Temperatures are not rising, hence global warming is a hoax

Some years ago, Maria, the Moldovan woman who took care of my old aunt, told me the story of when she had rushed back home from Italy, to see her sick mother one last time.

Apparently, in Moldavia there is the use of lighting up a candle beside the bed of a dying person. Maybe it is to light the way for the departing soul, maybe to remark the solemnity of the occasion, or maybe something else; I can't say. But that was what was done with Maria's mother. The priest had come to administer the Extreme Unction to her and then a candle was lighted up and placed on her nightstand. Her sons and daughters, including Maria, sat in the room, waiting in silence.

Night came and, at some moment, Maria's mother woke up. She opened her eyes, she saw the lighted candle but she seemed not to care. She looked at her relatives, called them by their names, she smiled and she chatted with them of this and that. Maria told me that for a while it seemed that the sickness, the Extreme Unction, the candle, and everything else was forgotten. It was just as the old lady had totally recovered and she would live for many years more.

Then, the old lady said she was tired. She closed her eyes and she fell asleep. In the morning, the candle had burned to the end and the old lady was gone; peacefully in her sleep.

Climate change: why people choose ignorance

Image above from Benvitalis' blog

Excerpt from Yahoo news, highlights by "The Frog"

Why Happy People Hide From Climate Change

Takepart.com – Wed, May 22, 2013

Ignorance may be bliss, but bliss also leads to ignorance—at least when it comes to climate change.

...

The study, published recently in the journal Science Communication, surveyed 736 undergraduate students. After asking them how they felt about the topic, the study then looked to see how likely they were to seek and gather more knowledge about it, said study author Janet Yang, a researcher at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

...

Most people—51 percent—also say they don't think global warming is caused by people, or don't know, according to a Pew Research Center Survey. In other words, they do not know that manmade carbon dioxide is increasing worldwide temperatures, the conclusion reached by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The most surprising result to Yang was that she uncovered a social "norm" to engage in information avoidance—if a person thought their peers were more likely to avoid information on the topic, then they were more likely to avoid information on it as well. Typically, as is the case with other environmental issues, social norms—what you believe other people want you to do—lead people to seek more information, not less, Yang said.

"If you believe people think you should know more, you are more likely to seek out information," she said.

In this case, if a person spends time with others who avoid information about climate change, then they are more likely to do the same, she said.

The research suggests that when trying to inform people or get them to care about and do something regarding global warming, it may be useful to stir up some kind of emotional response.

"Stirring up emotion and using more visual story-telling—based on the study I think that'd be effective at getting people to seek more information," she said. "We need to deliver a sense of urgency that can effectively stimulate emotional responses to this issue among the audience," the authors continued in the paper.

It could also be useful to portray information-seeking as responsible and favorable. Furthermore, it's important that people understand that they can do something about it; those who thought their actions have no effect were more likely to avoid seeking information, Yang said.

"Risk communication about climate change might benefit from arousing a sense of curiosity or debunking false beliefs about current knowledge so that people are not complacent with what they already know," the authors wrote.

Yang said that she cares deeply about climate change, because it will have "a huge impact on our generation and future generations." When she confronts climate change deniers, she tries to convince them that it's a real problem, if she thinks it's appropriate. But if it's a casual or dinner conversation, "I don't always engage, because I don't want to make people feel uncomfortable," she said. "But perhaps I should."

Jay Forrester on the nature of the problems we face

In a few sentences, Jay Forrester, still perfectly lucid at 95, outlines the origins of the problems we face with climate change and everything else. In the 1960s, Forrester developed a method of study of complex system that he called "system dynamics" and that was at the origin of the 1972 study "The Limits to Growth." Nearly 50 years later, the understanding of the behavior of complex systems by leaders and policy makers remains primitive at best. And it shows.



"People do the things they think they should do, but do not realize that what they are doing is causing the problems"

"[our leaders] reach maturity and come to positions of influence with a completely incorrect understanding of the systems they are dealing with"

"... and yet we are asking leaders to run systems that are way beyond any possibility for them to really understand them"





(h/t Tom Fiddaman)

Risk management failure illustrated

"When somebody says something that people don’t want to hear – and certainly don’t want to have to think about or acknowledge – they sometimes self-mockingly stick their fingers in their ears and sing, “La-la-la-la-la.” This is a very literal representation of the essence of denial". 

by Peter Sandman, specialist in the field of risk management. See also "May the force be against you" on this blog
 

The moth effect: blinded by too much evidence

 

A moth flying into a flame probably doesn't see it any more in the last moments before being consumed. Too much brightness creates blindness. Too much evidence is blinding us from seeing the threats we are facing: catastrophic climate change and resource depletion. (image from goodgrieflinus) 

Many people have been asking me why my new book, "Plundering the Planet" was published in German and not in English (even though I wrote it in English). The reason is simple: it was relatively easy to find a German publisher, much more difficult to find one who would publish the English version (*). When contacted, American and British publishers simply shook their head. They felt that there was zero interest for a book about resource depletion and catastrophic climate change - which form the basic thread of the book. These are both unthinkable and unspeakable subjects in the present debate in the English speaking world except as a fringe opinion held by small groups of contrarians.

