The Sociological Origin of AGW

[KLATTU]

I guess you don't want your kids to ever get a PhD. (except maybe from Trump University), 'cause then they might become *gasp* liberals!!!!

'Cause education turns people into liberals, I guess....

LOL. Those that can,do. those that can't-teach.

Those that can't teach, do climate research.

 

[Mithrae]

If your assumptions are wrong then your conclusions will be wrong. The assumption that we will eventually run out of vital resources is most likely wrong. The reason for this is that population growth is declining and is the world population is trending to level off at 10 billion. Woe betides the doom and gloom crowd, this is a sustainable number. We will have enough food, shelter, energy, etc., practically speaking, forever.

If you reject this scenario, then I would ask why. Why do you need to believe in doom?

The planet's certainly big enough to fully satisfy 10 billion people's need; it's not big enough to satisfy 5 billion people's greed. There's people suffering from hunger and malnourishment even now.

That's not the point however: The point is that your would-be psychologicizing of climate scientists and those who trust them fails, because "apocalyptic ideologies" are held ball kinds of people, and if anything tend to be even more pervasive and irrational in groups more likely to reject climate science such as in the examples I listed.

 

[jmotivator]

I can see it now.

A pundits viewpoint of others, without even knowing why they believe what they do. Just your own arrogant beliefs.

I'm sure he still get it published in Nature.

 

[jmotivator]

The planet's certainly big enough to fully satisfy 10 billion people's need; it's not big enough to satisfy 5 billion people's greed. There's people suffering from hunger and malnourishment even now.

That's not the point however: The point is that your would-be psychologicizing of climate scientists and those who trust them fails, because "apocalyptic ideologies" are held ball kinds of people, and if anything tend to be even more pervasive and irrational in groups more likely to reject climate science such as in the examples I listed.

You are begging the question. IF AGW is good science then your statement is true. IF AGW is bad science then AGW is by far the largest rejection of good science in modern times.

 

[Mithrae]

You are begging the question. IF AGW is good science then your statement is true. IF AGW is bad science then AGW is by far the largest rejection of good science in modern times.

I'm not sure you understand the argument here. LowDown suggests that mainstream climate science is an "apocalyptic ideology," which a large number of people (A) accept only or primarily because of their tendency to believe apocalyptic ideologies generally (eg. peak oil, food crises etc.). I'm pointing out that since other people (B) - and in fact all groups of people - also exhibit tendencies to believe apocalyptic ideology (eg. Jesus is coming back, 'leftists' want to destroy America etc.), such a vague tendency has no value in differentiating between groups' beliefs.

Especially given that the most obvious 'apocalyptic' beliefs associated with group A, even if incorrect, are merely errors of quantification (population growth didn't dramatically outstrip food production, oil supply hasn't yet peaked or if it has hasn't had dramatic results etc.) whereas the most obvious apocalyptic beliefs associated with group B have considerably less rational basis.

 

[LowDown]

The planet's certainly big enough to fully satisfy 10 billion people's need; it's not big enough to satisfy 5 billion people's greed. There's people suffering from hunger and malnourishment even now.

They suffer because of mal-governance, not a lack of resources.

That's not the point however: The point is that your would-be psychologicizing of climate scientists and those who trust them fails, because "apocalyptic ideologies" are held ball kinds of people, and if anything tend to be even more pervasive and irrational in groups more likely to reject climate science such as in the examples I listed.

No, people like Malthus and Ehrlich always based their arguments in science. The errors they made are the same ones made by climate scientists, i.e., assuming a straight line trend will continue forever, attempting to extend forecasts well beyond the known limits of forecasting, ignoring natural variation, ignoring the possibility of technical change, using unproven, unverified models, etc.

I don't know who you're talking about when you mention groups that adhere to apocalyptic ideologies and reject climate science. There apocalyptic ideologies are not generally religious. Those who embrace one tend to be favorable to them all. For example, Ehrlich is a big catastrophic global warming advocate, and the ideas tend to overlap.

