The Vile Nature of Climate Science, Part II

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One thing that has shocked me about climate scientists advocates is their lack of relief pertaining to the fact global temperatures have not risen for 17 years. Ocean heat content is rising at a fraction of the rate that was predicted. To just about anyone, absence of the forecast warming is good news. But, because so many climate people are now advocates rather than scientists, they are disappointed horrible things are not occurring.

So, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when (yet another) anonymous climate advocate wrote this on his/her website:

Part of being a science communicator is hoping a natural disaster kills as many members of the audience as possible, as soon as possible, with as much media exposure as possible. As a communicator myself, I’d like nothing better than for thousands of middle-class white people to die in an extreme weather event—preferably one with global warming’s fingerprints on it—live on cable news. Tomorrow.
The hardest thing about communicating the deadliness of the climate problem is that it isn’t killing anyone. And just between us, let’s be honest: the average member of the public is a bit (how can I put it politely?) of a moron. It’s all well and good for the science to tell us global warming is a bigger threat than Fascism was, but Joe Q. Flyover doesn’t understand science. He wants evidence.
So we’ve probably reached the limits of what science communication can achieve. At this point only nature herself can close the consensus gap—or the fear gap.
Cognitive scientist C. R. R. Kampen thinks the annihilation of a city of 150,000 peoplemight just provide the teaching moment we need:
You see, consensus is so often only reached after a painful confrontation with evidence.
Knowing this, I hope against knowledge of her expected track that Cyclone Ita will wipe Cairns off the map. Because the sooner the lesson is learnt by early confrontation, the better one more population will be suited to anticipate and mitigate the vast weather and climate (+ related) disasters that lie in the immediate future and to lose all distractions on the way.
While this is the first time I have written about it, this is not the first time I have heard these sentiments. There are a number of climate scientists advocates that express feelings like this. 

As far as I am concerned, there is a genuine sickness that has crept into climate science.

Comments

  1. CNY RogerApril 12, 2014 at 6:03 PM

    I think the web site is a parody

    In the about section:
    Do people take this site seriously?

    Yes, but not to the extent we’d hoped. We’ve analysed the comment threads by tone, and only about 80% of our visitors seem to think this is an honest-to-god, alarmist website.

    You’re kidding. How could anybody read this stuff with a straight face?

    Whoa—don’t get judgy! Several factors are at play.

    The simplest one is that on the Internet, readers don’t actually read anything writers write.

    They scan. And when a text strongly activates one of the 2 known climate-rhetoric schemata (Affirmative or Negative), it’s all too easy for the reader’s brain to miss or actively suppress those little deviations from the template that a satirist includes in order to make things… satirical. This isn’t necessarily a bug in our neural software (you could actually think of it as a tribute to our built-in powers of noise correction and tolerance), but it does make it less likely that subtleties will get across.

    Another thing nobody likes to talk about, because it isn’t funny, is that parody (and even satire) comes from a place of respect (and even affection). You can’t take the piss out of people whose mentality you can’t relate to, on some level.

    ReplyDelete
  2. CNY RogerApril 12, 2014 at 9:41 PM

    Refinement - Climate Nuremberg is a parody site. Not so sure about cognitive scientist C. R. R. Kampen's comment and that is scary.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Mike SmithApril 13, 2014 at 8:11 AM

    CNY Roger: The possibility of it being a parody occurred to me and I went back and read a half dozen articles. Some of them required genuine knowledge of climate science to write. Therefore, I judged that posting as meaning what it said, including the Kampen comment.

    Regardless, I stand by my characterization that what was written was "vile" regardless of whether it is a parody. The death of 100,000+ people is nothing to joke about.

    ReplyDelete
  4. JLAApril 13, 2014 at 3:59 PM

    Kampen is not a real name, just the handle of a troll who used to frequent Watts Up with That. The site is a self-confessed parody, written by a skeptic. Your are not making yourself look good here.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Mike SmithApril 14, 2014 at 5:11 PM

    JLA: Most people think I have a pretty good sense of humor but I supposed that is up for debate. Perhaps the deaths of hundreds of thousands is a humorous subject for some, it is not for me.

    ReplyDelete
  6. cRR KampenApril 15, 2014 at 7:31 AM

    The site is kinda parody. The theme it picked up from me, was not.

    /cRR

    ReplyDelete

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