As a follow-up to yesterday’s sciency science groupthink piece, HotAir has this today:
Climate Change Skeptics Should Be “Treated” Says Enviro-sociologist
This just smacks of the same mentality that inspired climate change activists to say global warming deniers should be purged from meteorology. Kari Mari Norgaard, a professor of sociology and environmental studies at the University of Oregon, suggests that resistance to the threat of climate change at individual and societal levels must be “recognized and treated” before real action can be taken to effectively address the problem global warming poses.
“Climate change poses a massive threat to our present social, economic and political order. From a sociological perspective, resistance to change is to be expected,” she said. “People are individually and collectively habituated to the ways we act and think. This habituation must be recognized and simultaneously addressed at the individual, cultural and societal level — how we think the world works and how we think it should work.” …
At the personal level, climate-change information raises fear about the future, a sense of helplessness and guilt. These emotions clash with individual — and often national — identity, sense of self-efficacy and the need for basic security and survival. In small groups, interactions often subvert political conversations and/or submerge the visibility of climate-change issues. At the macro level, or society at large, the co-authors point to an absence of serious discussion of climate change within U.S. Congressional hearings and in media coverage.
In many discussions in the last 30 years, climate change has been seen as either a hoax or fixable with minimal political or economic intervention, said Norgaard, author of the book “Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions and Everyday Life” (2011, MIT Press). “This kind of cultural resistance to very significant social threat is something that we would expect in any society facing a massive threat,” she said. The discussion, she said, is comparable to what happened with challenges to racism or slavery in the U.S. South.
If you question the “researchers” who put ideology before data, you’re now a racist slaveowner, a mentally diseased, intellectually and emotionally deficient reactionary whose reasoning stops with the reptile brain. Oh, and don’t forget you’re a racist slaveowner, too.
Obviously our benevolent enviro-sociologist overlords should just destroy us Mathusian masses and replace us with better humans, right? Or overhaul us like a – oh, wait…
“Just as we cannot overhaul a car fleet overnight, we cannot change our ideological superstructure overnight,” Norgaard said. “We must first be aware that this resistance is happening at all levels of our society,” she said. “If you have to push a heavy weight, it doesn’t mean it can’t be moved, but in order to push it you had better know that you have something heavy and figure out how to move it — where to put the lever to shift the weight.”
Most discussion on climate change has focused on natural science. It is time, she said, to broaden that approach. “Social scientific responses have been limited in their primary focus on individuals. These explanations are important but partial and thus inadequate as explanations or guides for future action. Our cross-dimensional model links individuals, culture and society. We have to take all dimensions into account simultaneously.”
“Confronting climate change is daunting but it is not an insurmountable obstacle if we collectively put our minds together,” said Kimberly Andrews Espy, vice president for research and innovation at the University of Oregon. “Interdisciplinary collaboration among social scientists and those involved in technological advances can help to move us forward.”
I am reminded of this scene from Airplane!:
Oh Professor, I speak academic!
“Just like we can’t make people all drive electric cars, we can’t reprogram their little racist brains overnight. They’re all stupid. They’re so stupid you might not think we can program them, but we just have to figure out how to program them and put the lever to ‘nudge’ them into what we want. … We keep trying ot figure out why they’re stupid alone, but we haven’t figured out how they’re stupid altogether, too. We have to figure out how to make all of them do what we want, both the one and the masses. … Pushing Manbearpig is tough because they’re so stupid, but if we all get in line and repeat the same thing over and over and over and run out any nonbelievers, we will soon have complete Manbearpig orthodoxy as the lie becomes truth and we will be able to control the masses into our perfect fantasy worldview.”
Looking up Norgaard’s background, this is a professional leftist academic we’re looking at:
Yes, she spelled it “climate chage” on her bio page.
She’s been referenced by the New York Times in an entire article of pots calling kettles black.
A new book by Kari Norgaard has done the best job yet of cutting to the core on our seeming inability to grasp and meaningfully respond to human-driven climate change. As the science of climate change has become stronger and more dire, media coverage, public opinion, and government actions regarding this issue has declined. At the same time, climate denial positions have become increasingly accepted, despite a lack of scientific evidence.
Except people who actually do science disagree with the Manbearpig disciples. The gender and environmental sociology-justice people would-be-masters have one idea, folks who do science have another.
Update: Tina Korbe over at HotAir just posted another piece wherein there’s yet another call for purges of anti-Manbearpig heretics. Well, quit Stalin’ and start purgin’!
As an aside, I subscribed to Science News for about a decade – I found it fascinating as a weekly newsmagazine of hard science. For years and years, I found articles in various disciplines to be fun and informative, keeping me abreast of changes in different disciplines (even if some fields were either boring or required more subject matter familiarization to follow completely). Then a few years back, Science News went from a weekly newsmagazine to a monthly, complete with a new layout. And an editorial page.
The editorial page in one of the very first issues stated the need to push for global warming (this was a bit before the new name climate change had taken hold) data to be forced out there because of the “global threat”. No longer was hard science a concern, but advocacy science that followed an agenda that was already set. I called them up and cancelled my subscription and informed them that I would not subscribe to a magazine that was supposed to be about the scientific method – about data and observation – and that had become one of government policy advocacy and spreading only the data they already agreed with.
That’s not science.
No matter what the protestations the global warmers/global coolers/climate changers give, they can’t trump data and observation. Every time they “hide the decline” and get caught in a lie, every time they make a bogus hockey stick that’s debunked, they grow stronger in their resolve to impose dictates on the people who do not subscribe to their orthodoxy. If you disagree with them based on their flawed data and outright lies, their inconclusive arguments, their dogmatic adherence to something that isn’t proven, they expose their vehement hatred of people who question them to the point of likening skeptics to neo-Nazi holocaust deniers. They use inflammatory rhetoric to make their points, and now they skulk in the halls of academia trying to figure out ways to brainwash those who demand actual science – data, observation, hypotheses and testing – into subjugation.
That’s not science.
Filed under: Eco-Daleks, Environmentalism, Eugenicists, Humor, Manbearpig, Science, Social Justice
