it that they take to elections, and whatever one wants to do the other will oppose, and the bulk of the population will be totally uninterested because it’s “politics”. Yes one side or the other will achieve small victories from time to time but there is no longer any chance for the comprehensive, bipartisan program that would have had some chance of making a real difference.

Maybe I’m just an incorrigible optimist or terribly naive, but it seems fairly clear that the denialists have lost. The rate at which the price of solar has come down has surprised many folks. Additionally, it’s becoming clear that with smart grid technology the need for always on baseline power has dropped considerably. Various parts of the fossil fuel industry are hedging their bets with alternative energy. Certainly not enough to make a difference, but enough that the path forward is there if they get pushed hard enough.

China has basically done a back of the envelope calculation as to how much environmental damage they can afford before it stops being cost effective. They are playing a long game, but their investments in alternative energy are designed to overtake their investments in coal power in the long run. They are gonna do a whole lotta damage along the way, but they are probably calculating that the elderly will be most vulnerable and it might solve their demographic issues. It’s as cynical a strategy as possible, but the end game is a China that uses zero fossil fuel.

They are doing this because there is a limit to how much damage they can cause before it limits growth, but also because the interconnected global market place makes it very difficult to be a total outlier. Taking our internet technology or mobile phone technology didn’t commit them to using our internet protocol our building western style 3G networks. That’s an easy change. But choosing to do it would limit their ability to export.

We don’t actually have to get China and India to agree to anything. If the rest of the wold is demanding solar panels and wind turbines and has no use for coal or oil both countries would be dooming their economies if they chose not to follow along.

We know more or less the tech: solar, wind, smart grid, etc. The creative part is the storage. Probably won’t be batteries. It will involve nanotechnology and something random like compressed air or water/electrolosis or methane. It will be invented in the US, Germany or Japan and manufactured in China and India.

The only real question is how fast? And we know that the answer to that question determines how many poor people die thanks to an inability for food and water supplies to adapt to a rapidly changing climate. It’s a moral imperative to make it as fast as possible. Billions of lives are at stake. But the idea that somehow we won’t make it seems rather unlikely. And even if we don’t, it won’t be the first climate change induced mass extinction on Earth, and it won’t be the last, either.

To follow up on ZM, we have the divestment movement (divestiture of fossil fuel related investments). The world council of churches just voted to divest, and they are claimed to represent half a billion Christians. Obviously all those “followers” won’t go along, but we do have non-quite-political actions that people are doing. I suspect the carbon-equity bubble will burst soon, that is the stock prices of lots of companies that are based upon carbon in the ground -or selling equipment and services to those who extract or consume the stuff could collapse. These companies face challenges from the combination of climate change based restrictions, and competition from renewables. We’ve already seen how solar can ruin the financial outlook of fossil fuel electric generating plants, by picking off the highest priced peak-demand part of the curve. Some utilities are already computing that in some cases storage is a cheaper alternative to peaking needs than gas-turbines. System phase changes can happen faitly rapidly, and I think we are on the cusp of one. Our goal should be to push up the date of the phase change, as that will limit the eventual inventory of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere/oceans.

One thing of note, is that China announced a target of installing 100 GW of solar per year (I can’t remember the date). They probably won’t reach it that quickly anyway, but it is the sort of scale we need to be thinking/planning for.

What amazes me is how much money was spent on denialist propaganda, and it has only tilted the polls by 10% or so — an unstable 10% that swings.

But I tend to agree with the collapse thesis. The growing complexity of problems overwhelms individual intellectual capacity. That probably wouldn’t matter anyway, because the thing that has usually changes most people is not intellectual reasoning, it is moral or spiritual change.

But this has been diverted in an odd new way in the modern period. Science works against acceptance of spirituality because of the god hypothesis. Yet science itself is merely a technique; it doesn’t have a moral bias. So what remains, i.e. the material world’s remaining avenues for moral clarity — i.e. market economics, right-wing tribalism, fascism — range in effect from deceptive weak tea to deadly certitudes.

I agree that the denialists didn’t win. Everyone lost. That’s a characteristic of a political system that is no longer capable of doing anything about real problems, and it characterizes U.S. politics particularly well. (For instance, conservatives certainly didn’t win, and liberals didn’t win, and the “left” whatever there is of it didn’t win. The only politics of importance is demographic, as modified by the blind aggregate interest of the oligarchic class. But they aren’t smart enough to have a planned policy, so they can’t win either.)

This is kind of a tawdry business article, but I’d recommend that people like Bruce read things like this before being too skeptical about what China is doing. Authoritarian socialism did survive in one important place, and is still capable of pursuing large projects after our society lost the ability to.

