The Ineffectiveness of Fearmongering

The environmentalist community believes that escalating fear will engender change in human activity. Fear does work, but only to a degree. Humans in the first world have been motivated by fear to modify some of their behavior resulting in dramatic reductions in air pollution and dramatic improvements in water quality even as the population grew and industry thrived. The environmentalist community would have us believe we need radical change now, and the way to get people to agree is to spread ever more fear. Anyone who has studied human behavior will tell you, that fear is not the best motivator, and can often have the opposite effect.

Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference makes many excellent observations on the psychology of changing behavior. Teen smoking has exploded even as the anti-smoking lobby and it's government agents have been restricting it further, and further and spreading ever more fearful and explicitly shocking advertisements. The assault on teen smoking which uses ever escalating scare tactics to "prove" it's points is a colossal failure.

I highly recommend both of his books.

Environmental models based on faulty statistics

As the saying goes, statistics can used to show anything to be true, but most importantly statistician.

I still can't let go of the cacophony of environmental nitwittery the Al Gore movie is generating.. so here please indulge me belaboring the following point..

IMHOP, Environmentalist movement has become it's own pseudo religion (and an emotionally reactionary one at that) in response to many of the dehumanizing and destructive side-effects of modern society and the industrial revolution. Despite these well know and regularly publicized side-effects, it's important to ponder the fact that these very same people owe their existence and privilege to the very same changes in human society they denigrate. I endorse their right to espouse their nitwit views, my issue has to do with the group-think, jackboot way this ideology is being jammed down our throats. I believe it was Mark Twain that stated when everybody thinks the same, everybody has stopped thinking.

Here are some excellent reader comments from the Wall Street Journal posted in my previous blog entry:

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Weather or Not
Richard Bees - Indianapolis

There's a saying in IT, "Garbage in, garbage out." Anyone who understands chaos theory realizes predictive models are all flawed due to the inability to accurately measure the initial state. This is precisely why the "two-week forecast" was abandoned in the '60s. It was so wildly inaccurate as to be useless. Now the same people who can't see two weeks ahead are telling us what will happen in 30 years? I don't think so. Most predictive models fail to track solar cycles, lack any input from the sun (a nearby star).

Ask these people next time they go into their Chicken Little routine which islands in the Pacific have disappeared. Ask them where the melt is going, if it's not going into the ocean.

It's fun to have an emotional response, it's harder to develop a logical one.

Colossal Egotism
Art Laramee - Billerica, Mass.

I don't think for a minute that humans have no impact on their environment. But when it comes to the earth's environment it is colossal egotism that makes humans think that their impact can compare with Mother Nature's or the Earth itself. The Earth moves within itself, causing earthquakes even to the extent that the earth wobbled for days after the tsunami that rocked Indonesia. We also know that there are cycles to everything about the Earth including precession of its rotation. What we don't know are the direct impacts of these events much more impact than anything humans could accomplish, but just because we don't know doesn't mean they don't have consequences including consequences we are trying to tie to human pollution today.

Greenland Was Once Green
Bernie Smith - Troy, Mich.

In the 1100s and 1200s the Vikings were routinely sailing the North Atlantic, 12 month of the year, in open boats. Back then they discovered and named Greenland, there setting up an agrarian society. Things were much warmer than today.

At that same time, Venice was a budding art center in a lagoon in northern Italy, the same lagoon it occupies today. Sea levels were not appreciably different in this documented time of little arctic ice. I am not worried in the least. Thanks for the article.

At Least We Avoided the Ice Age
T.R. Gregory - Diablo, Calif.

An excellent summary of various aspects of recent environmental concerns. Global warming is a myth of gargantuan proportions, one of many "political scientific" explanations, posited for political reasons or seasons. The very fact that Al Gore (inventor of the Internet) is involved in this enterprise ought be enough to make folk aware that it's a sham.

Not long ago, in 1986 I think it was--20 years since, TIME magazine had a cover story predicting the imminent onset of an ice age. Back in the early 1970s I was working on the Boeing supersonic passenger aircraft program, the Senate killed the program by one vote, on the basis that supersonic airliners would totally destroy the earth's ozone layer. The so-called spreading hole in the ozone has since mysteriously disappeared! And so on and so on.

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Let's end the hyperbole and fear mongering. How about some real scientific debate.

Enough with the fearmongering!!!

I'm sick of nearly everyone tacitly accepting the specious environmentalist credo that we must preserve the earth as it was... the Earth is a dynamic system. Ice ages come and go. The earth warms up and cools down. This is not a justification for raping and pillaging, stewardship is always better than exploitation, but the only effective method for protecting against unnecessary or dangerous exploitation is PRIVATE OWNERSHIP, not government oversight. If you want a good example of how well governments protect the environment, then check out Russia, which under tight state control was turned into a veritable wasteland.

Once again emotionalism, elitism, slipshod thinking, dubious science and statism are the key drivers behind the environmental shock troops that want to send you back to the Stone Age. Stand up for people! Not bogus neo-Malthusian logic.

My supposition is the core tenants of the radical environments credo have more to do with self hatred. Deep down these folks must hate people and hate themselves. I, for one, do not. If in fact we evolved to be the dominant species on this planet, then damnit, I don't advocate surrendering our position! I'm not at all willing to retreat to "noble savage" status to satisfy the whims of some radical, who probably drives a nice car, lives in a nice warm house in luxury a king would have only dreamed about 400 years ago, eats a diet of high quality organic food, etc. just because they think our carbon footprint is too big, or mankind is destroying the environment and a few species might die out. The world is a very big place, it's constantly changing....species die out.. it will continue to change... duh!

Good links..

Click for a sound debunking of many myths

Other good links..

Hypocrisy of Gore and the truth about that "dangerous" gas, carbon dioxide in little video snippets! No reading required.

CEI Videos

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has been dubbed the best environmentalist think tank in America.. check them out.

CEI Environmental Policy Page

Plenty more... just search Google. Don't believe what you read or see in the media!