Church of Climatology

[Bluey]

It's 100% exactly the same. If you mock someone's beliefs, then you have to accept that yours will be mocked in return. Yes science has been wrong, but it is usually right because it is based on logic and evidence, unlike Religion. I would normally never bring up religion, but the OP has been happy to do so in the past, and the tone he chose this time was religious in nature (read the first post and tell me how that would sound if you inserted religion into it?). You reap what you sow.

Ok Andy lets leave it, some of the climate change folks are pretty radical and much like a religious cult, i personally believe the distance to our sun varies in orbit and this and solar flares and activity along with ocean currents have a great impact on our weather, as with the ice age and its thawing and the little ice age in 14th century and the warming after that, so we leave it there, and thought we were on ignore?.

 

[Magaoidh]

What’s even better is that the Energy Council of Australia(Lol) is selling off our natural gas overseas and then selling our natural gas back to Australia at the overseas gas price.God loves capitalism.
Gough Whitlam wanted to buy back the farm and look at us now!
There is no such thing as climate change and Covid is a conspiracy.
Hallelujah.

 

[andyrabbit]

Ok Andy lets leave it, some of the climate change folks are pretty radical and much like a religious cult, i personally believe the distance to our sun varies in orbit and this and solar flares and activity along with ocean currents have a great impact on our weather, as with the ice age and its thawing and the little ice age in 14th century and the warming after that, so we leave it there, and thought we were on ignore?.

Yeah I made the mistake of viewing ignored content and got sucked in. It's a shame we can't have a civil conversation around this but I wasn't the one who started this. I think it's the science denialists who are the radical ones, pouring fuel on the fire. I see this crisis as effecting our very existence, our food supply, forced migration e.t.c.

 

[Bluey]

No dont use it as an excuse for economic migrants swamping Europe, that is a case of people not liking the economy at home and gate crashing Europe and the UK, also massive population growth in Africa is a factor.

Yeah I made the mistake of viewing ignored content and got sucked in. It's a shame we can't have a civil conversation around this but I wasn't the one who started this. I think it's the science denialists who are the radical ones, pouring fuel on the fire. I see this crisis as effecting our very existence, our food supply, forced migration e.t.c.

 

[andyrabbit]

No dont use it as an excuse for economic migrants swamping Europe, that is a case of people not liking the economy at home and gate crashing Europe and the UK, also massive population growth in Africa is a factor.

I'm not talking about that at all, I mean possible future migration due to land no longer able to sustain populations.

 

[andyrabbit]

Prudent risk management requires consideration of bad-to-worst-case scenarios. Yet, for climate change, such potential futures are poorly understood. Could anthropogenic climate change result in worldwide societal collapse or even eventual human extinction? At present, this is a dangerously underexplored topic. Yet there are ample reasons to suspect that climate change could result in a global catastrophe. Analyzing the mechanisms for these extreme consequences could help galvanize action, improve resilience, and inform policy, including emergency responses. We outline current knowledge about the likelihood of extreme climate change, discuss why understanding bad-to-worst cases is vital, articulate reasons for concern about catastrophic outcomes, define key terms, and put forward a research agenda. The proposed agenda covers four main questions: 1) What is the potential for climate change to drive mass extinction events? 2) What are the mechanisms that could result in human mass mortality and morbidity? 3) What are human societies' vulnerabilities to climate-triggered risk cascades, such as from conflict, political instability, and systemic financial risk? 4) How can these multiple strands of evidence—together with other global dangers—be usefully synthesized into an “integrated catastrophe assessment”? It is time for the scientific community to grapple with the challenge of better understanding catastrophic climate change.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2108146119#body-ref-r7

 

[southsport]

What’s even better is that the Energy Council of Australia(Lol) is selling off our natural gas overseas and then selling our natural gas back to Australia at the overseas gas price.God loves capitalism.
Gough Whitlam wanted to buy back the farm and look at us now!
There is no such thing as climate change and Covid is a conspiracy.
Hallelujah.

It's the same with coal mags, they can't get enough of our coal overseas but we won't use it because australia is going to save the planet all by ourselves.

In europe they are being told not to charge their electric cars because there isn't enough power, fancy the EU demanding that we follow their example, what a mess they've made of things over there, how dumb are they?
.

 

[MegaRabbitoh]

What Makes People Share Misinformation on Social Media?

