Money guru has some ecologically sound reasons for penny pinching his way to freedom.
Month: November 2018
Talking Across Tribal Terror
We’re all getting an education in communication across boundaries, see yesterday’s post.
Journalists are now starting to learn, as a matter of survival, those things that climate scientists and communicators have been figuring out for the last decade.
It’s no secret that Donald Trump’s political tactic of choice is fear mongering. Muslims are terrorists, and those who aren’t hate America. Hispanic immigrants are murderers and rapists. The migrant caravan headed toward the southern border is full of criminals.
There is no doubt this strategy is effective, especially among his supporters, but as we have seen over the last few weeks, it can also be deadly. Why? Because Trump frames these minority groups as being an existential threat to Americans. And when unstable people feel that their life is being threatened, or that the existence of their “ingroup” — those who share their cultural worldview and national or ethnic identity — is at risk, they will resort to the most extreme measures to “protect” themselves and their loved ones. The psychology underlying this phenomenon can be understood by considering a well-established psychology theory, known as Terror Management Theory (TMT).
In the animal kingdom, humans have a unique awareness of their own mortality. Our intelligence and self-awareness allow us recognize that death is not only inevitable, but can occur at any time for reasons that cannot be controlled or predicted in advance. To manage this profound terror, TMT says humans create cultural worldviews — like religions, political ideologies, and national identities — that instill life with meaning and value, which distracts from and eases the fear of death. Cultural worldviews also diminish death anxiety by offering paths to immortality. While religions offer a road to literal immortality through the concept of an afterlife, political ideologies and national identities offer paths to symbolic immortality. Symbolic immortality refers to being part of something larger that will outlive the physical self, and people strive to achieve this through leaving a legacy, or doing something that will get one remembered by society long after death.
TMT predicts that when thoughts about death are triggered, people will do all they can to preserve and strengthen their cultural worldviews, since it is those worldviews that act as a death anxiety-buffer. This means clinging to those worldviews more strongly, as well as defending those who share those worldviews and aggressively opposing those who do not. They may also seek paths to symbolic immortality, committing acts that they will be remembered for.
Red State Texas Going Green
Nothing New: Climate Scientists Live with Threats and Harassment from Climate Deniers
Under a racist, climate denying President, Haters are empowered.
Rebecca Leber in Mother Jones:
Before Tom Steyer was a high-profile figure calling for the president’s impeachment, before the attacks directed at him escalated from name-calling to threats and violence, and before the president demeaned him as a “crazed & stumbling lunatic,” the Democratic donor was familiar with being a target for the extreme right because of his prominent work in climate change advocacy.
Last week, Steyer learned he was the intended recipient of one of the 13 bombs mailed to prominent critics of President Donald Trump. It was a violent escalation of attacks on the billionaire hedge fund manager and philanthropist from those that I had observed early in 2015. At that time, he surpassed Al Gore as the most hated environmentalist in conservative America after spending millions advancing pro-climate candidates in the midterms.
Before Tom Steyer was a high-profile figure calling for the president’s impeachment, before the attacks directed at him escalated from name-calling to threats and violence, and before the president demeaned him as a “crazed & stumbling lunatic,” the Democratic donor was familiar with being a target for the extreme right because of his prominent work in climate change advocacy.
Last week, Steyer learned he was the intended recipient of one of the 13 bombs mailed to prominent critics of President Donald Trump. It was a violent escalation of attacks on the billionaire hedge fund manager and philanthropist from those that I had observed early in 2015. At that time, he surpassed Al Gore as the most hated environmentalist in conservative America after spending millions advancing pro-climate candidates in the midterms.
“Climate change was really one of the seminal points for the Republicans because they decided they could straight-up lie,” he said in a phone interview. “When you look at the kind of violent and dehumanizing rhetoric that the president has indulged in, it’s entirely consistent with the idea that there is no cost to lying, there is no cost to really attacking the basic interest of the American people. So I think climate was the template.”
These questions about tensions concerning the climate change debate are not as well understood or explicitly drawn as the immigration debate, where George Soros is charged in coded language with pulling all the strings in a vast global conspiracy, as the New York Times reported, to “undermine the established order and a proponent of diluting the white, Christian nature of their societies through immigration.”
But the right’s denial of climate change science nonetheless repeats many of the same patterns that have appeared in other extremist targets, from guns to immigration to abortion. These patterns include the appropriation of Nazi or anti-Semitic imagery, the demonization of funders and prominent advocates, and the distortion of the terms of the debate. Climate change has become another flashpoint for irrational, hateful, sometimes violent rhetoric, and even personal attacks on people who have risen to some prominence as scientists, funders, and advocates.
