Rampant alarmism at WUWT (again) about UN climate talks in Geneva
Sou | 8:14 AM 8 Comments - leave a comment
WUWT is veering once again into rampant alarmism. Eric Worrall (he's just a run-of-the-mill denier from Australia, one of Anthony Watts' useful idiots) has written one of his very short "guest essays" (archived here), most of which is a copy and paste of a segment from the Sydney Morning Herald. It's a contrast to the tedious verbose "guest essays" by some other contributors I suppose.
The SMH article was about how, for the Geneva talks, the draft UN agreement to combat climate change has now swollen to 100 pages, from the 38 page document drafted at Lima.
Eric sets the ball rolling with alarmism, writing:
Given the fact that countries are free to write their own terms, including joke effort’s like China’s agreement to do nothing until the 2030s, in return for America agreeing to commit economic suicide, the greatest contribution to CO2 reduction Paris is likely to produce, will be the sequestration in some dusty filing cabinet, of all the carbon copies, of what promises to be the longest climate agreement ever written.
Eric just made up the part about China - out of thin air. China is reportedly bringing forward its plan for carbon trading. As for America agreeing to "commit economic suicide" - I don't see that happening any time soon.
(Is this really the best that people who want the globe to warm faster have to offer? Seems pathetically weak to me. Thankfully, many world leaders are taking the UN meetings very seriously.)
Framing climate policies for public support
Now all this rampant alarmism gives me a good reason for alerting readers to a new paper by Mark Hurlstone and his colleagues. Mark and one of his co-authors, Stephan Lewandowsky, have written about the paper at Shaping Tomorrow's World. The research was exploring how best to frame messages to build support for climate policies.
They found that when messages about the effect of climate policies on future national income are framed as "foregone gain" rather than "loss", people are more inclined to support them. The "foregone gain" is that incomes will rise, but not by as much as they would without emission cuts.
They also found that Australians weren't persuaded to change their thinking by the fact that Australia is one of the highest per capita emitters of CO2. However they were more likely to be persuaded if they thought that most other people were persuaded. People like to adhere to social norms.
Deniers look for other people who share their warped "norms"
That's why blogs like WUWT survive, in my view. Deniers are comforted by the fact that there are other deniers somewhere in the world. WUWT-ers don't come across many deniers in real life - so they herd together in the dimmest darkest corners of cyberspace, seeking solace.
Deniers run away from the hundreds, probably thousands of websites and blogs about climate science and climate policy, preferring to settle in on pseudo-science and conspiracy blogs. Deniers play make believe with each other. They pretend they are the sane, rational ones, despite all evidence to the contrary. Read on to see how utterly irrational deniers can be.
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HotWhopper: Rampant alarmism at WUWT (again) about UN climate talks in Geneva