I knew to expect long-term climate change when I was in high school and read Basic Ecology by Ralph and Mildred Buchsbaum. They laid out the phosphorus cycle, and the potassium cycle, and the carbon cycle. When you have 3 times the total carbon biomass of the earth sequestered, and then you expose it to life within a few centuries, that’s going to make big changes. People talk like it’s a little bit of CO2 in a big atmosphere, but the reason there’s so little CO2 in the atmosphere already is that plants have taken the rest out. They’ll take this out too and use it, and that’s going to make tremendous changes.

But you can’t make political arguments like that. It’s too tenuous and too long-term. It sounds like the claim that the US government can’t keep increasing its debt forever, some cataclysmic event will happen. How would people know whether that’s true or not? There are lots of Chicken-Little arguments people can make. Why should they believe this one, if they haven’t studied ecology?

The people who successfully publicized the problem, focused on global warming which is really just one small facet of the issue. But it was something that people could understand. The idea was to make drastic changes to prevent global warming, and a whole lot of people quite reasonably were not sure it was that big an issue. If it takes thousands of years for global warming to start, by that time we might have easy ways to stop it. Maybe we’ll find out that there’s an ice age coming and our global warming is doing just the right thing to delay it. Etc.

They weren’t ready to take drastic action based on the data that was available then. It was mostly theory used to stitch the data together, after all. They were wrong, but they weren’t particularly unreasonable.

But now there is enough data. Probably within 30 years we’ll have something close to a global consensus. What will happen then? I don’t know.

In 1960 the tobacco industry successfully convinced a lot of people that cigarettes weren’t proven to cause cancer. Now only 4% believe them. Great big things usually take time.

Sometimes people change around quick. Pearl Harbor got a big response. I think maybe the anti-pollution movement got a boost back when some river caught fire. We haven’t had anything like that yet for climate change. The Larsen A and B ice shelf collapses were not really big enough to attract a lot of attention, and they were far away. Opening the Northwest Passage isn’t that dramatic and isn’t catastrophic. But some sudden event might focus public opinion.

@BW: Further up-thread; the bit about the 25%.

Like I said, not a big deal. It just struck me as kind of interesting/ amusing , for no reason I could really explain.

My own attitude of guarded pessimism is probably closer to yours (BW). As an old union guy, I would analogize the political prospects for real action on CC to going into an arbitration with the deck stacked against you. It manages, somehow, to be a hopeful time; cases can break in entirely different directions with startling suddenness. Geo-climatics is a dynamic physical process. The catastrophe point bids to be a real catastrophe but, as someone noted up-thread, a less drastic preview (the Greenland ice-sheet finally sliding off into the ocean, say) might serve as a wake-up call.

J. Thomas: I haven’t read Basic Ecology; is there a more recent edition? My own introduction to the issue of atmospheric CO2 was a Scientific American article I read in the mid-70s called “The Carbon Dioxide Question”. As I recall, it was quite detailed, even going into the issue of ocean acidification (by way of speculation concerning the capacity of the oceans for excess CO2 solution. SA, pre-Shermer, was omce a real science mag).

Thnx

It’s hard for me to see cap-and-trade at $10/ton as a win for humanity.

Oh well. It’s possible that one or more alternative energy sources will get cheap faster than the fossil fuel guys can legislate extra expenses. Or maybe somr extreme event will get people moving, like Pearl Harbor or 9/11 did.

That reminds me of a joke. Three businessmen have befriended each other at a resort hotel. They’re sitting at a table on the beach, sipping at those drinks with the little umbrellas, and one of them says, “My business had a fire and the insurance paid ten million dollars. I’m here while they remodel.”

The second one says, “My business also had a fire and the insurance paid thirty million dollars, and I’m here while they rebuild.”

The third one says, “My business was hit by a tornado and I lost everything. The insurance paid a hundred fifty million dollars, and it will take awhile to start over from the ground up.”

There was a short silence. Then the first one whispered to him, “How do you start a hurricane?”

On the one hand, you can’t cause something like the ice sliding off Greenland the way Roosevelt could Pearl Harbor or Cheney could do 9/11. But on the other hand, if it happens we won’t have conspiracy theories saying the environmentalists made it happen on purpose.

Right? They couldn’t possibly make conspiracy theories like that. It would be just too stupid. They just couldn’t do it. Right?

…

Right?

J Thomas,
There has been some resistance to stating or accepting recent disasters such droughts, bush fires, hurricanes, typhoons, crop failures etc relate to or have been made worse by the now changed climate.