I can't fault these editors: they know their market. Right now, the general feeling seems to be that a few years of increasing oil production in the US (and in a specific region of the US) have been enough to completely destroy the very concept of "peak oil" and - additionally - to completely discredit any claim that we have a general depletion problem with all mineral resources. At the same time, catastrophic climate change remains a subject of interest only for polar bears.

The situation is better in Germany, where it is still possible to carry on a serious debate on these subjects and where the press has been highly responsive to the publication of the book. Even in Germany, though, there are signs that the debate may be evolving in the wrong direction; that is closing to all options except to the one involving drilling more and drilling deeper for oil and gas.


Think about this situation for a moment: what the hell is going on? The problems of climate change and oil depletion have never been so clear as they are now. Just look at the Arctic ice cap: would you deny that it is melting, and melting fast? And look at the market prices of all mineral resources: can you deny that everything costs now three times more than it used to cost just ten years ago. And you know that depletion is forcing us to use more coal, and that more coal is bringing more climate change. Come on, dammit: how can you ignore the evidence so blatantly? All this is happening for real!

And yet, the English speaking world seems to be nearly completely oblivious to evidence. I think there is no other explanation that to invoke the concept of the "moth blinded by light". I imagine that, in the last moments, a moth doesn't even see the flame it is flying into. It is totally blinded by it. We must be subjected to something similar. We are flying into total disaster willingly, perfectly aiming at maximizing damage to ourselves, and totally blind.

They say that moths fly into bright lights because their brains are geared for seeking faint lights; maybe for orienting their flying - they simply are not equipped for managing very bright lights. Our decisional system seems to suffer the same problem: it is geared to seek for short term economic profit and it was never conceived for anything else. The evidence of incoming disaster is incomprehensible to it, so it just shuts it off. The more the evidence grows, the more actively the system operates to shut it off. And it flies into the flame.





(*) Eventually, we were able to find a publisher who will take care of the English version of "Plundering the Planet". If everything goes well, it should appear this fall.

The coming ice age and the virtualization of reality

Maybe you have already seen this image (reproduced from Greg Laden's blog). It is part of a campaign aiming at discrediting science and scientists. It goes more or less like this: Those scientists in the 1970s were predicting a new ice age coming. So much that it even made it to the front cover of "Time". And then, later on, they started talking about global warming (which was then transmogrified into climate change to further confuse us). How can we trust these people?

Well, the image on the left is a hoax; such a Time magazine cover never existed. As explained in a recent post by David Kirtley on Greg Laden's blog, it is a Paintshop job. The real cover is this one, not from 1977, but from 2007

The hoax that had "scientists worried about the coming ice age" reminds very much to me the story invented by Ronald Bailey in 1989 to to attack "The Limits to Growth" study. In a paper that he published in 1989 on "Forbes" he stated that the study had predicted that we would run out of some major mineral resources (gold, zinc, oil, and so on) by some specific dates that were already past at that moment. That, of course, showed that the whole study was completely unreliable. Well, Bailey's story was totally invented. There were no such predictions in "The Limits to Growth" study!

Reviewing these stories, it is impressive to see how effective these dirty tricks can be. And they are so simple! Just invent something from scratch; show how those pompous scientists turned out to be making silly mistakes. Nobody will check whether it is true or not but, if it is a good story, it will spread wildly around. This one of "scientists worried about the coming ice age" has done quite some damage to science and to all of us. Others, such as the "climategate scandal", turn out to be even more stubborn and dangerous.

It is also impressive to note how easy it is to create a complete alternate reality which has never existed. Simply changing the title of the cover of a magazine generates a whole parallel universe in which scientists are busy at warning people and policy makers about the need of preparing for an incoming glaciation. It is called, sometimes, "virtualization". We are so much focused on what we see and we read on the internet and on the media that we easily lose track of the fact that there is a physical reality, out there. Then, the ghosts of our imagination take over and create their own reality, complete of heroes and villains, virtues and vices, crime and punishment, and happy endings. But it is a reality made of such stuff dreams are made of.

If we work in communication in climate science, we might be tempted to use these methods. We shouldn't. Virtualizing reality by creating legends is a form of dark magic; not a good thing to get involved with. But, at least, we should know what kind of tricks and ruses we are facing. And, also, we should remember that physical reality, in the end, always wins. 

Books on climate change communication

For a while I have been under the impression that printed books had become useless. Not really. When you need to learn something on a new subject, books are a good way to go into full-immersion, avoiding the infinite distractions you face when you are on line.

The picture shows just some of the books I have been reading (or re-reading) during the past few months about communication on climate change, about communication in general, and about the psychology of the human mind when facing bad news. If I were to pile up all the books I have collected on this subject, the stack would be about twice higher than this one.

So, what did I learn from these books? In short, I learned a lot. And I am still learning: it is a completely new world. I thought that as a scientists all what I had to learn about was science; well, it is not so. There is much more. It is not enough to be scientists; we must learn how to communicate science.

And so, back to the pile of books..........