…environmental groups have known since 2000 that efforts to link climate change to natural disasters could backfire, after researchers at the Frameworks Institute studied public attitudes for its report “How to Talk About Global Warming.” Messages focused on extreme weather events, they found, made many Americans more likely to view climate change as an act of God — something to be weathered, not prevented.
Some people, the report noted, “are likely to buy an SUV to help them through the erratic weather to come” for example, rather than support fuel-efficiency standards.
Since then, evidence that a fear-based approach backfires has grown stronger. A frequently cited 2009 study in the journal Science Communication summed up the scholarly consensus. “Although shocking, catastrophic, and large-scale representations of the impacts of climate change may well act as an initial hook for people’s attention and concern,” the researchers wrote, “they clearly do not motivate a sense of personal engagement with the issue and indeed may act to trigger barriers to engagement such as denial.” In a controlled laboratory experiment published in Psychological Science in 2010, researchers were able to use “dire messages” about global warming to increase skepticism about the problem.
Many climate advocates ignore these findings, arguing that they have an obligation to convey the alarming facts.
But claims linking the latest blizzard, drought or hurricane to global warming simply can’t be supported by the science. Our warming world is, according to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, increasing heat waves and intense precipitation in some places, and is likely to bring more extreme weather in the future. But the panel also said there is little evidence that this warming is increasing the loss of life or the economic costs of natural disasters. “Economic growth, including greater concentrations of people and wealth in periled areas and rising insurance penetration,” the climate panel noted, “is the most important driver of increasing losses.”
People like the Bills McKibben and Nye look like fools when they seize on every weather event to evangelize their religion.
It just isn’t a compelling issue without seizing on the evolutionary fear of an uncertain future and claiming an impending apocalypse that will destroy life on Earth.
You really do have to give them credit though. All the other end of days cults always picked a specific day the world was going to end. This time, the people who claim the end is neigh left the end date open.
Eric Berger is skeptical that there’s been a warming pause
Sure, blatant fudging of NH temperatures makes the surface data appear vaguely ambiguous. But, SH temps, despite moving in lock step for over 100 years, disagree. Moreover, even were one to gullibly accept the NH temps, one cannot then say the phenomenon is global.
The satellite temperatures show no warming for almost two decades, a time interval in which atmospheric CO2 levels have risen an additional 33% above purported pre-industrial levels. Moreover CO2 rate of change, as a proxy for global temperature, agrees with the satellite data. And, the satellite data agree with the less fudged SH data.
Anyone who actually believes in the AGW hypothesis at this stage is not scientifically qualified to hold an opinion. The rest of the advocates are simply dishonest.
Does Wood-for-Trees have a link to a glossary of what the different acronyms for the different temperature series stand for?
If you click the hyperlink for raw data, there is info in the header.
Personally, I’m all for the hyping. For example, I’m thrilled when I hear warmists bemoan the hurricane drought (The major decline in Atlantic hurricanes since 2006, sometimes blamed on AGW due to the increase in upper level winds). I hope they publicize the hurricane drought more often, and blame it more forcefully on AGW.
Yep, the dire threat of fewer hurricanes should do wonders to influence the opinions of coastal dwellers. 🙂
If anyone hasn’t yet seen the video of Ted Cruz disemboweling the head of the sierra club it is highly recommended. It clearly was triggering for Phil Plait; he embedded it in his cry-fest.
Sadly the stock picture of earth in flames has been removed. He probably cried over that too.
I stopped reading Plait years ago over global warming/climate change. His self-vaunted skepticism has utterly deserted him over the issue and he just can’t see it.
The Left *needs* catastrophic man-made climate change to be real. They need it to be real, it is the last gasp of socialism.They need it to be real to feel intellectually superior to anyone who doubts the conclusions or opposes the “remedies”. They need it to be real so badly that they’ve turned to Lysenkoism.
If you’ve gotta go back and alter historical raw data to make your graph work, if you’ve got to “adjust” older records down and current records up to make it work, if you have to completely shut opposing voices out of journals, if you engage in lawsuits rather than debate to silence those opposing voices rather than change their minds, if you falsely accuse your opponents of being dishonest shills for “big oil” while lining your own pockets and those of family members with millions of dollars of government grants…
If you’ve been doing ANY of these things, then what you are engaging in is not science. It is fraud. How could there not be, once governments figured out a way to tax the very air we breathe?
If the goal of Global Warming tactics is to improve fuel efficiency standards, then shouldn’t we applaud VW for working around the US EPA, which seems to be on a roll with finding ways to pollute the environment.