Climate change reality: They aren't listening to us

[Louisiana1976]

snip

If you say it enough times it becomes the truth. Or does it? While we work to keep the climate data in the ideasphere, we must think about what becomes "truth." Perhaps it takes more than repeating the facts again and again. The goal is to get people to listen again and again. This is a propoganda war we cannot afford to lose.

There is big money behind climate change denial, and we should not be surprised that people respond to their narrative. It's easy to throw our hands in the air in frustration when we meet people who do not embrace the scientific consensus, but if we are going to overcome anti-science propoganda, we have to talk to people who disagree with us in a way that isn't reactive or cynical.

All politics is local. While it's true that Rupert Murdoch can decide what comes out of the televisions, he can't talk over fences or have a conversation over coffee with his audience. The people who direct the right wing noise machine depend on their audience to maintain the obedient reactivity the GOP cultivated so brilliantly. And it's reinforced through media outlets like Fox.

Without that control, the noise machine grinds to a screeching halt.

snip

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/12/12/811605/-Climate-Change-Reality:-They-arent-listening-to-us.

[GliderGuider]

1. Evoking near-term fear is a winning strategy for the obstructionists.

Consider two propositions: "The oceans will rise in 50 years if we don't do something," and "You might lose your job and not be able to feed your kids next year if we do what the greenies want us to."

Which one causes a greater emotional response in the average mom and dad? It's completely obvious why they aren't listening to us.

[wuvuj]

2. The avg American...

...responds to "simple stuff"....the kinds of things psychologists/advertisers have found that they value or react to most strongly.

Since it's "simple stuff"....it usually aligns well with various forms of previous "indoctrination" they have been exposed to and things like flags and patriotism...religion...kids...jobs...family?

"Simple stuff" doesn't include being able to understand cause and effect...or complex issues....or being able to project into the future...the real consequences of today's decisions.

So "they" find out which "simple stuff" buttons they can push to get the short term reaction they want...and just keep pushing them...over and over.

Result? ....wingnuts in action....and fools afraid of change....easily led....AND USED...

Possibly...over time...these "reactionaries" wear down and respond less and less when their buttons are pushed...or maybe their reactions become "fossilized"?? Then they will grow new reactionaries by raising their children as psyco-social clones of themselves. And so...they propagate.

[TxRider]

3. Simpler to me

We hear of doom and gloom predictions all the time.

Something is always likely to kill us off, none have yet.

Be it a drugs, super volcano, an asteroid, the latest flu pandemic, global warming, overpopulation, foreign terrorists etc. etc.

It either never happens, or isn't nearly as bad in the end as we were told. Just more sensationalism.. We tune out.

People are quite desensitized to predictions of peril from science and the media. We are as a society quiet cynical about it.

[GliderGuider]

4. Yeah, thank goodness that Katrina thing was a one-off, and wasn't followed by ...

Oh wait, nevermind.

Not saying Katrina and Rita were necessarily AGW events, just that doom and gloom predictions aren't "always" wrong.

One of the problems that we humans have is our very short psychological time horizon for comparisons. The Spanish Flu was definitely a doom and gloom event, but it happened almost a hundred years ago, so the emotional charge it carried has drained away.

I wonder if the reason some people get so worked up about the catastrophic potential in events is that the have a very strong sense that "something" is seriously wrong here, and they keep wondering if each event is The Big One. For what it's worth, I definitely belong to that cadre.

[TxRider]

6. Oh you must mean

Like the people that said for a decade saying N.O. hadn't been hit in 40 years, was overdue, and was not prepared? It was even in a documentary.

Katrina wasn't a one off, very far from it. N.O. has been inundated with flood many times over many years. What happened in N.O. was what you call "inevitable".

The old original part of town didn't even flood in Katrina. Only what has been expanded and made habitable by levees.

A little history from http://frenchquarter.com/history/KatrinaHistory.php which gives a brief history of N.O. disasters.

"Those who count the Katrina aftermath as our darkest hour might consider 1794, when a hurricane struck on August 10, another brought rain and flood on the 21st, and the city (then just the French Quarter) burned a second time on December 8, followed by looting. Governor Carondelet faced the desolation without FEMA to blame or complain about and without America coming to the rescue with troops and billions of dollars. But the city rose again."

Same for earlier hurricane related disasters, like the 47" of rain in 36 hours in Houston in 1979 the NA rainfall record, Alicia that caused billions in damage in Houston in the 80's, back to storms like Carla, a cat 5, all the way back to the 1928 Okeechobee hurricane killing 2500 and the 1900 storm in Galveston, the largest loss of life in any U.S. natural disaster with 6000 to 8000 dead.



The spanish flu was also pretty much buried in history. Simply not talked about, and not taught in history books until recent years. Pandemics such as typhoid, yellow fever, diphtheria, and cholera were common in the day, and WWI was killing scads of people at the time as well.


In warming if there is a "big one" it would be something that took years to happen, like ocean current changing followed by years of cooling or warming at a few tenths up to a degree a year for a wide 5+ degree change. Not a hurricane.