I don't know of any political support for basing public policy on the Book of Revelation, but there is support for basing it on climate science, which would be mal-governance in my opinion. We've already wasted hundreds of $billions on this stuff, and we have nothing at all to show for it.

 

[jmotivator]

I'm not sure you understand the argument here. LowDown suggests that mainstream climate science is an "apocalyptic ideology," which a large number of people (A) accept only or primarily because of their tendency to believe apocalyptic ideologies generally (eg. peak oil, food crises etc.). I'm pointing out that since other people (B) - and in fact all groups of people - also exhibit tendencies to believe apocalyptic ideology (eg. Jesus is coming back, 'leftists' want to destroy America etc.), such a vague tendency has no value in differentiating between groups' beliefs.

You are actually arguing against the point you are trying to make here. If it is fact that all people tend to gravitate towards apocalyptic ideologies then only helps LowDown's argument. IF people gravitate towards apocalyptic ideologies then it could be argued that AGW is simply the apocalyptic choice of people who are not adherents to religious apocalyptic ideologies. AGW could simply be filling the void for the non-religious.

Especially given that the most obvious 'apocalyptic' beliefs associated with group A, even if incorrect, are merely errors of quantification (population growth didn't dramatically outstrip food production, oil supply hasn't yet peaked etc.) whereas the most obvious apocalyptic beliefs associated with group B have considerably less rational basis.

Again, the assertion is that adoption of apocalyptic ideologies is a sociological phenomenon rather than a rational one. If all people are equally susceptible to this bias towards belief in apocalyptic ideologies then your assumption of immunity to this phenomenon for your selected group is itself irrational.

 

[Mithrae]

You are actually arguing against the point you are trying to make here. If it is fact that all people tend to gravitate towards apocalyptic ideologies then only helps LowDown's argument. IF people gravitate towards apocalyptic ideologies then it could be argued that AGW is simply the apocalyptic choice of people who are not adherents to religious apocalyptic ideologies. AGW could simply be filling the void for the non-religious.



Again, the assertion is that adoption of apocalyptic ideologies is a sociological phenomenon rather than a rational one. If all people are equally susceptible to this bias towards belief in apocalyptic ideologies then your assumption of immunity to this phenomenon for your selected group is itself irrational.

I didn't say all people gravitate towards apocalyptic ideologies, I said it's a tendency seen in all groups of people. Of course the vagueness and imprecision of LowDown's argument hardly helps here; but for example there certainly are some folk whose rhetoric or fears about climate change far exceed the scientific mainstream, even though the science itself is sound. Obviously it would be utterly absurd to claim "all groups of people exhibit some apocalyptic tendencies, therefore all concerns for the future are invalid expressions of apocalypticism": And just as obviously absurd to claim "[all groups of people including] those who accept mainstream climate science exhibit some apocalyptic tendencies, therefore it's an invalid expression of apocalypticism."

Credit where credit's due, the guy started out by saying that psychologicizing one's political opponents is a sign that one is running out of arguments, and by golly he has proven himself right on that point at least!

 

[Tim the plumber]

The planet's certainly big enough to fully satisfy 10 billion people's need; it's not big enough to satisfy 5 billion people's greed. There's people suffering from hunger and malnourishment even now.

That's not the point however: The point is that your would-be psychologicizing of climate scientists and those who trust them fails, because "apocalyptic ideologies" are held ball kinds of people, and if anything tend to be even more pervasive and irrational in groups more likely to reject climate science such as in the examples I listed.

The at least 10 million people per year dying due to the bad science of globul warming hype needlessly are certainly evidence of some sort of greed.

We must end the use of food as fuel.

 

[jmotivator]

I didn't say all people gravitate towards apocalyptic ideologies, I said it's a tendency seen in all groups of people.

Hahah! So can I assume that you think this is a meaningful distinction?

