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« Drought links | Main | More climatologists for the Royal Society »
Friday
May062016

Byway robbery - Josh 374

There is a fairly persistent alarmist idea that if only 'Climate Change' was properly communicated then everyone would believe all the hype, spin and misinformation and ignore the politicking, the dodgy science, and the duff statistics.

The latest study from the University of California outlines how to talk about climate change to increase donations.

How to talk about climate change so people will act

What can you do about climate change? The better question might be: What can we? University of California San Diego researchers show in a new study that framing the issue collectively is significantly more effective than emphasis on personal responsibility.

Published in the journal Climatic Change, the study finds that people are willing to donate up to 50 percent more cash to the cause when thinking about the problem in collective terms.

Thinking about climate change from a personal perspective produced little to no change in behaviour.

Cartoons by Josh

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Reader Comments (93)

Spot on. Climate Change is a scam to relieve the gullible of money- by force if necessary.
The Democratic Attorneys, in the USA, have their RICO sights on the wrong target.

May 6, 2016 at 10:51 AM | Unregistered CommenterBitter&Twisted

it wasn't even their money? this study says little, very little

May 6, 2016 at 11:14 AM | Registered Commenteromnologos

The Climate Change scam looks more like a religion every day. Buy your indulgences carbon credits or you are going to burn.

May 6, 2016 at 11:15 AM | Unregistered Commenterivan

Is there any information on how much taxpayer funding it cost, to write this report about extracting more taxpayer funding?

I give, willingly, 0.00% of all my income to climate science. If I could reduce that by 50%, I would.

If I could reduce by 100% the amount of money I am forced to pay for climate science, I would.The Electorate in the USA may be offered that choice. Early indications are that they like the 0% option, to match their faith in all of climate science's claims.

May 6, 2016 at 11:21 AM | Unregistered Commentergolf charlie

Another gem Josh.

Warmists like to use 'we' all the time but by 'we' they mean 'you'. The only we involved is the urine they are extracting.

It still doesn't work when used as a goad to motivate the population to radically change their lives or vote for a government that will press those changes on them.

May 6, 2016 at 11:49 AM | Unregistered CommenterTinyCO2

I suppose it is polite to 'ask' for donations but since they are weeing our money away already, why bother, may just as well say 'thanks suckers' shoulda voted UKIP/Republican.

May 6, 2016 at 12:17 PM | Registered CommenterDung

"...people are willing to donate up to 50 percent more..."

Ah, the wonderful weasel phrase "up to".

As in "the world might warm by up to 2C over the next century", "you could save up to £500 by buying my climate-change green snake oil", and so on.

They prefer you not to realise that "up to" a number includes zero as a possibility.

May 6, 2016 at 12:27 PM | Unregistered CommenterAndrew Duffin

"Up To" The key to British broadband package sales!

May 6, 2016 at 12:35 PM | Unregistered CommenterIvor Ward

You can't just eat yourself fitter, but they apparently choose to believe that they can talk themselves greener.

But, as Tiny_CO2 points out, they really mean "you", not "we". They hail from the talking classes, not the doing classes.

May 6, 2016 at 12:49 PM | Unregistered Commentermichael hart

Is the decline behind the picture?

Can anybody tell the chuckle brothers apart?

May 6, 2016 at 1:07 PM | Unregistered CommenterAlan Kendall

Josh nails it - AGAIN.....!

May 6, 2016 at 1:20 PM | Unregistered Commentersherlock1

Who said it was all about the money? Oh, they did.

Brilliant one, Josh.

May 6, 2016 at 2:55 PM | Unregistered CommenterGraeme No.3

Do you ever get the feeling we're on the wrong side of the con?

The great global warming con.

Pointman

May 6, 2016 at 4:43 PM | Unregistered CommenterPointman

Speaking of stupid the Scottish pretend parliament has, of today 6 watermelon members.
As the saying goes "the age of stupid has not passed"
So more windmills on the way.

