The Vile Nature of Climate Science, Part II

One thing that has shocked me about climate scientists advocates is their lack of relief pertaining to the fact global temperatures have not risen for 17 years. Ocean heat content is rising at a fraction of the rate that was predicted. To just about anyone, absence of the forecast warming is good news. But, because so many climate people are now advocates rather than scientists, they are disappointed horrible things are not occurring.

So, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when (yet another) anonymous climate advocate wrote this on his/her website:

Part of being a science communicator is hoping a natural disaster kills as many members of the audience as possible, as soon as possible, with as much media exposure as possible. As a communicator myself, I’d like nothing better than for thousands of middle-class white people to die in an extreme weather event—preferably one with global warming’s fingerprints on it—live on cable news. Tomorrow.

The hardest thing about communicating the deadliness of the climate problem is that it isn’t killing anyone. And just between us, let’s be honest: the average member of the public is a bit (how can I put it politely?) of a moron. It’s all well and good for the science to tell us global warming is a bigger threat than Fascism was, but Joe Q. Flyover doesn’t understand science. He wants evidence.

So we’ve probably reached the limits of what science communication can achieve. At this point only nature herself can close the consensus gap—or the fear gap.

Cognitive scientist C. R. R. Kampen thinks the annihilation of a city of 150,000 peoplemight just provide the teaching moment we need:

You see, consensus is so often only reached after a painful confrontation with evidence.

Knowing this, I hope against knowledge of her expected track that Cyclone Ita will wipe Cairns off the map. Because the sooner the lesson is learnt by early confrontation, the better one more population will be suited to anticipate and mitigate the vast weather and climate (+ related) disasters that lie in the immediate future and to lose all distractions on the way.

While this is the first time I have written about it, this is not the first time I have heard these sentiments. There are a number of climate scientists advocates that express feelings like this. 

As far as I am concerned, there is a genuine sickness that has crept into climate science.