Of course the vagueness and imprecision of LowDown's argument hardly helps here; but for example there certainly are some folk whose rhetoric or fears about climate change far exceed the scientific mainstream, even though the science itself is sound. Obviously it would be utterly absurd to claim "all groups of people exhibit some apocalyptic tendencies, therefore all concerns for the future are invalid expressions of apocalypticism": And just as obviously absurd to claim "[all groups of people including] those who accept mainstream climate science exhibit some apocalyptic tendencies, therefore it's an invalid expression of apocalypticism."

Nobody is making that argument. Whether or not people are drawn to apocalyptic ideologies has nothing to do with the validity of the given foreseen apocalypse. It doesn't change the argument that AGW draws people with what amounts to apocalyptic prophecy.

Credit where credit's due, the guy started out by saying that psychologicizing one's political opponents is a sign that one is running out of arguments, and by golly he has proven himself right on that point at least!

OUt of curiosity, is "psychologicizing" not flagged by your spell check?

 

[joG]

The Green Blob is a natural event.

I thought The Green Blob was an underwater light.

 

[Jack Hays]

I thought The Green Blob was an underwater light.

My mistake. I confused it with a water-temperature phenomenon.

 

[Jack Hays]

[h=1]More on weak minds and the rise of environmentalism[/h]Posted on 29 Jul 16 by SCEPTICUS • 16 Comments
By Ben Pile This is an edited version of the comment Ben left on Geoff’s Weak Minds Think Alike post. The rise of tertiary education Geoff raises as a possible factor in the rise of environmentalism is an interesting phenomenon. As one who did a degree relatively recently as a mature student, I was able … Continue reading →

 

[Mithrae]

The at least 10 million people per year dying due to the bad science of globul warming hype needlessly are certainly evidence of some sort of greed.

We must end the use of food as fuel.

As tiring as becomes to repeatedly point out the blatant falsehoods which you feel compelled to constantly post, it does help to highlight some kind of weird phenomenon that must be going on inside your mind

There aren't even 10 million deaths per year from all hunger and malnourishment; and since feeding cows and other meat animals wastes far more agricultural land than biofuel crops, yet even that isn't the biggest cause of hunger, your claim is both even more obviously bull**** and your selective outrage nothing more than a manifestation of your rabid anti-scientific ideology.

If Scientific American can publish gibberish then the whole society of science needs a kick up the arse.

No, because a website of a popular science magazine has a poll on a politically sensitive topic which is targeted by a biased internet mob and they don't stop the poll because any result from it would be misleading and thus scientifically wrong my impression of the tolerance of crap by the general society of science is very negatively influenced.

If there is an atmosphere of strong rigor pervasive in science in general, as there damn well should be, then this poll would have been pulled before it was finished because there was a biased internet mob swinging it off course. That it was not and that there was not general fuss over that says that the scientific world needs a kick up it's arse!

I thus conclude that there is an obvious bias about the way the IPCC and the science community and wider science reporting media works. I know of popular TV personalities who have lost their careers due to saying the wrong thing about it. I have seen professors at CERN saying that any scientist who works on their cloud experiments has to be tenured or they will not have a career. I thus conclude there is a Macarthyist style conspiracy at work.

 

[Mithrae]

Hahah! So can I assume that you think this is a meaningful distinction?

Yes. Alcoholism is a tendency seen in all groups of people too - rich or poor, black or white, male or female, left or right - but it's obviously not a tendency of all people.

Nobody is making that argument. Whether or not people are drawn to apocalyptic ideologies has nothing to do with the validity of the given foreseen apocalypse. It doesn't change the argument that AGW draws people with what amounts to apocalyptic prophecy.

I'm pretty sure there's nothing which could be fairly described as either apocalyptic or prophetic in mainstream climate science as embodied in the IPCC reports, so either you don't know what you're talking about or you're trying to create some kind of caricature. If the question is "Why do most people accept the conclusions of climate science?" the obvious and indisputable answer is because it's science. I thought LowDown was trying to make a more nuanced argument than just denying the obvious or stating the irrelevant, but perhaps I was wrong.

OUt of curiosity, is "psychologicizing" not flagged by your spell check?