May 6, 2016 at 4:45 PM | Unregistered CommenterPatrick healy

"How to talk about climate change so people will act"

1) get out of your private jets and yachts (I'm looking at you, Leonardo di Caprio)
2) stop buying ocean-front property (I'm looking at you, Al Gore and David Suzuki)

As always, from Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds: "I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who keep telling me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis".

Seems reasonable, no?

May 6, 2016 at 5:05 PM | Unregistered CommenterCaligula Jones

Argument from authority - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

"In 1923, leading American zoologist Theophilus Painter declared, based on poor data and conflicting observations he had made, that humans had 24 pairs of chromosomes. From the 1920s to the 1950s, this continued to be held based on Painter's authority, despite subsequent counts totaling the correct number of 23.

Even textbooks with photos clearly showing 23 pairs incorrectly declared the number to be 24 based on the authority of the then-consensus of 24 pairs.

This seemingly established number created confirmation bias among researchers, and "most cytologists, expecting to detect Painter's number, virtually always did so".

Painter's "influence was so great that many scientists preferred to believe his count over the actual evidence", to the point that "textbooks from the time carried photographs showing twenty-three pairs of chromosomes, and yet the caption would say there were twenty-four".

Scientists who obtained the accurate number modified or discarded their data to agree with Painter's count.

Psychological basis - An integral part of the appeal to authority is the cognitive bias known as the Asch effect. In repeated and modified instances of the Asch conformity experiments, it was found that high-status individuals create a stronger likelihood of a subject agreeing with an obviously false conclusion, despite the subject normally being able to clearly see that the answer was incorrect.

Scholars have noted that the academic environment produces a nearly ideal situation for these processes to take hold, and they can affect entire academic disciplines, giving rise to groupthink. One paper about the philosophy of mathematics for example notes that, within mathematics,

"If...a person accepts our discipline, and goes through two or three years of graduate study in mathematics, he absorbs our way of thinking, and is no longer the critical outsider he once was...If the student is unable to absorb our way of thinking, we flunk him out, of course.

If he gets through our obstacle course and then decides that our arguments are unclear or incorrect, we dismiss him as a crank, crackpot, or misfit."

May 6, 2016 at 5:28 PM | Registered Commenterdennisa

I have also thought of a way to talk about climate change.

What can you do to find out if climate change really is a problem? The better question might be: What can we do to find out if climate change really is a problem?

May 6, 2016 at 5:42 PM | Unregistered CommenterRoy

In a similar manner, Goody and Yung claimed in 1989 that radiative heat transfer from our planet's surface to its atmosphere is at the 'black body' level, and is offset by what is termed 'Radiative Forcing', the radiant exitance at sea level of the atmosphere. They further claimed this was justified by a 'bidirectional photon diffusion' argument, proved because the Meteorological Pyrgeometer instrument measures these opposing fluxes. This has become the argument from authority.

However, it is really quite trivial to prove that because of the self-absorption phenomenon, the instrument measures a potential energy flux from a virtual composite emitter to a perfect radiation sink at Absolute Zero. In reality net mean energy emission from the surface is just one sixth of that claimed, and none of it heats the atmosphere. That means the radiant forcing argument is zilch, nada etc. Hence when you tell warmists this fact, they blow a fuse; fun to watch!

May 6, 2016 at 5:42 PM | Unregistered CommenterNCC 1701E

It's not _my_ responsibility it's _our_ responsibility. But I'll pay you to make the first move.

May 6, 2016 at 5:56 PM | Unregistered CommenterClovis Marcus

Vivienne Westwood is on the case:

"Dame Vivienne Westwood to talk climate control at Manchester Museum"

http://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/dame-vivienne-westwood-to-talk-climate-control-at-manchester-museum

"Early in 2016, the city committed to become zero carbon by 2050. Manchester Museum, part of The University of Manchester, is working with Manchester City Council, Manchester Climate Change Agency and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research (also part of The University of Manchester) to imagine how that target can become a reality through a series of exhibitions called Climate Control, which aim to enable civic action and participation.

