Psychologists were sure “climate deniers” were selfish, but a study of 4,000 showed the experts were wrong

By Jo Nova

A team of psychologists were so sure “climate deniers” deceive themselves for selfish reasons that they ran three experiments with four thousand people, only to find they were completely wrong.

The researchers figured that those who do not accept that coal makes storms and floods must be motivated by their desire to keep on polluting, or flying, or feeling warm, and so they lie to themselves about the science in order to feel OK about it. (A bit like academics must do when it turns out they get paid well, but don’t know their research topic at all, maybe?)

It must have been quite the shock when Zimmermann and Stötzer were proved wrong on every single experiment. They even tried to bribe skeptics with $20 cash rewards and it still wasn’t enough.

Why are people climate change deniers? Study reveals unexpected results

Do climate change deniers bend the facts to avoid having to modify their environmentally harmful behavior? Researchers from the University of Bonn and the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) ran an online experiment involving 4,000 US adults, and found no evidence to support this idea. The authors of the study were themselves […]

Glorious Gods! Writers at The Guardian think they rule the world

The Guardian is a study in delusional arrogance. Consider this weeks headline pronouncement from the anonymous “Guardian Staff”:

“The climate emergency is here. The media needs to act like it”

..

Wrapped in so few words — ponder the vainglorious conceit embodied in such a headline. One, that Guardian “staff” are the judge and jury of a complex science, that they can prophesy the future climate, choose which experts are right, and feel that they know more than the Nobel Prize winning physicists, atmospheric chemists and professors of climate who disagree. Two, that “the media” are supposed to save the world from their own decreed emergency by making policy pronouncements, silencing opponents, and overriding elected officials. Three, that they unfailingly know what’s best for the stupid voting masses.

What the media needs is to eat humble pie and start doing their jobs.

If they were only smart enough to recognize their own failings they might start investigating the issues of the day with an open mind, serious questions, and report the smartest arguments made by the most informed commentators on all sides of the issues that matter.

These are our Upperclass wannabee rulers

How stupid […]

Climate Distress? ABC offers therapy and forgiveness to failed Ecowarriors who still use plastic nappies and styrofoam cups

It’s all a bit much for snowflakes

The ABC is just a Lifestyle Magazine for the Upperclass, paid for by everyone else.

For twenty years the media EcoRulers told people they will destroy the Earth if they use disposable coffee cups and nappies. Their whole identity as a Good Person depended on doing the right thing. And “every little bit matters” — etcetera, and ad nauseum.

Who would have guessed that asking people to save the Planet with every purchase would cause anxiety, a perpetual sense of failure, and long term stress?

And it never mattered anyway — the point was not the environment, but the political power. So now that hapless fans are being struck down with “Climate Distress” — it’s time to forgive them.

Here’s the ABC Agony Aunt column letting all of them off the hook:

Climate distress is real and it’s rational. Here’s how to manage it

Edwina Seselja

While researching how to reduce her carbon footprint a few years back, Brisbane woman Zara Monteith quickly fell down an anxiety-inducing rabbit hole, with each search opening her eyes to a different environmental problem to try to solve.

“It feels overwhelming — […]

Climate scare machine — happy to use people with a mental illness as a promotional tool:

So some people have a mental illness. Unbridled, baseless Climate-Panic makes that worse. Now those victims are advertising material:

Climate Despair is making people give up on life

Mike Pearl, Vice.

There’s nothing like a bit of unprecedented misery made possible by unprecedented history denial:

“This is painful,” [Renee] Lertzman said. “It’s super painful to be a human being right now at this point in history.”

We live longer than ever, are richer than ever, fly all over the world, and one of our biggest fears is losing our mobile phone. This article is wholly so far gone past the Rubicon that it makes Michael Mann look sensible. Seriously, by reviewing apocalyptic books and stories from mental health wards, the man who brought hockey-stick hype to the world appears to be the most normal person in the room.

This article is doing its best to normalize climate-depressive-obsession.