Truth Sandwich: How to Handle the Blitzkrieg of Lies
For some time, communication researchers like John Cook, as well as front line communicators like Mike Mann and Katharine Hayhoe, have struggled with best practices for dealing with deliberate, well crafted misinformation and motivated reasoning in the sphere of climate denial.
Turns out climate scientists have not only been doing climate research, but also cutting edge cognitive science – as they have been confronting the global attack on truth and fact mounted by fossil fuel oligarchs over the last 3 decades.That assault is now an existential crisis for democracy, as well as the living world.
Importantly, they have come up with some answers and best practices.
Above, the first glimmer of self awareness that I’ve heard from the larger journalistic community, as to how best to deal with a political figure, indeed, now, a whole party, for whom lies are not just an occasional tactic, but a global strategy.
Here’s a clear example of the degree to which many reporters — even great ones — fail to understand how Trump manipulates the media.
Carl Bernstein, one of the legendary Watergate reporters who took down the corrupt Nixon presidency, was interviewed by CNN’s Brian Stelter about Trump’s constant lies. Bernstein correctly observed that Trump and his ilk are engaged in a “war on truth.” But then he suggested that reporters counter Trump’s lies by dedicating more time and energy to examining whether they are true.
Said Bernstein: “When Trump talks, for instance, about voter fraud. . .we need to be doing stories about the reality of whether or not there is widespread voter fraud.”
This couldn’t be more wrong. If reporters dedicate time and energy to investigating whether known lies might be true, they will continue to cede control of the news cycle to Trump.
Trump’s “big lie” strategy is designed to exploit journalistic convention by providing rapid-fire “news” events for reporters to chase. Trump spews falsehoods in a blitzkrieg fashion, but the lies are only part of the game. What reporters continue to miss is the strategy behind the big lies: to divert attention from big truths. The technique is simple: create controversy and confusion around politically-charged topics to stoke his conservative base and distract from stories that harm Trump.
It’s a numbers game. The more he can get his key terms and images repeated in the media — even as “fact checks” — the more he wins. That’s just how our brains work. The more we hear about something, the more it sticks. Even if it’s not true. When I say “don’t think of an elephant,” it forces you to think of an elephant. Repeating lies, even to debunk them, helps spread and strengthen them. The scientific evidence is clear.
Continue reading “Truth Sandwich: How to Handle the Blitzkrieg of Lies”
Ocean Heat may be Underestimated
New research amplifies what Lijing Cheng told me last year.
The world’s oceans have been soaking up far more excess heat in recent decades than scientists realized, suggesting that Earth could be set to warm even faster than predicted in the years ahead, according to new research published Wednesday.
Over the past quarter-century, Earth’s oceans have retained 60 percent more heat each year than scientists previously had thought, said Laure Resplandy, a geoscientist at Princeton University who led the startling study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The difference represents an enormous amount of additional energy, originating from the sun and trapped by Earth’s atmosphere — the yearly amount representing more than eight times the world’s annual energy consumption.
In the scientific realm, the new findings help resolve long-running doubts about the rate of the warming of the oceans before 2007, when reliable measurements from devices called “Argo floats” were put to use worldwide. Before that, differing types of temperature records — and an overall lack of them — contributed to murkiness about how quickly the oceans were heating up.
The higher-than-expected amount of heat in the oceans means more heat is being retained within Earth’s climate system each year, rather than escaping into space. In essence, more heat in the oceans signals that global warming is more advanced than scientists thought.
Surefire Intelligence. How Dumb do you Have to Be to Doubt Climate Science?
As climate denial becomes ever more preposterous in the face of calamitous planetary impacts, hard core deniers triple-down.
The extent to which the science denial industry has been able to tap into and reinforce human frailties is ridiculous, sobering, sad, and terrifying at the same time.
Above, Stephen Colbert’s commentary illustrates the desperate hunger for delusion among the Trumpist right. Below, links between climate denial and mail bomb denial.
A number of climate skeptics are rejecting the threat of mail bombs sent to Democrats and the media, in what some observers describe as a nexus of conspiratorial thinking in the politically charged days before the midterm elections.
Some prominent conservatives, including many who reject climate science, have questioned whether the devices allegedly sent through the mail by Cesar Sayoc are “fake bombs.” Others described the attempted delivery of 12 or more bombs as a “hoax,” echoing claims by the president and other conservatives meant to discredit human-caused global warming.
“The Secret Service must treat these possible hoaxes as real in the unlikely event they are not another liberal scam,” wrote Kurt Schlichter, a conservative columnist with the website Townhall. He has also accused climate scientists of lying about rising temperatures.
“Climate change is a fraud and I’m going to increase my carbon footprint because the hell with you,” he wrote in March, directing his comments at Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University.