Dame Vivienne Westwood, designer, activist and founder of Climate Revolution is set to open Climate Control on 10 May 2016 and speak to University of Manchester students in a talk titled Intellectuals Unite. The talk will be live streamed via Periscope to reach audiences across the world interested in climate related issues.

Climate Control is a major contribution to Manchester’s time as European City of Science. It isn’t an exhibition about depressing stories of climate change, but focuses on giving visitors opportunities to get really creative, to express what matters to them and what kind of world they would like to live in."

Loadsa money for all these extravagances.....

May 6, 2016 at 6:17 PM | Registered Commenterdennisa

What's the problem with Climate Change ?

Answer Its not called Global Warming anymore.

Another topic

Sadiq got in .Islamo Fascist beat the Eco Fascist

May 6, 2016 at 6:45 PM | Unregistered CommenterJamspid

dennisa. Just looked up the weather prediction for Manchester on the 10th. Why couldn't it have been a cloudy, windless day leading to red faces?

May 6, 2016 at 6:52 PM | Unregistered CommenterAlan Kendall

The framing is too often 'let's you and him share'. Leonardo please note.

JF

May 6, 2016 at 6:56 PM | Unregistered CommenterJulian Flood

Jamspid - Zac's dearly loved and revered Uncle Edward was more Nazi than fascist.


Black Shirts in Green Trousers

The far right is moving in, and greens and globalisation campaigners must do more to shut it out.

The BNP is not the only force on the far right which now describes itself as “the true green party”. Similar claims have been made by members of Le Pen’s Front National, by the Vlaams Blok in Belgium and, in Britain, by a tiny offshoot of the National Front which calls itself Third Way. This is the group which most clearly articulates the way in which the politics of the hard right are shifting.

The previous editorial team split with its founder Teddy Goldsmith after he addressed a meeting of the hard right Groupement de Recherche et d’Etudes pour la Civilisation Europeene. Goldsmith, whose politics are a curious mixture of radical and reactionary, has advocated the enforced separation of Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda and Protestants and Catholics in Ulster, on the grounds that they constitute “distinct ethnic groups” and are thus culturally incapable of co-habitation.


http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2002/04/30/black-shirts-in-green-trousers

May 6, 2016 at 7:05 PM | Unregistered CommenterMorrissey McSmiffFace

Headline ,Trump pulls plug on Electric Car Maker

http://www.breitbart.com/california/2016/05/06/tesla-plunges-2-5-billion-hedge-fund-shorts-stock/

After Indiana the smart money in Wallstreet knows where the U S election is headed.

May 6, 2016 at 8:05 PM | Unregistered CommenterBig Wall and no more Subsidies

It is notable that so far in Houston, Texas, where flooding is increasing and impacting my neighbors up twice yearly now, no one is pulling the "climate card".... yet.
Frankly the first government official who does so knows he or she will be booed off the stage.
The flooding in my fair city is strictly due to poor land use and engineering decisions.
The only "we" that is coming together is a big class action lawsuit against the government for not compensating home owners whose homes have been turned into flood water storage against their will.
The climate kooks as demonstrated in the laughable essay rightly made fun of by Josh are sorry parasites who keep mooching for more money from other people.

May 6, 2016 at 9:28 PM | Unregistered Commenterhunter

"Black Shirts in Green Trousers...The far right is moving in...
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2002/04/30/black-shirts-in-green-trousers"
--Morrissey McSmiffFace

Why didn't you warn me it was Moonbat right off, and save me the time to read it? :)

John Smith-Smith, Ministry of Silly Journalism

That's why I didn't tell you. It was entirely deliberate :-)

It would be great if it was known that the father of the British Green Movement / Ecology Party (became the Green Party) / The Ecologist was on the far right.


https://spinwatchwatch.wordpress.com/2010/06/05/the-ecologist-and-the-far-right/

May 6, 2016 at 11:23 PM | Unregistered Commenteresmiff

"That's why I didn't tell you. It was entirely deliberate :-)"
--esmiff

Heck, I shoulda known as soon as I saw "Black Shirts..." :)

"Speaking of stupid the Scottish pretend parliament has, of today 6 watermelon members.
As the saying goes "the age of stupid has not passed"
So more windmills on the way."