Step 1: pick one graphic tale

Suddenly, she was contemplating self-harm. “Though I don’t think I would have hurt myself, I didn’t know how to live with the fear of… the apocalypse, I guess? My son was home with me and I had to call my friend […]

End of Civilization coming: 31 years til lethal hothouse ” beyond the threshold of human survivability”

Biblical doom coming says prophesy

Limbourg Bros, Folio 108: Hell. circa 1416.

A new report by a “Breakthrough” think tank has arrived to leave no stone, or cliche, unturned in scaring the kiddies. Whole thesauruses have been ransacked: the threat is existential, lethal, and not survivable. The End Days include choas, collapsing ecosystems, with devastating wildfires. “Nuclear War is possible”. (Yes, just like it was in 1962 when CO2 was 317 perfect ppm.). Will zero emissions bring World Peace? Why not. It can solve everything else.

The Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration is run by two men from Melbourne who apparently long for the little ice age. To get back there they take the climate models that don’t work and amplify their worst guesses into an apocalypse. They pluck the most ominous quotes they can find to create a sense that the IPCC are just another bunch of bureaucrats hiding the awful truth. As if Big-government is on the side of skeptics.

It’s not about observational evidence so much as quote-mining. If a professor once said something ominous, suggestive of oppression or of censorship, that’s grist for the carbon-mill. Naturally, they focus on Arctic Sea Ice since it’s […]

Queensland govt pays $320k to Al Gore to train people in climate witchcraft and gets Snow too!

Al Gore is here in Australia to train 1,0o0 useful idiots on Unscience, neolithic reasoning and witchcraft. The man with no climate science expertise, and a huge vested interest is being paid by taxpayers to train people to chant “consensus” and pretend that wind and solar can stop storms and hold back the tide. These obedient fools help to destroy any conversation about science by reciting anti-science bumperstickers like “the science is settled”, “gravity is real” and “tobacco, tobacco, tobacco”. Because, hey, the tobacco industry funded merchants of doubt, and they were wrong, so therefore Ergo Prompter Upchuck, all government scientists are right on Everything, All Of The Time, and you are an idiot denier.

Repeat after me: There were no storms in 1703. Droughts didn’t exist. It wasnt hotter, colder, deadlier and more extreme for most of human history and 20 times as many people didn’t die of cold.

Global Bullies Unite and ask Anna Palaszczuk for money. Suffer the Queensland taxpayer. The Labor Party in Queensland should pay this money back, it’s an advertising expense.

Fittingly, The Gore effect strikes again. Snow fell in Queensland. (The last time it fell was 2015.)

Alan Jones asks why the Queensland […]

Evil whites caused the Little Ice Age by bringing small-pox to America

Is it April 1st in London?

The BBC is reporting that academics from University College London have discovered that the Little Ice Age was not caused by the record low solar activity of the Maunder Minima, instead it was due to the colonization of the Americas. Thanks mostly to measles and small pox the death toll was so enormous that about 9% of the global population died, supposedly leaving empty farmlands. These were swiftly covered in forests causing a deadly fall in CO2 which cooled the world.

This is an Apocryphal story that virtue signals in so many ways. A kind of triple-point scrabble maneuver combining climate, race, war, forests and imperial colonization in the one story.

The Great Dying of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas caused the Little Ice Age

Colonisation of the Americas at the end of the 15th Century killed so many people, it disturbed Earth’s climate.

That’s the conclusion of scientists from University College London, UK.

The team says the disruption that followed European settlement led to a huge swathe of abandoned agricultural land being reclaimed by fast-growing trees and other vegetation.

This pulled down enough carbon […]

Eco-psychology: NEW Free helpline, handbook, for climate change mental illness

After thirty years of Green-Blob disaster porn, there are casualties.

Climate change [propaganda] takes a toll on our minds

Psychologist Susie Burke tells the story of a woman who came to her for counselling after having her first child. Not because she was suffering from post-natal depression, but because she was “struggling with the enormity of what she had done.” She felt she had brought her child into a “world she knew was going to be a lot harsher and a lot less safe,” Burke told DW.

