2036 and Climate Change

After 16 minutes, Michael Mann on climate change, climate sensitivity, etc.

Why does Joan of Arc look so worried? The fire hasn't even touched her! Why does Joan of Arc Being look so worried? The fire hasn't even touched her!

Mann uses the analogy of a person jumping (or being thrown?) off a tall building, and as he passes the third floor notes that everything is fine. Another analogy that might be helpful is being burned at the stake. After they tie you to the stake and pile up the wood, you're fine. Then they light the wood on fire and you're still fine. For a while.

The climate sensitivity graph above is from here.

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"Clive Hamilton, the Australian author of Requiem for a Species, made the essential point a few years ago that climate change denial was no longer just a corporate lobbying campaign. The opponents of science would say what they said unbribed. The movement was in the grip of "cognitive dissonance", a condition first defined by Leon Festinger and his colleagues in the 1950s . They examined a cult that had attached itself to a Chicago housewife called Dorothy Martin. She convinced her followers to resign from their jobs and sell their possessions because a great flood was to engulf the earth on 21 December 1954. They would be the only survivors. Aliens in a flying saucer would swoop down and save the chosen few.

When 21 December came and went, and the Earth carried on as before, the group did not despair. Martin announced that the aliens had sent her a message saying that they had decided at the last minute not to flood the planet after all. Her followers believed her. They had given up so much for their faith that they would believe anything rather than admit their sacrifices had been pointless.

Climate change deniers are as committed. Their denial fits perfectly with their support for free market economics, opposition to state intervention and hatred of all those latte-slurping, quinoa-munching liberals, with their arrogant manners and dainty hybrid cars, who presume to tell honest men and women how to live. If they admitted they were wrong on climate change, they might have to admit that they were wrong on everything else and their whole political identity would unravel."
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/22/climate-change-den…

By cosmicomics (not verified) on 26 Mar 2014 #permalink