Why are there so many climate change "believers"?

"Climate alarmism: The mother of all availability cascades"
was a May 22, 2017  WUWT  guest essay by Iain Aitken


Original essay:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/05/22/climate-alarmism-the-mother-of-all-availability-cascades/


wattsupwiththat.com
 is the best climate science website in the world

The original WUWT essay was very hard to read,
so my summary follows rather than a link.

 A lot of editing/rewriting may have inadvertently changed
what the author was trying to say:

The public has been seduced by five simple claims presented as ‘scientific facts’:

(1) Climate change has occurred only because of man-made carbon dioxide emissions – nature had nothing to do with it.

(2) Climate change catastrophe will result if we do not drastically reduce our carbon dioxide emissions.

(3) Climate science is “settled”.

(4) 97% of scientists agree.

(5) Anyone questioning ‘facts’ (1) through (4)

         is a ‘science denier’.

These claims seem to have become memes (beliefs spread by cultural acquisition, e.g. peers, media).

They are what the non-skeptical public thinks scientific authorities are saying.

Members of the general public who hold these beliefs may say they do so because ‘their Facebook friends say they are true’, or ‘newspapers say they are true’, or ‘politicians say they are true’, or ‘scientists say they are true’.

This process has been characterized by psychologists as an ‘availability cascade’.

This is a self-reinforcing cycle that explains the development of a collective belief (or meme).

Many climate phenomena that are unrelated, with complex causes, are 'explained' with one simple cause: Climate Change.

Man-made climate change sounds plausible -- we have been adding carbon dioxide to the air, and it is a greenhouse gas, so it must cause some global warming.

It’s hard to go through a day without the radio, TV, or newspaper mentioning future catastrophic man made global warming (now called “climate change), as though the future climate is a fact.

The need for social acceptance, and political correctness, overwhelm critical thinking.

Conformity, rather than critical analysis and independent thinking, are at the heart of a meme.

The public sees confirmation of their concern because politicians are enacting policies to address it.

This is a self-reinforcing loop of irrationality.

And it’s based on a poor understanding of what some scientists are actually claiming, with no proof:

After 4.5 billion years of having no effect on the Earth’s ever changing climate, in the past few decades we humans have taken control of it … with no explanation of how, or why, that allegedly happened.

It’s very easy to ‘just believe’ in the man-made climate change crisis.

Independent critical analysis of the subject requires time and effort to understand the science.

There is a huge temptation to simply ‘trust the authorities’.

It is tempting for skeptics to call these beliefs ‘myths’ rather than ‘memes’; however that would imply that they are entirely made-up and without any truth.

Even the most skeptical of scientists would accept that man-made carbon dioxide emissions contribute to some extent to global warming.

Therefore it is literally true that ‘man-made carbon dioxide emissions cause climate change’.

Even if they contributed just one hundredth of one percent to global warming, they would still ‘cause climate change’.

Even if the burning of fossil fuels created global cooling through the additions of soot to the atmosphere, then man-made carbon dioxide emissions would still ‘cause climate change’.

Perhaps foolish members of the public misinterpret what the word ‘cause’ means, assuming it means ‘is entirely responsible for’.

The ‘educated guess’ of the UN’s IPCC (well, a few dozen alarmist scientists and computer modelers) is that probably more than a half of recent global warming is man-made, which is a far cry from ‘all’.

And note that ‘probably more than half’ is a subjective opinion.

There is huge scientific uncertainty over the ‘correct’ value for climate sensitivity to CO2, so a huge cloud of uncertainty hangs over the IPCC’s guess.

Politicians and the media continue to endorse these beliefs, so the public will continue to believe them.

The politicians endorse them with the oldest political trick in the book: come up with a short, simplistic slogan (e.g.: ‘Crooked Hillary’) – and then repeat it over and over again.

In climate change the slogan is ‘climate change is real, man-made, and dangerous’ – and this is repeated over and over again.

This is an ‘appeal to authority’.

As Leonardo da Vinci said, ‘Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence’.

Politicians, journalists and the public need to understand their climate beliefs are mainly based on faith and emotion, rather than science and reason.

It would take considerable time and trouble to critically investigate and understand the science.

It would require people to lay aside simple, easy-to-understand “certainties” … for complex, hard-to-understand uncertainties.

Don’t hold your breath.

 

My Own Two Cents

By Richard Greene:

Claims of a coming global warming catastrophe from manmade CO2 have been made almost every day for the past 30 years.

Yet the climate today in 2017 is wonderful – the best in our lifetime.

Nights are slightly warmer than 100 years ago, and more CO2 in the air is greening our planet.

How many more decades of a pleasant climate will be needed before most people realize that correctly predicting the future climate has always been impossible?

The average temperature of our planet barely changed from 2003 to 2015 – a nearly flat trend -- did your favorite media even mention that?

Claims of a coming climate catastrophe have been wrong for 30 years … and will always be wrong, because the true causes of climate change are still unknown – and that means predictions are just wild guesses!

Climate change has become a secular religion for people who reject conventional religions and make fun of their beliefs.