“She came to me when she was overwhelmed by this distress; questioning whether she had done the right thing. The fear she had for his future was really huge.”

Look out for the new hotline (Can someone find this number?)

Burke is an Australian psychologist and academic who specializes in eco-psychology. She treats people suffering mental illness as a result of climate change, and also recently set up a free hotline called the “Climate Change Psychological Support Network,” where Australians can call a qualified psychologist to talk through their feelings about environmental change.

Look out for the handbook:

‘The Climate Change Empowerment Handbook’ is a handy […]

It’s not cold, it’s a “warming hole”

Brought to you by the Theory That Can Never Be Wrong — what’s the opposite of hot? A hole!

Next time you are feeling cold you will know you are in a hole instead. Stop digging.

h/t Climate Depot

Snow-covered beaches? Chilly iguanas? They are part of a mysterious ‘hole’ in global warming

BY STUART LEAVENWORTH, February 15, 2018 05:00 AM

… “according to a scientific study published this month, the Southeast’s colder winter weather is part of an isolated trend, linked to a more wavy pattern in the jet stream that crosses North America. That dipping jet stream allows artic air to plunge into the Southeast. Scientists call this colder weather a “hole” in overall global warming, or a “warming hole.”

“What we are looking at is an anomaly,” said Jonathan M. Winter, an assistant professor of geography at Dartmouth College and the principle investigator in the study. “The Southeast is the exception to the rule.”

Coming soon, new discoveries will show that the Little Ice Age was not cold, just part of an isolated trend that happened all over the world.

This particular modern hole is happening over SE USA. Obviously […]

Al Gore 2017: Was that science or gratuitous random weather-porn to fuel superstitious belief

Gore’s a modern day soothsayer with powerpoint

Thanks to CFACT I was lucky enough to get to see Al Gore in Melbourne yesterday (and even luckier to see Climate Hustle the night before and meet some great people!). Gore wanted everyone to spread the word, but banned anyone recording him. (The staff actively patrolled for wayward cameras. We’d love to have helped share Gore’s message, but we would have been kicked out for doing so).

The intrepid Marc Morano even managed to meet Al in an inconvenient encounter:

Marc Morano kindly offered Al Gore a copy of Climate Hustle, (which might have helped him feel a lot better about the future). Gore refused to take it. Possibly, he’s not that interested in climate change.

What I saw was nearly a whole hour of primal weather-porn – gratuitous, non-stop, scenes from the apocalypse, glowing clouds boiled about incandescent forests, and giant drains in the sky emptied massive clouds in a flash. Glaciers crumbled before our eyes. Poor victims were stuck in boiling tar on hot roads, they crawled out of mud slides, and were dragged in spectacular rescues from cars being swallowed by turbulent floods. Biblical is the word.

Gullible, […]

Climate grief group has nine step program

I nearly headlined this: Climate grief group meets at someone’s house, Grist covers it. That’s pretty much all this program is. No one even counts to nine in this story.

Depressed about climate change? There’s a 9-step program for that.

Imagine Alcoholics Anonymous mixed with an environmental humanities course, and you’ll begin to get a sense of the “good grief” group started by Schmidt. Its goal is to help people cope with what’s been called “climate grief” — anxiety, sadness, depression, and other emotions provoked by awareness of the planet’s march toward a hotter,… future…

What she found was that feelings of sadness and anxiety, and even literal nightmares, were common. Last year, with the help of her partner, Aimee Reau, Schmidt developed a nine-step program for building resiliency loosely modeled on AA…

But this is big:

About a dozen people attend each session and 50 subscribe to its mailings.

If I get 12 people to my house, and have 12,000 subscribers, do you think Grist will write it up?

Perhaps they have some good results?

Perhaps not:

Schmidt, who now works as an outreach coordinator at the environmental group HEAL […]

NY Times makes out climate change believers are forced to speak in hidden codes

More Fake News from the NY Times

Here’s a creative effort to sell the story that the people with billion dollar industries, all the academic positions and a sympathetic media entourage are going underground, forced to disguise their belief about “climate change”.