One problem with looking towards a possible even greater disaster in the future as being more likely than talking with other people now to change minds on the need for an urgent response to climate change is : there are conceivably responses to climate change that could move towards social justice and peace, but there are also conceivably responses to climate change that could exacerbate existing social injustice and geo-political tension and conflict.

If urgent responses to climate change are only to be publicly discussed at some time in the future when people are coping with a an even greater disaster, the discussion is likely not to be as considered as it could be if undertaken now.

Lee A Arnold,
“This has been diverted in an odd way in the modern period”
You might be interested in this project started I think to look at the modern project in the context of climate change and other sustainability problems. It is very interesting but a little difficult for me, so slow going…
http://www.modesofexistence.org

ZM #132 — Are you able to find where the 15 modes of existence are listed?

I have borrowed a library copy of the hardcover edition that I am reading – I find the website a little confusing to use because it is interactive and there are all sorts of ways through it so I am reading the book mostly first.

I think these are the modes in the book (but the work in the book is now going to be revised in accordance with the contributions from website participants in the project)

[REP] PRODUCTION

[MET] AMORPHOSIS

[HAB] IT

[TEC] HNOLOGY

[FIC] TION

[REF] ERENCE

[POL] ITICS

[LAW]

[REL] IGION

[ATT] ACHMENT

[ORG] ANIZATION

[MOR] ALITY

[NET] WORK

[PRE] POSITION

[DC] DOUBLE CLICK

If you sign up to the site you can access the book there and interactive material and participant contributions.

ZM #136 — It won’t let me sign up, maybe because I am not using Chrome.

ZM, I agree, sitting around and waiting for a disaster to persuade people is a depressing approach.

But then, going onto CT and trying to persuade Brett Bellmore is even more depressing.

We used to handle this sort of thing by being very conservative. Don’t try out very many new ideas, and go cautiously with the ones we do try. It used to be people would go tens of thousands of years before they’d try a new version of the fist axe.

I read that the first bronze was a copper-arsenic bronze that tended to kill bronze smiths and was some ways inferior to copper-tin bronze. But over a long time as bronze-smithing spread, in each place copper-arsenic smiths came first and were replaced by copper-tin smiths later, so the two technologies co-existed for hundreds of years.

People used to be very slow to try new agricultural methods. They’d do it the same way for generations, because the methods that had worked in one location for generations were likely to keep on working. Try out something that looks like a good idea and an event that happens once in a lifetime can come along and give you a lot of grief.

But all that broke down. We decided that we could throw away the superstition and think it all out for ourselves. And now we’re obligated to think it all out. The old ways had their problems, but they mostly worked without needing people to understand stuff. Society kept functioning and peasants kept being peasants.

Conservatism was dead long before I was born and some ways I kind of miss it.

#141
But really, I think waiting for a disaster is dangerous and imprudent and more likely to end up with really bad circumstances.

Yes, agreed. Particularly since it’s so very hard to arrange just the right disaster. I’m pretty sure whoever was responsible for 9/11, did not expect or intend for the towers to fall. They were supposed to be a long-time blight on the NY skyline, with long slow repairs. The engineering reports said they wouldn’t fall. And then they did, and caused many billions of dollars of damage. And that was a little thing, we have no idea how to create climate disasters.

But I don’t want to just wait. I want some hope. And there is hope. Even while it looks like there isn’t enough progress to matter, still it can change suddenly. One little disaster that gets publicity. Or public opinion can reach some sort of tipping point without that. Or the US economy could collapse, so we can’t afford to send out oil-burning Navy ships to protect the nuclear-power carriers, and suddenly the USA is not a world power and we’re the biggest roadblock.

None of the guys who’re arguing against climate change now are still arguing that there’s no issue with the ozone layer. They gave up on that. At some point they’ll give up on climate change and switch to arguing against evolution or something….

No matter how hopeless it looks, it still isn’t completely hopeless. We can get some changes in time to make a difference.

Are you related to this man Bruce? ;)

that’s only in the last 10,000 years or less.

In other words, for pretty much the whole of the Holocene, the current (or recently concluded?) geologic epoch.

Going extinct might not be the worse choice, based on experience to date.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Na9-jV_OJI?rel=0&w=420&h=315%5D

“When the fossil fuel armies get to be too uneconomic what will replace them? I don’t know. ”
The US military is a huge fan of portable renewables. Anything that can reduce the size of the at-risk supply chain. The navy touts the creation of jetfuel from seawater (H2O plus CO2 plus energy makes hydrocarbons). I don’t think the end of petroleum will necessarily mean the end of mechanized warfighting stuff.

In other cases (eg on some legal issues), I find him stronger…

You obviously have not been exposed to the full Brett spectrum.