Yes, but so is IPCC, apocalypticism and OUt. Psychologicizing was LowDown's term - maybe it's not a real word, but it damn well should be

 

[The Vincer]

[h=1]More on weak minds and the rise of environmentalism[/h]Posted on 29 Jul 16 by SCEPTICUS• 16 Comments
By Ben Pile This is an edited version of the comment Ben left on Geoff’s Weak Minds Think Alike post. The rise of tertiary education Geoff raises as a possible factor in the rise of environmentalism is an interesting phenomenon. As one who did a degree relatively recently as a mature student, I was able … Continue reading →

Good thing I read the article before responding, I was tempted to bring up the issue of making it easier for more people to get secondary education. So, when a school that was intended to cater to the top 5% of intelligence suddenly has to cater to 45-50%, then either you are going to have more people failing out (which hurts tuition coming into the school) or standards need to be lowered.

So, we have an increasing number of grads who are less and less skilled, only making it through because the bar was lowered sufficiently.

Even in engineering school, conversation with numerous profs had the consensus among them that there was a trend of students being less able to complete tests on time, where years before students would complete the same tests faster or with a higher average... And a good number of students were just barely scraping by to graduate.

 

[Tim the plumber]

Can anybody remember the paper which showed how many deaths there are per year from increased food prices due to the use of biofuels?

 

[Mithrae]

Can anybody remember the paper which showed how many deaths there are per year from increased food prices due to the use of biofuels?

So this is how you debate? Really? You make a claim constantly over the years - including personally slandering me over it on at least two occasions - and no matter how many times various other posters point out how utterly and pathetically wrong it is, you just keep on making it... and beg other posters to try to prove you right?

How about you try Googling 'hunger deaths per year' to start with? It's a very big ask, I know.

"Around 9 million people die of hunger and hunger-related diseases every year, more than double the lives taken by AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis in 2012."
https://www.mercycorps.org/articles/quick-facts-what-you-need-know-about-global-hunger

Does that sound like "at least 10 million people per year dying" just because of the production of biofuels? No, it doesn't look like it to me either. And the impact on food prices caused by inefficiently using agricultural land to feed cows and cars is arguably not even the biggest contributor to world hunger:

Why are they hungry?

Many hungry people live in countries with food surpluses, not food shortages.

The issue, largely, is that the people who need food the most simply don’t have steady access to it.

In the hungriest countries, families struggle to get the food they need because of several endemic issues: lack of infrastructure like roads and storage facilities; frequent war and displacement; overwhelming dependence on livelihoods, like farming, that are disrupted by natural disaster or climate change; and chronic poverty.

75 percent of the world’s poorest families don’t buy their food — they grow it.

Many poverty-stricken families depend on their land and livestock for both food and income, leaving them vulnerable to natural disasters that can quickly strip them of their livelihoods.

Drought — the result of climate change and increasingly unpredictable rainfall — has become one of the most common causes of food shortages in the world. It consistently causes crop failures, kills entire herds of livestock and dries up farmland in poor communities that have no other means to survive.

One-third of the food produced around the world is never consumed.

In developing countries, so much food is wasted due to inadequate food production systems. Inefficient farming techniques, lack of post-harvest storage and management resources, and weak market connections are some of the factors responsible for significant food losses in these countries each year.​

 

[Quaestio]

Can anybody remember the paper which showed how many deaths there are per year from increased food prices due to the use of biofuels?

So this is how you debate? Really? You make a claim constantly over the years - including personally slandering me over it on at least two occasions - and no matter how many times various other posters point out how utterly and pathetically wrong it is, you just keep on making it... and beg other posters to try to prove you right?

Bwahahah! Talk about shooting oneself in the foot. He probably read it on a Climate Truther blog like WUWT and gullibly believed it was a 'paper'.

 

[Threegoofs]

So this is how you debate? Really? You make a claim constantly over the years - including personally slandering me over it on at least two occasions - and no matter how many times various other posters point out how utterly and pathetically wrong it is, you just keep on making it... and beg other posters to try to prove you right?

