PRODUCTION scientists pro Romney and Denial ; IMPACT scientists pro Obama and climate change reality ?

undergrad scientists DENY climate change, vote Romney

The latest Washington Post/ABC TV poll has a few figures you probably hadn't seen in this polled-to-death election season : the difference in GOP/DEMOCRAT support between people with undergraduate and post graduate degrees : undergrads pro Romney, post-grads pro Obama.


I believe it explains the push back on climate change reality in one easy sentence:

Undergraduates with degrees in science tend to go to work in factories producing things (and pollution) ; while scientists with post graduate degrees tend to work in universities and government assessing the impact of that pollution upon the wider world and society.

Allan Schnaiberg's election

Canadian sociologist Allan Schnaiberg - dead for years - could probably explain the current American election (the one that has both sides refusing to mention climate change)   better than anyone alive ---- thanks to his theory of the primal conflict between production science and impact science.

The pushback on climate change reality is coming from people with undergraduate degrees in science - enough to be minimally credible to speak on science matters , but not really involved in current world class basic research.

Typically, the lead climate deniers are TV weathermen in their seventies, with an undergraduate science degree from a fourth rate university that they obtained in the early 1960s, based on mediocre teachers whose own science education was last seriously updated in the late 1940s.

State of the art climate science today is simply quite different than it was 65 years ago and this is fuelling the conflict between two sides , both sides sincerely convinced that their science is the state of the art....

Watching the Deniers lose the election over Climate Change is Grim : Ryan Grim, the blogger who brought them down

KOCH BROS suffer a GRIM fate

Out here in rural Nova Scotia, people have a particularly vivid way of saying their chances are toast : they are "screwed : screwed and bored". That is what the feckless Democrats and Obama would have been, if not for a relatively obscure blogger named Ryan Grim.

Blogosphere brings down the GOP with just one post 

His brief blog post - recollecting Romney a year earlier vowed to kill FEMA, stalled the Mitten's "BIG MO"  - nixed, at the stroke of a computer keyboard, all the billions the reality-deniers spent in dark money, trying to steal the American election.

Sandy-the-storm could have gone either way, in terms of any incumbent president's popularity .

This is because no true storm of the century can ever be cleaned up in a week or so - leaving a whole lot of cold, hungry, tired people ready to blame anyone and everybody - particularly the person at the top.

But a less than miracle-working but still highly efficient federal rescue effort is a hell and a half better than no federal rescue effort at all - such as Romney had proposed to provide if he was elected.

FEMA suddenly became the fastest and simplest way to tell Dems and GOP election promises apart - and many people suddenly recalled that Obama's much hated support for big government could look pretty good ,whenever big storms come calling.

And with climate change promising more and more bigger and bigger storms, maybe Obama and the Democrats had a point, after all.......

The NEW Normal : barges stuck in mud on America's natural highway, the Mississippi

GOP denies this is a DROUGHT !

Caught this on CBC Radio's ever reliable AS IT HAPPENS show: a fascinating interview with a barge company owner lamenting what damage this year's drought has done to barge traffic on America's cheapest, most profitable super-highway : the immense Mississippi- Missouri-Ohio River system.


This river system is probably America's best economic advantage - or it was 

Forget trucks, planes or trains : this ole man river really totes them bales and moves them freight.

And during this summer,the 'warmist' on record,  it is hurtin' - bad......

* Tip of the hat to Mike at Australia's Watching the Deniers (cute name alert !) for maintaining his long running litany of climate change induced natural disasters under the smart title of "THE NEW NORMAL"

The reason climate skeptic MUST see conspiracies everywhere

Tin Hats against CLIMATE CHANGE

There is a reason why all climate skeptic wear tin foil hats.

Suppose you are a DENIER cum SKEPTIC and your honest scientific beliefs teach you that wrenching changes in the Natural World are literally *impossible* and that only moderate oscillations up and down around an eternal norm are possible .

That is, you un-skeptically believe in the sort of self-flattering-to-humanity type of science that is still taught in our High Schools.

Then you must account , if only in your own mind, for why hundreds of millions of other, decent, honest, ordinary people seem so convinced that the climate is drastically and maybe even permanently changing.