This is a death-throes type article, clutching for ways to pretend Global Worriers are still relevant, and to feed a fantasy that they might be the underdog.

In America’s Heartland, Discussing Climate Change Without Saying ‘Climate Change’

So while climate change is part of daily conversation, it gets disguised as something else.

“People are all talking about it, without talking about it,” said Miriam Horn, the author of a recent book on conservative Americans and the environment, “Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman.” “It’s become such a charged topic that there’s a navigation people do.”

What really happened is that climate change is overused agitprop and people are tired of being beaten over the head with it. The first most compelling example the NY Times can find is a farmer called Doug Palen who talks about “carbon sequestration” in his soil (and what crop farmer wouldn’t?) Palen is painted as a “believer”:

Psychoanalysis shows Nuclear Power stops countries meeting climate targets

Only higher education could produce something this silly.

The University of Sussex gets the credit for a paper that argues that countries that are committed to nuclear energy are progressing slower towards the holy grail of meeting “climate targets”. This discovery coincidentally comes exactly as the UK Hinkley Point “hangs in the balance”. What were the odds?

The Newspeak starts in the headline — what’s a “climate target”. My personal climate target is to move into the tropics each winter, but the EU climate target is not about reducing temperatures over Spain, but about “more windmills”. The climate target of the EU has apparently got nothing much to do with the climate:

…the EU’s 2020 Strategy — to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 20%, increase the share of renewable energy to at least 20% of consumption, and achieve energy savings of 20% or more by 2020…

They cluster countries in to 3 groups and discover that the countries that plan to maintain or expand nuclear energy (eg Bulgaria, Hungary and the UK) are not cutting emissions as fast as countries that have no nukes (Denmark, Ireland, and Norway).

Could it be, I wonder, because […]

Climate Grief — Believers mourning — It’s denial and anger (but it sure isn’t science)

Those who believe the Glorious Climate Models (GCMs) are in trouble. Many of them have spent their entire careers soaking in dire predictions, but things are falling apart — (or rather, not falling apart) — the models don’t work, the public doesn’t care, the media are not that interested, and skeptics keep winning Bloggies awards. Spare a thought for them. It’s tough out there for unskeptical people. Children still know what snow is.

Things are unravelling in believer-land and there is pain. They are witnessing “the wholesale destruction of the planet”, or perhaps the death of a hypothesis, which is nearly as bad.

Truthout, where no conspiracy is too grand, and skeptical scientists are bastards

The headline reads:

“Mourning Our Planet: Climate Scientists Share Their Grieving Process”

The 3,000 word extravaganza of psychological pain is published by an NGO aptly called Truthout (think, “LightsOut”?)

“Climate science researchers, scientists, journalists and activists have all been struggling with grief around what we are witnessing.”

There’s an angry professor calling other scientists who disagree “greedy, lying bastards” and talking of backing “you plutocrats, denialists, fossil-fuel hacks “ against the wall. Another professor blames ACD for the driving cause of her […]

What’s an alarmist to do? Extreme weather images lead to denial (like everything else does)

I sense much gnashing of teeth. There seems to be nothing a reasonable social-science communicator can do. If they write like conservative scientists, the public don’t worry enough, if they load on the fear and guilt, people turn off. They can hammer the anti-science notion of consensus, which seems to work a treat in inept five minute surveys, but “the consensus” has been all over the press, in school, and in documentaries, yet (wail and weep) the polls of public alarm are still sliding! The media is even less interested. (See Figure 1 below).

There plots the rise and fall of climate in the media. (Figure 1 in this paper).

For the last few years the media have tried showing a lot more high-gloss posters of floods, cyclones and cracked earth, and that is not working either. It doesn’t seem to matter if we show disasters-away with stoic Sudanese or disasters-at-home with suffering suburban mortgagees, the public disengage.

Here Nerlich and Jaspal use “visual thematic analysis” (a technical word for looking at pictures and saying things about them) and publish a paper in a journal with the unlikely title “Science As Culture“.

It appears the social science communicators have […]