How about you try Googling 'hunger deaths per year' to start with? It's a very big ask, I know.

"Around 9 million people die of hunger and hunger-related diseases every year, more than double the lives taken by AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis in 2012."
https://www.mercycorps.org/articles/quick-facts-what-you-need-know-about-global-hunger

Does that sound like "at least 10 million people per year dying" just because of the production of biofuels? No, it doesn't look like it to me either. And the impact on food prices caused by inefficiently using agricultural land to feed cows and cars is arguably not even the biggest contributor to world hunger:

Why are they hungry?

Many hungry people live in countries with food surpluses, not food shortages.

The issue, largely, is that the people who need food the most simply don’t have steady access to it.

In the hungriest countries, families struggle to get the food they need because of several endemic issues: lack of infrastructure like roads and storage facilities; frequent war and displacement; overwhelming dependence on livelihoods, like farming, that are disrupted by natural disaster or climate change; and chronic poverty.

75 percent of the world’s poorest families don’t buy their food — they grow it.

Many poverty-stricken families depend on their land and livestock for both food and income, leaving them vulnerable to natural disasters that can quickly strip them of their livelihoods.

Drought — the result of climate change and increasingly unpredictable rainfall — has become one of the most common causes of food shortages in the world. It consistently causes crop failures, kills entire herds of livestock and dries up farmland in poor communities that have no other means to survive.

One-third of the food produced around the world is never consumed.

In developing countries, so much food is wasted due to inadequate food production systems. Inefficient farming techniques, lack of post-harvest storage and management resources, and weak market connections are some of the factors responsible for significant food losses in these countries each year.​

Ouch.

That's gotta hurt.

Assuming he can comprehend it.

 

[Jack Hays]

Bwahahah! Talk about shooting oneself in the foot. He probably read it on a Climate Truther blog like WUWT and gullibly believed it was a 'paper'.

Ouch.

That's gotta hurt.

Assuming he can comprehend it.

Are biofuel policies to help Mother Earth killing her most vulnerable children instead?

Guest post by Indur M. Goklany I have a new paper — Could Biofuel Policies Increase Death and Disease in Developing Countries? — which suggests that global warming policies may be helping kill more people than it saves. It was published last month in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. Access to the paper…

April 19, 2011 in Economy-health.

 

[Threegoofs]

Are biofuel policies to help Mother Earth killing her most vulnerable children instead?

Guest post by Indur M. Goklany I have a new paper — Could Biofuel Policies Increase Death and Disease in Developing Countries? — which suggests that global warming policies may be helping kill more people than it saves. It was published last month in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. Access to the paper…

April 19, 2011 in Economy-health.

Apparently, this is an example of:

 

[Jack Hays]

Apparently, this is an example of:

Incapable of substantive discussion?

 

[Threegoofs]

Can anybody remember the paper which showed how many deaths there are per year from increased food prices due to the use of biofuels?

I think you found it here:

https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/

 

[Jack Hays]

I think you found it here:

https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/

[h=3]Biofuels and World Hunger - The Institute of Science In Society[/h]www.i-sis.org.uk/biofuelsAndWorldHunger.php

Nov 3, 2010 - If all global biofuels targets are to be met, food prices could rise by up to .... causingwidespread hunger, and depriving millions of the poorest of ...


[h=3]Biofuels policy causes hunger | The National[/h]www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/biofuels-policy-causes-hunger

The National


Sep 19, 2013 - Pumping crop-based biofuel into petrol tanks is diverting more and more food from the stomachs of hungry people around the world, say ...


[h=3][PDF]Biofuels: Fueling Hunger? - ActionAid USA[/h]www.actionaidusa.org/sites/files/actionaid/fueling_hunger.pdf

ActionAid


... mind, world leaders have not addressed the root causes of the crisis. ... global food crisis a “massive violation” of human rights and a “silent tsunami” that pushed 100 million ... To put faces to thebiofuels and hunger statistics, read Facing the ...