We need to understand how lies spread in order to secure the truth.

www.psychologytoday.com

Grant Hilary Brenner MD, DFAPA​

ExperiMentations

What Makes People Share Misinformation on Social Media?​

We need to understand how lies spread in order to secure the truth.​

Posted August 31, 2022 | Reviewed by Hara Estroff Marano
https://facebook.com/dialog/share?a...akes-people-share-misinformation-social-media

Misinformation is like a disease. Understanding how it spreads is key for stopping it. Given the information environment we are in, getting a handle on what is true and what is misleading is not just a question of integrity and morality but a matter of survival. Disinformation kills people.
Poor quality information short-circuits wise decision-making, leading to the spread of preventable diseases, undermining public health initiatives, and delaying or obstructing us from recognizing and responding to escalating threats, including climate change, COVID 19, human migration, and many others.

People tend to "believe lies despite the obvious truth" if something seems like it might be true (the "gist" versus "verbatim" truth), and is aligned with their values and wishes. Moreover, they are also likely to share it without pause. However, research is less clear about what individual factors come into play when people decide whether to engage with or share potentially misleading posts on social media.

Studying Drivers of Disinformation​

Source: Fauxels/Pexel
To understand the drivers of disinformation, Morosoli and colleagues conducted research published in the journal American Behavioral Scientist (2022). They looked at sociodemographic factors including gender, age, and educational level; permissive factors such as social media behavior including, political beliefs, consistency with one’s own attitudes on a given subject (“attitudinal congruence,” e.g. if I believe climate change is a hoax, and I see news in line with that idea, there is greater congruence), the importance of the issue at hand (“issue salience”), along with relevant personality traits, specifically the dark triad of narcissism, sociopathy and Machiavellianism.

Researchers surveyed over 7,000 people in six different countries, all Western democracies (Switzerland, Belgium, France, Germany, the UK, and the USA). They focused on information about climate change, immigration, and COVID-19, all polarizing social issues known to be fraught with disinformation.
Subjects were shown three sample social media posts, one on each issue, designed for the purposes of the study to contain misleading information, mirroring actual posts. They were told their opinions were being solicited to help an online news service vet the posts prior to publication. They were asked how likely they would be to engage with a given post, and how motivated they would be to share it. Various demographic factors, attitudes, and political beliefs were surveyed using accepted rating scales.

Correlates of Engagement with and Sharing of Misleading Social Media News​

The researchers found that males, older individuals, and people with lower educational achievement were significantly more likely to engage with sample posts. The dark triad personality traits of narcissism and psychopathy were associated with greater engagement with social media posts. Moveover, people whose political orientation was conservative (versus liberal) were more likely to engage with the posts.
article continues after advertisement

Subjects said they were more likely to share sample posts when they were aligned with their attitudes and beliefs, for example fake news saying climate change wasn't real when they didn't believe in it in the first place. The more relevant an issue was perceived to be, as well, the more likely participants indicated they would be motivated to share a given post. Participants were most likely to engage with the post on climate change protest, followed by immigration and, last, coronavirus.

Perhaps not surprisingly, people who used social media more in general were more likely to indicate a willingness to engage with posts. Those with greater baseline trust in social media news reported greater motivation to disseminate posts. People who tended to engage with posts from friends and families were also more likely to share posts, suggesting a synergistic social effect.

There were some nuanced findings requiring further investigation. For example, while right-leaning people were more likely in general to go along with disinformation, the effect was stronger for the immigration-related post. Likewise, attitude also mattered more with immigration: Engagement with misinformation was more likely when the information in the post aligned with one’s perspective.

Notably, for the climate change post, news blaming protestors for leaving behind garbage drove greater engagement because of the attribution of blame more than the issue of climate change itself, highlighting the importance of the details in understanding dissemination of disinformation on social media. This suggests that inserting inflammatory material into social media news, even if irrelevant to the main points, could be used manipulatively to drive engagement and sharing.

Making Sense of an Increasingly Murky and Fast-Paced Information Environment​

More work is required to fully understand how disinformation propagates through social media engagement and sharing. Painstaking research to look at each individual issue, along with relevant subfactors, would be required to map out all the different paths and factors predicting both belief in falsehood as well as engagement with it and sharing. of it. Research would need to tap such psychological factors as the “illusory truth effect”1 and how beliefs and upbringing can incline some to blindly follow authoritative leaders.

Given that research of this nature can be used both in the service of truth as well as to bolster disinformation efforts, there is emerging an escalating information arms race in which different stakeholder groups are in a position to make use of research on the psychology of disinformation for whatever their own goals may be.

Where it will lead is hard to predict. Hopefully, research like this can be used to establish a consensus on how to manage information as the grand social experiment of technology unfolds and shapes our world.