Overpopulation and viral pandemics have truly catastrophic potential for humanity. AGW not so much, and not so fast IMO.

[GliderGuider]

7. Why do you think overpopulation has a catastrophic potential?

I don't, at least not directly, and I say that as someone who was convinced that it was THE problem until quite recently.

Then I started doing some thinking and research. The conclusion I came to is that population has a direct, proportional impact only on the ecological damage attributable to food production. Don't get me wrong, that's a lot: it includes soil depletion, ground water depletion, the loss of ocean fish, habitat loss both on land and at sea, loss of biodiversity and pollution due to fertilizer runoff.

I wrote about this aspect of the problem in this article.

But when I looked at the Ecological Footprints of countries around the world (that take into account all our activities), I found that they correlated quite well with per capita GDP. Now GDP is a crude proxy for industrial activity, and the USA is still the the world's leader, even with less than 5% of the world's population.

I lay out the case against industrial activity in this article.

Overpopulation is important and we're certainly bursting at the seams, but we would reduce our aggregate impact on the planet a lot more by cutting our consumption than by simply cutting our birth rates. And the USA could take a leadership role in that exercise. They won't, of course, but they could...

In terms of the Big Picture risks, I don't know where the axe will finally fall but I have a strong feeling that we're piling up a lot of mutually amplifying crises and that sooner rather than later we're going to have a resiliency failure of some kind. We face problems in the global ecology (on many fronts, not just AGW), energy (especially with Peak Oil), economics, social fragility and complexity, technological and social over-optimization, a variety of risks to our food supply etc.

Faced with a tangle of risks like that, the failure could come at any place or time. One good black swan and our goose could be cooked...

[TxRider]

8. Many reasons

"I don't, at least not directly, and I say that as someone who was convinced that it was THE problem until quite recently.

Then I started doing some thinking and research. The conclusion I came to is that population has a direct, proportional impact only on the ecological damage attributable to food production. Don't get me wrong, that's a lot: it includes soil depletion, ground water depletion, the loss of ocean fish, habitat loss both on land and at sea, loss of biodiversity and pollution due to fertilizer runoff."

It's not just food production, but energy and resource demands in general.

I agree totally about technology and social overproduction, and the higher the population goes the more easily something like a single uber deadly and contagious flu pandemic could bring it crashing down around us. Look what this latest swine flu has done, and it's no more deadly than any normal every day flu.

There more of us there are, and the more mobile we are, the more likelihood a disease can spread more easily globally and have plenty of hosts to use to mutate into more deadly strains. I figure this type of scenario is also like N.O. pretty inevitable.

Not the end of our species, but a catastrophe nonetheless.

[GliderGuider]

9. Energy and resource demands are not proportional to population.

They are proportional to per capita consumption. If that were not the case, Bangladesh would be using over 50% of the energy the USA does, instead of less than 1%, since their population is over half that of the USA.

My point about food is that there is an irreducible minimum number of calories required by a human being, and Bangladeshis and Americans need the same minimum. 2800 kcal/person is a pretty fixed ratio, and the production of that 2800 kcal results in a fairly uniform overall amount of ecological damage per person.

There is no such fixed minimum for energy and other resources, so their use is dependent on standard of living rather than just the number of people.

Take energy as a proxy. We could run the world on 10% of the energy we use today if everyone miraculously adopted a Bangladeshi standard of living. That would cut the ecological damage related to energy use by 90%, and nobody would die. If we cut the amount of food being produced by 90%, people would die - something approaching 90% of us.

The problem is that we in the industrial west have come to believe that it's not possible to live in any other way than we live now, when it manifestly is. If the world had to adopt a Bangladeshi standard of living, ecological damage would cease.

[guardian]

11. Not saying Katrina and Rita were necessarily AGW events

Oh realllllllly. For the last 4 years I've heard nothing but from the Doomers. We were inundated with doomsday scenarios of how "hurricanes would increase in intensity and frequency" and how the USA was about to be leveled by the double whammy of 20ft sea level increases and hurricanes. A Google search on the keywords "katrina caused by global warming" turns up 1,410,000 hits.

You and your fellow doomers have cried wolf so often that I wouldn't believe you if you said the sun rises in the East.

[bhikkhu]

5. A long tradition of scientific illiteracy in the US

http://www.alternet.org/environment/141679/unscientific_america:_how_scientific_illiteracy_threatens_our_future/

It seems sometimes that a field needs to be basically bogus (crystal power, pyramid power, aliens, angels, bigfoot etc) before it can really capture anyone's interest here.

[tinrobot]

10. It's only become a tradition lately.

There were tons of scientists/engineers coming out of our schools in the middle part of the 20th century. When they shipped our industrial base overseas in the latter part of the century, the need for scientists went with it.

The crystal power/new age people I've run across may not be scientists, but when it comes to environmental issues, most have a deep connection to the planet and the environment. They often buy local, recycle, and live lower impact lifestyles than most engineers I know. Funny how that works.