Fish heads No. one and No. two love windmills, because they're subsidized out of UK mainly English consumers but are built in Scotland as monumental follies and stiffing England in the same moment, how green is that?

SNP, are the Communist party of Scotland by another name.

Though, like most Scots do, I abhor the Westminster claque of jelly baby brains.

What I cannot get my head around is, the constant refrain and SNP ballad; dedicated themselves to the EU while wanting out of the Union, at the same time as spending £billions - mainly monies sourced from taxes levied in the south. Where categorically, it has been stated by the Brussels Mafia, Scotland will have to reapply for membership - if they sundered the Union. How does that pitch, a song of utter contradiction, with cacophonous tone.

I don't doubt for a moment that Scotland could not go it alone - of COURSE THEY CAN!!

But if, independence meant governance under the auspices of the........... SNP and cut off from, the safety net of Britain and also the EU, how long could they last, spreading the jam after: the factory is shut down?

May 7, 2016 at 12:39 AM | Unregistered CommenterAthelstan.

“Climate change is arguably the largest collective-action problem the world has ever faced …”.
======================
That’s a frame in itself.
The results of the study are hardly surprising asking a herd of lefty students whether they prefer an individual or collectivist “frame” as motivation to ‘do something’ about climate change™.
Whether it’s Marx’s “dictatorship of the proletariat” or “Volksgemeinschaft”, it’s Mill’s “tyranny of the majority” rearing it’s ugly head again, that’s why the alarmists are at heart dangerous enemies of individual freedom.

May 7, 2016 at 1:13 AM | Unregistered CommenterChris Hanley

"...the study finds that people are willing to donate up to 50 percent more cash to the cause..."

Don't you just love the sophistry!?

50% More!

Sounds marvelous. Just what does that mean.

That when the plate is passed, collective donors throw in one and a half pence instead of one pence?

Perhaps it does explain religious organizations. Though, I always thought that ministers/priests loved to watch people squirm while berated.

May 7, 2016 at 3:54 AM | Unregistered CommenterATheoK

"...[F]raming the issue collectively is significantly more effective than emphasis on personal responsibility."

The objective being to make people imagine they won't pay for it, but everybody else will.

Of course the word "frame" has many meanings. I like to think of climate scientists framing carbon dioxide for crimes it hasn't commited. Hiding evidence, distorting the facts, spreadng false rumours, a regular South Yorkshire of dubious behaviours.

May 7, 2016 at 6:24 AM | Unregistered CommenterAlan Kendall

The Bishop must be deeply disappointed in Josh for not putting the Episcopal Tip Jar in the frame.

May 7, 2016 at 6:27 AM | Unregistered CommenterRussell

Surely this needs to be flipped?

"How to talk about climate change so people will act"

to "How to talk about climate change so believers will understand it is mainly natural"

May 7, 2016 at 6:36 AM | Unregistered CommenterSteve Richards

Flipped

"How to talk about climate change so believers will understand it's mainly bollocks"

May 7, 2016 at 7:47 AM | Unregistered CommenterJamspid

Wait, what?

But all my money has already been sent to the awesome, planet-savior, consensus climate scientists. I mean, you know, and Obama's and DiCaprio's and... and... I mean, everyone's money has already been given to them.

How could it not?

I refuse to believe Obama and right-thinking people the world over have been lying all along. I just can't be.

May 7, 2016 at 11:48 AM | Unregistered CommenterAyla

Ayla, relax and sleep well, safe in the knowledge that your kind donations have helped pay for others to enjoy lifestyles beyond your dreams.

May 7, 2016 at 11:55 AM | Unregistered Commentergolf charlie

Sweet Ayla,

Don't lose your confidence now, and not over anything as grubby as money.

Your delphic cavern is fully paid up, and donations to your cause continue a pace.