References
1. The illusory truth effect shows that when people hear something repeated over and over, it begins to feel true, regardless of whether it is true or not. We see this in politics, when people repeat false messages in order to influence voter belief.

Morosoli S, Van Aelst P, Humprecht E, Staender A, Esser F. Identifying the Drivers Behind the Dissemination of Online Misinformation: A Study on Political Attitudes and Individual Characteristics in the Context of Engaging With Misinformation on Social Media. American Behavioral Scientist. August 2022. doi:10.1177/00027642221118300

 

[Bluey]

So your saying there must be something wrong with anybody who doesnt agree with you, seems you always have to have the last word, is that an ego thing?.

What Makes People Share Misinformation on Social Media?

We need to understand how lies spread in order to secure the truth.

www.psychologytoday.com

Grant Hilary Brenner MD, DFAPA​

ExperiMentations

What Makes People Share Misinformation on Social Media?​

We need to understand how lies spread in order to secure the truth.​

Posted August 31, 2022 | Reviewed by Hara Estroff Marano
https://facebook.com/dialog/share?app_id=220580041311284&display=page&href=https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/experimentations/202208/what-makes-people-share-misinformation-social-media&redirect_uri=https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/experimentations/202208/what-makes-people-share-misinformation-social-media

Misinformation is like a disease. Understanding how it spreads is key for stopping it. Given the information environment we are in, getting a handle on what is true and what is misleading is not just a question of integrity and morality but a matter of survival. Disinformation kills people.
Poor quality information short-circuits wise decision-making, leading to the spread of preventable diseases, undermining public health initiatives, and delaying or obstructing us from recognizing and responding to escalating threats, including climate change, COVID 19, human migration, and many others.

People tend to "believe lies despite the obvious truth" if something seems like it might be true (the "gist" versus "verbatim" truth), and is aligned with their values and wishes. Moreover, they are also likely to share it without pause. However, research is less clear about what individual factors come into play when people decide whether to engage with or share potentially misleading posts on social media.

Studying Drivers of Disinformation​

Source: Fauxels/Pexel
To understand the drivers of disinformation, Morosoli and colleagues conducted research published in the journal American Behavioral Scientist (2022). They looked at sociodemographic factors including gender, age, and educational level; permissive factors such as social media behavior including, political beliefs, consistency with one’s own attitudes on a given subject (“attitudinal congruence,” e.g. if I believe climate change is a hoax, and I see news in line with that idea, there is greater congruence), the importance of the issue at hand (“issue salience”), along with relevant personality traits, specifically the dark triad of narcissism, sociopathy and Machiavellianism.

Researchers surveyed over 7,000 people in six different countries, all Western democracies (Switzerland, Belgium, France, Germany, the UK, and the USA). They focused on information about climate change, immigration, and COVID-19, all polarizing social issues known to be fraught with disinformation.
Subjects were shown three sample social media posts, one on each issue, designed for the purposes of the study to contain misleading information, mirroring actual posts. They were told their opinions were being solicited to help an online news service vet the posts prior to publication. They were asked how likely they would be to engage with a given post, and how motivated they would be to share it. Various demographic factors, attitudes, and political beliefs were surveyed using accepted rating scales.

​

 

[southsport]

I hate to let FACTS get in the way leftie propaganda but it seems like our coal is being used by everyone except us.

Coal to lead surge in Aussie energy exports: REQ - Daily Cargo News

Off the back of major geo-political upheaval around the world, coal is to lead the surge in Australian resource and energy exports for at least another 12 months

www.thedcn.com.au

.

 

[MegaRabbitoh]

So your saying there must be something wrong with anybody who doesnt agree with you, seems you always have to have the last word, is that an ego thing?.

No.

 

[andyrabbit]

Harvard researchers chart evolution from denial to misdirection as House inquiry widens​

BY Alvin PowellHarvard Staff Writer
DATESeptember 28, 2021
SHARE
The U.S. House of Representatives’ Oversight Committee earlier this month widened its inquiry into the oil industry’s role in fostering doubt about the role of fossil fuels in causing climate change. A letter from the panel to Darren Woods, ExxonMobil chief executive, said lawmakers were “concerned that to protect … profits, the industry has reportedly led a coordinated effort to spread disinformation to mislead the public and prevent crucial action to address climate change.” The Gazette spoke with Geoffrey Supran, a research fellow in the History of Science, who, together with Naomi Oreskes, the Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science, published a series of studies in recent years, the most recent one in May, on the climate communications of ExxonMobil, one of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies.