To deniers, the only possible rational reason is that these decent honest people have been conned by a conspiracy, with either profit or domination the co-consprators’ true ultimate aim.

We WARMISTS must equally ask ourselves why so many ordinary people on the other side believe so readily in conspiracy wackiness – unless their scientific beliefs have left them with no alternative explanation……

White Gold Supremacist RON PAUL fights off Black Carbon, Watermelons : The South Gonna Rise Again !

WHITE GOLD

Like too many of his followers, Ron Paul, the world's leading White Gold Supremacist, has a documented history of "issues" with questions of race.

Raised in the American South , he may not even be aware of just where all his followers' hyper-firing synapse connections of random data are leading his movement against "fiat" money.

But clearly many literally do see the world in black and white terms ; more specifically "black versus white" terms.

Apparently it is all the result of a mess of free-floating memes in their over active neurons having collided, producing a nightmare , to them , of a successful conspiracy of black carbon currency against white gold currency, led by dangerous hordes of watermelons.

(As Canadian Liberals are wont to say, "I am not making this up".)

"Invasion of the free-floating synapse memes" 

It all begins to feel like what happens after you watch BIRTH OF A NATION and THE INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, after eating way too many deep-fried crawdaddies way too late at night.

This is the stuff of cultural nightmares - and individual indigestion.

So to the bilious believers of Ron Paul's rantings : take a milk of magnesia and call your doctor in the morning,  if you still think the watermelons in your garden are really plotting world one government domination.....

The climate deniers' mindset : its not about science but hyper-firing synapses

JAMES, James Bean, er, pole

California-based ( I suppose that alone is excuse enough for most !)  N. Brohm , "Student of  Life and the Universe" , is a typical example of your average climate change conspiracy-theorist , if my reading of endless comment columns gives me any expertise.

I came across N. Brohm, struggling to endure my way through the comments in Amazon, beneath James Delingpole's fresh new take on conspiracy theory.

Delingpole believes it it possible to see dangerous conspiracies in watermelons , instead of the more usual "through the radio" or "under the bed", if only you stare at them long enough.

Rather like staring at the sun, really.

Brohm, of unfixed gender, correctly notes that watermelons are green on the outside but red on the inside.

Watermelons, Brohm goes on and on to say, want to set up a one world government where where you are prescribed how you live. The watermelons have no use for  economics or liberty. They still believe in the "Noble Savage" - can you imagine ?

It went on and on, in a similar disjointed vane, as conspiracy theorists tend to do : both in the sheer length and in the extreme - can we say labile ? - free association jumpiness.

But that last bit - about watermelons opposing liberty and  supporting Noble Savage ideals - stopped me cold.

My blood literally ran cold : I should explain my father spent the better part of his life trying to instill a bit of logical thinking into callow undergraduates, as part of his job as a professor in philosophy.

This why I do not blame our poor Mr or Ms Brohm - the poor dear is just a victim of misguided permissive, relativist, teachers.

My father would have politely asked Brohm to describe their vision of  the idea of Liberty and then to describe their vision of the idea of the Noble Savage.

(Pause.)

Then my father would ask the rest of the class if they disagree or not with claims of the vast bulk of History's  sharpest thinkers, who held the Noble Savage to be the purest known example of Absolute Liberty.

Undergraduate Brohm would sink ever lower into the seat throughout all of this,  but would learn a valuable lesson on first running random thoughts through the mind's logic machine before releasing them via the mouth.

This generation of climate change denying conspiracy freaks are the sad result of  the majority of our parents, teachers and media encouraging kids to take up wholesale relativism and new age psycho-babble : the spoiled-rotten "Its All About Me Generation".

Or maybe it isn't permissive 'teaching" ---- maybe it is true : maybe it is all the fluoride they put in the Kool-Aid that the climate denying conspiracy freaks drink.

Climate Debate isn't about Science but about Synapses, mis-firing synapses

Who knows ? I just know that these guys aren't like you and me : my synapses are firing slower and slower these days , but these guys ?

Firing at hyper-warp speed, in overtime.

The only way to end the overly-long climate change debate is not with hockey sticks or  verbal violence but with CAT SCANS.

Bring 'em on : I'll put my brain wiring up against that of  James Delingpole, N. Brohm and all the other ADHD deniers any old time......