Concentrate upon your destiny, your minions continue our mission without fear or favour.

There are, however, grumblings about not back pay.

I'm sure diCaprio and Obama will come to our rescue, but there are rumours that one has job-security and housing concerns. The other is just a concern.

May 7, 2016 at 12:49 PM | Unregistered CommenterAlan Kendall

Still on the topic of Climate Change, almost, I see another government "independent" enquiry is on the cards to discuss the "Swansea Barrage scheme". But guess what, the Chairman is one of the troughers one Hendry, ex MP, now working? for a large windfarm group hoping to put them on the Dogger Bank. What was that about vested interests????

May 7, 2016 at 1:29 PM | Unregistered CommenterDerek Buxton

Derek Buxton, Green Blob Barrages exist everywhere, and in all walks of life. They attack everything useful, and defend everything useless.

May 7, 2016 at 2:50 PM | Unregistered Commentergolf charlie

Why would 'belief' depend on the message being 'properly communicated'?

Do we have a properly communicated explanation for water being wet or the gestation period for a baby elephant? Erm, nope.

AGW is the world's greatest crock of fraudulent sh1t in scientific history, and if the self-appointed 'experts' think they need to communicate the message better in order to compel belief in the masses is just confirms what an evidence-free crock it really is.

May 7, 2016 at 3:01 PM | Unregistered CommenterCheshireRed

CheshireRed

You're not communicating your message to me. Are you a believer or a sceptic ? Get off the fence already.

May 7, 2016 at 3:08 PM | Unregistered Commenteresmiff

CheshireRed. Have you ever speculated why so many, including those who had a good scientific education, have accepted as gospel what you call the "greatest crock of sh1t"? If it has no merit, why are people attracted to it and why do they persist with what you would probably term their false beliefs.

I have become interested in the ideas of those who share similar views to my own, but are so much more certain than I am.

May 7, 2016 at 4:34 PM | Unregistered CommenterAlan Kendall

Alan Kendall

Why do all the kids in the school down the road from me wear the same uniform ? I can't fathom it. Maybe it's really cool.

May 7, 2016 at 4:38 PM | Unregistered Commenteresmiff

Alan Kendall

In my view, this is why every newspaper, business and government support AGW

http://www.scrapthetrade.com/intro


James Hansen in the Guardian.

Governments today, instead, talk of "cap-and-trade with offsets", a system rigged by big banks and fossil fuel interests. Cap-and-trade invites corruption. Worse, it is ineffectual, assuring continued fossil fuel addiction to the last drop and environmental catastrophe.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2010/aug/26/james-hansen-climate-change

Billions, possibly trillions of dollars of free carbon credits (license to produce CO2) were handed out to big business in often very corrupt ways. The idea is that they could sell them later for a massive profit.


Carbon credits bring Lakshmi Mittal £1bn bonanza


LAKSHMI MITTAL, Britain’s richest man, stands to benefit from a £1 billion windfall from a European scheme to curb global warming.

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/business/article192167.ece

May 7, 2016 at 4:44 PM | Unregistered Commenteresmiff

If you want to keep your job, you support Climate Change . In Victorian times, you supported Jesus. Or else.

May 7, 2016 at 4:46 PM | Unregistered Commenteresmiff

esmiff (4.46pm) sometimes. I kept my job in the midst of a university that hosted CRU and the Tyndall Centre, and was outspoken about my concerns over CAGW. But then my case may have been the exception.

May 7, 2016 at 5:02 PM | Unregistered CommenterAlan Kendall

Alan Kendall

Thanks. I overstated my case with the Jesus reference. I was really referring to anyone who come to the attention of the media Like Roger Pielke Jr., Jeffrey Marque, Willie Soon, Judith Curry, Richard Lindzen etc

I'm sure you also understand that vast sums of money have funded to convince us that every aspect of human life will be blighted IF global warming is real. That's incentive enough to fall in line.

May 7, 2016 at 5:42 PM | Unregistered Commenteresmiff

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