Oil companies discourage climate action, study says

Harvard researchers have turned a spotlight on the sometimes subtle, yet effective, strategies employed by oil companies to foster doubt and delay action on climate change.

news.harvard.edu

Speaking of propaganda. Unfortunately this site won't allow the entire article to be posted.

 

[MegaRabbitoh]

GAZETTE: Tell me about your research on the oil and gas industry’s role in spreading climate disinformation.​

SUPRAN: In 2017, I and Naomi Oreskes published a series of three papers focused on what you might call traditional climate-science denial by ExxonMobil. Then, in May of this year, we shifted gears slightly, releasing a new study looking at the company’s more subtle forms of climate propaganda.
GAZETTE: What kinds of issues do you suspect the House committee will find?
SUPRAN: In 2017, our research was the first peer-reviewed analysis of ExxonMobil’s 40-year history of climate-change communications. And what we discovered was that there were systematic discrepancies between, on the one hand, what Exxon and ExxonMobil scientists said about climate-science privately and in academic circles, versus what Exxon, Mobil, and ExxonMobil said to the general public in The New York Times and elsewhere. That analysis showed that ExxonMobil misled the public about basic climate science and its implications. They did so by contributing quietly to climate science, and loudly to promoting doubt about that science.
Our work and others’ in that area provides evidence for the committee, demonstrating ExxonMobil’s long history of attacking science and scientists in order to undermine and delay climate action. Our more recent work, this May, is an evolution of that study in that it focuses on how, beyond outright disinformation, ExxonMobil has used language to subtly but systematically shape the way the public thinks about climate change, often in misleading ways. That study demonstrates how the company has selectively emphasized some terms and topics in public while consistently avoiding others.
The takeaway message across all of our work is that over and over, ExxonMobil has misled the public about climate change by telling the public one thing and then saying and doing the opposite behind closed doors. Our latest work shows that while their tactics have evolved from outright, blatant climate denial to more subtle forms of lobbying and propaganda, their end goal remains the same. And that’s to stop action on climate change.
GAZETTE: So according to your findings, within the walls of ExxonMobil there was never any doubt about climate science. Is that right?
SUPRAN: Right, there was never the undue doubt that they promoted in public. In fact, behind closed doors and in academic circles, Exxon has known that its products would likely cause dangerous global warming since at least the 1970s. By way of its trade association, the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry as a whole has been on notice even longer — since the 1950s.

GAZETTE: What was the most disturbing finding from this hard look at ExxonMobil’s communications?
SUPRAN: A key contribution of our work has been demonstrating the systematic and statistically significant bias of ExxonMobil’s public communications toward denial and delay. But the most uncomfortable realization is how subtle and systematic and increasingly sophisticated their propaganda has become.
In our most recent work, we’ve had to rely on statistical techniques from computational linguistics to uncover patterns of speech hiding in plain sight. These include a systematic fixation on consumer energy demand rather than on the fossil fuels that the company supplies and the systematic representation of climate change as a “risk” rather than a reality. These are subtle patterns that, we’ve now realized, have been systematically embedded into climate discourse by ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel interests.
That’s particularly discomforting, because when you start to pull back the curtain you see just how sophisticated the oil industry’s propaganda machine has been, how easily their rhetoric has snuck into people’s consciousness and biased the way the public thinks about this. Mobil’s vice president and pioneer of PR in the ’70s and ’80s literally talked about what he called “semantic infiltration.” He called it “the process whereby language does the dirty work of politics.” And he said that the first “general principle” of PR was to, quote, “grab the good words … while sticking your opponents with the bad ones.” Our research now shows that’s exactly what they’ve been up to for decades.
GAZETTE: Have the oil companies stopped outright denying climate change? The subtle approach you talk about, is that all they’re doing now?
SUPRAN: From the mid-2000s through to the 2010s, ExxonMobil and other fossil-fuel companies gradually “evolved” their language, in the words of one ExxonMobil manager, from blatant climate denial to these more subtle and insidious forms of delayism. Another ExxonMobil manager described the effort by former company chairman and chief executiveRex Tillerson in the mid-2000s as an effort to “carefully reset” the company’s profile on climate change so that it would be “more sustainable and less exposed.” They did so by drawing straight from the tobacco industry’s playbook of threading a very fine rhetorical needle, using language about climate change just strong enough to be able to deny that they haven’t warned the public, but weak enough to exculpate them from charges of having marketed a deadly product.
So while their outright denial has tapered off, their propaganda hasn’t stopped. It’s in fact shifted into high gear and is now operating with a sophistication that we’ve never seen before. In our recent study, I mentioned the rhetoric of risk and individualized responsibility, but we also identified systematic use of language indicative of other what we call “discourses of delay,” such as greenwashing, fossil-fuel solutionism, technological optimism, and so on. These are now pervasive in industry marketing and, in turn, in the ways that the public and policymakers think and talk about the climate crisis.
To give just one example, did you know that the very notion of a personal carbon footprint — a concept that’s completely ubiquitous in discussions about personal responsibility — was first popularized by BP as part of a $100 million per year marketing campaign between 2004 and 2006?
They’ve also upgraded their tactics, moving from print advertorials to digital advertorials and microtargeted social media. Digital advertorials are ads presented to appear in the style of newspapers online and made for the oil companies by the newspapers themselves. They are the direct digital descendant of the print advertorials that Mobil pioneered in the ’70s through the 2000s, in part with their climate messaging.
“The takeaway message across all of our work is that over and over, ExxonMobil has misled the public about climate change by telling the public one thing and then saying and doing the opposite behind closed doors.”