Lou Dobbs, a Fox Business anchor, has spent years attacking climate science, at one point saying that he would be “debunking climate change” by inviting conservative researchers whose findings challenge mainstream findings onto his show. Last week, he suggested that the bombs were a political distraction by Democrats.
“Fake News — Fake Bombs. Who could possibly benefit by so much fakery?” he tweeted.
President Trump himself referred to the mail bombs as “Bombs” in a tweet he wrote before Sayoc’s arrest. Days earlier, he attacked climate scientists, including those who work for the federal government, who he said have “a very big political agenda.”
Trump’s tweet questioning the bombs was written exactly six years after a tweet, in advance of the 2012 presidential election, raised the possibility of President Obama using a bomb to sway the race.
“Be careful of an Obama ‘bomb’ to win election! Would be a horrible thing to do,” Trump wrote.
Trump has shifted the conservative base toward positions once considered unthinkable, such as an embrace of Russia and economic protectionism, said Jerry Taylor, president of the Niskanen Center and a former climate skeptic who now works to craft climate policy.
Jumping from a rejection of the scientific consensus on climate change to a denial of bomb threats isn’t that big a leap, Taylor said.
“If you’re a right-wing Trumpist conservative, you don’t want to believe that your people or your crowd is in the business of trying to kill people in the Democratic Party, and so you will harness your brainpower to come up with any narrative story or explanation that you can imagine to argue the contrary,” he said.
“Climate denialism was in a step proof of concept for Trumpism in general to the extent to which this braying about fake news and conspiracies with regards to elites and academics and scientists and reporters and all of that proved so successful in the climate arena,” he added. “It certainly laid the groundwork for metastasizing climate denialism and the tactics and strategies involved in that to other aspects of political life.”
Continue reading “Surefire Intelligence. How Dumb do you Have to Be to Doubt Climate Science?”
Amazon Series will Feature Cli-Fi
This year’s extreme weather might have created a market for climate fiction.
What will the future world look like in the face of climate change? Will our cities be washed away overnight by great floods or trapped under colossal glaciers like The Day After Tomorrow?
No, climate scientists say it won’t go in the way of Hollywood blockbusters. Still, envisioning the real face of climate change, and how it may impact individuals or their families, remains difficult for many people. It’s just too abstract to be tangible. To overcome this, some are turning to one of humankind’s oldest, most powerful tools: a good story.
The literary genre known as climate fiction, or cli-fi, has been maturing over the past few years, with titles that seek to shine a light on emerging science and help readers understand a rapidly changing world.
On Tuesday, Amazon Original Stories will launch a new series of cli-fi short stories by A-list writers, what they call “a collection of seven possible tomorrows.” Called Warmer, the collection includes works by Jane Smiley (of A Thousand Acres fame), Lauren Groff (Fates and Furies), Jesse Kellerman (The Genius), and Jess Walter (Beautiful Ruins).
The goal, according to Amazon, is stories that “offer up a collision of fear, hope, and imagination.”
National Geographic spoke with award-winning author Jess Walter about his contribution to the new series, called “The Way the World Ends.” Set during a freak storm at Mississippi State University in the near future, the story explores the intersection of climate science and activism in a fight for survival.
A newspaper-journalist-turned-novelist, Walter is a New York Timesbestselling author and winner of the Pushcart Prize as well as an Edgar Award. He is based in Spokane, Washington.
Why were you attracted to this project?
I love when fiction tries to tackle big topics. And climate change is such a fascinating challenge.How did you approach writing a fiction story about climate change?
If you think about the stakes in most short stories, especially in the Western and American tradition, they are based on an individual’s triumph against society. But climate change is the thing that could destroy us all. So the stakes in this type of fiction would be people deciding to do what’s best for everybody.
Steve King: Climate Denier is a Hero to Neo-Nazis and the Klan
Today’s GOP all rolled up in one guy.
At an event sponsored by the climate-denying, Koch-funded Americans For Prosperity on Wednesday, King reportedly told the audience that climate change “is not proven, it’s not science. It’s more of a religion than a science.” He also argued that an increase in carbon in the atmosphere might actually be a good thing:
He said that even if carbon dioxide in the atmosphere causes the earth to warm, environmentalists only look at the bad from that, not the good.
“Everything that might result from a warmer planet is always bad in (environmentalists’) analysis,” he said. “There will be more photosynthesis going on if the Earth gets warmer. … And if sea levels go up 4 or 6 inches, I don’t know if we’d know that.”
Waiting to hear the upside of Neo-Nazism, too, Steve. Continue reading “Steve King: Climate Denier is a Hero to Neo-Nazis and the Klan”