GAZETTE: Did we get a sense as to how this happens? Are there company memos about phrasing and language, that kind of thing? Or is it still opaque?
SUPRAN: Proving intent is generally nontrivial, but all signs point to “Yes.” In terms of outright climate denial, we have smoking-gun documents that lay out in black and white Exxon’s intentions from the ’80s and ’90s to, in their words, “emphasize the uncertainty,” “extend the science,” and so on. In terms of delayism, we know, for example, that in 1981, Mobil internally reviewed its PR campaigns from the previous decade and celebrated how their advertorials in The New York Times had allowed them to become part of what they called “the collective unconscious” of the nation, as not only the general population but the Times editorial board had begun to shift their opinions in line with the company’s views. As I mentioned, the pioneer of Mobil’s advertorials, Herb Schmertz, also talked a lot about their public-affairs principles.
Beyond that, we don’t yet have the smoking-gun strategy documents for delay equivalent to the ones for denial. This is speculation, but part of the reason that we see propaganda mirrored so closely between different companies and different industries is because much of the time they work with the same PR firms and ad agencies. And so it could be that those memos lie in the file cabinets of PR firms rather than the oil companies themselves. That’s why there are now campaigns to hold those PR agents to account as well.
GAZETTE: This is kind of a horrible question to ask, but were you ever, despite yourself, impressed with the strategy and its effectiveness?
SUPRAN: Through our research, it has gradually dawned on me and my colleagues how central to the invention and advancement of modern propaganda the oil and gas industry has been over the last century. For me, coming from a physics and engineering background and retraining to work in this discipline, it’s been eye-opening and humbling to realize how much of the way we think and talk about this crisis has been encouraged and embodied by fossil-fuel-industry propaganda.
So I do recognize just how effective this industry’s public-affairs tactics have been. They’ve certainly undermined public concern and action on this crisis for decades. For my entire lifetime, in fact, the climate denial and delay machine has been in full swing. I’m not sure if “marvel” is the right word, but I’m very cognizant of the fact that I am part of the climate-change generation, born into a society locked into fossil fuels not for want of scientific understanding or technology or policy know-how, but because of the greed and disinformation and lobbying of a small group of fossil-fuel interests and conservative billionaires.

 

[MegaRabbitoh]

Harvard researchers chart evolution from denial to misdirection as House inquiry widens​

BY Alvin PowellHarvard Staff Writer
DATESeptember 28, 2021
SHARE
The U.S. House of Representatives’ Oversight Committee earlier this month widened its inquiry into the oil industry’s role in fostering doubt about the role of fossil fuels in causing climate change. A letter from the panel to Darren Woods, ExxonMobil chief executive, said lawmakers were “concerned that to protect … profits, the industry has reportedly led a coordinated effort to spread disinformation to mislead the public and prevent crucial action to address climate change.” The Gazette spoke with Geoffrey Supran, a research fellow in the History of Science, who, together with Naomi Oreskes, the Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science, published a series of studies in recent years, the most recent one in May, on the climate communications of ExxonMobil, one of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies.

Oil companies discourage climate action, study says

Harvard researchers have turned a spotlight on the sometimes subtle, yet effective, strategies employed by oil companies to foster doubt and delay action on climate change.

news.harvard.edu

Speaking of propaganda. Unfortunately this site won't allow the entire article to be posted.

You have to do it in separate lots as they have a 1,000 word limit. I've added the rest of it above. Very interesting and very telling.

 

[southsport]

You have to do it in separate lots as they have a 1,000 word limit. I've added the rest of it above. Very interesting and very telling.

Lol, universities are a big part of the problem and not the answer.
.