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A few years ago, I received an email from Pär Holmgren, the weather forecaster and climate pundit, with connections to the Club of Rome and who later became tutor for a child prophet.
Now he wanted to discuss something he referred to as 'Climate Psychology'.
The backstory is that we know each other from high school - we were classmates. Over the years, we met on a few occasions over a cup of coffee to discuss descriptive and explanatory aspects of the climate. Flying was of particular interest for Mr Holmgren as well as the public diet.
Recommended reading: The dangers of worrying about doomsday (Pinker).
Mr. Holmgren sees himself equivalent to a professor:
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| Picture 1. Pär Holmgren, a former weather forecaster turned climate pundit,compare his undergraduate education with being a professor. |
And like the Club of Rome, Mr Holmgren is convinced that the Earth is doomed and we have to act now. And by acting now, these people mean that we need to stop flying and switch to a plant-based diet.
Facts point in a different direction:
- Mr Holmgren is halfway through his doctorate.
- Climate is a process where trace gases move in a cyclic fashion between five spheres: the atmosphere, the biosphere, the cryosphere, the hydrosphere, and the pedosphere or the lithosphere. Central for this process in the carbon cycle. During the Cambrian, when visible life emerged on planet Earth, the atmosphere contained 10-15 times more carbon dioxide, 4-10 % Oxygen, and the temperature was 50 % higher. Since then, the oxygen levels has doubled, 90 % the CO2 has moved from the atmosphere to the bedrock, forests, and the seas. And it has only gotten colder.
- aeroplanes account for ~ 4% of greenhouse gases.
- Food production does cause the release of greenhouse gases from burping cows - methane is released into the atmosphere. But the methane transforms into carbon dioxide within ten to twelve years through a process called hydroxyl oxidation. And a similar amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) is consumed by plants through photosynthesis. This cycle is referred to as the Biogenic Carbon cycle. White and Hall (2017).
- most welfare diseases are associated with the consumption of [refined] carbohydrates (Ref:Harcombe (blog), Lustig (2009, 2017), Malhotra (2017, 2018), Noakes, Teicholz, (2014, 2015),Yudkin (1972/1986)).
- the introduction of meat consumption (from grazing animals) more than two million years ago explains the emergence of the human neocortex that accommodates higher-order thinking - that is the mind which is studied by psychologists (Aiello och Wheeler, 1995; Pontzer et al. 2016; Pringle, 2016).
- People who abstain from animal source Good also report neuroticism, anxiety, and depression (Forestell och Nezlek, 2018, Nezlek, Forestell och Newman, 2018).
Psychology is the science of behavior and mind, including conscious and unconscious phenomena, as well as feelings and thoughts (Wikipedia), and relate essentially to three areas: motivation, emotions, and cognition.
Motivation is 'the driver of behavior' and constitutes, together with emotions, so-called PRIMEs (Buck, 1985). Emotions include disgust, anger, sadness, fear, the experience of surprise, joy, and curiosity to name a few. These PRIME:s are part of the human decision-making process including mental fallacies like Negativity bias the notion that, even when of equal intensity, things of a more negative nature have a greater effect on one's psychological state and processes than neutral or positive things - and our desire to explore. Motivation and emotions are non-declarative, that is, it is not possible to declare all the decision rules underlying these processes.
"Memories convey information forward in time for the computational use in the indefinite future" (Gallistel, 2017).Cognition concerns information processing, learning, language and reasoning, creativity [for problem-solving] as well as imagery, forward in time (Diamond, 2013 Gilbert & Wilson, 2007 Seligman m fl, 2016), and are to some extent declarative, i.e., can be communicated to others without loss of information, but mostly non-declarative. Prospective thinking in partly based on on episodic memories which are constructive in social manner (Schacter & Addis, 2007).
Lurking in the mental shadows are the fallacies - systematic patterns of deviation from norm and/or rationality in judgment. In 1993 psychologist Kieth Stanovich coined the term dysrationalia - the inability to think and behave rationally despite adequate intelligence (Wikipedia). It can be used as an umbrella term for the more than 200 mental fallacies. But here's an interesting example.
During the 1950s housewife Dorothy Martin claimed that the Earth was doomed and would be consumed by sea level rise. Like doomsayers before her, she had no rational argument. Instead she claimed the beings from the planet Clarion had sent her the warning and those who believed would be saved. By a spaceship. This led social psychologist Leon Festinger to coin the term cognitive dissonance:
an unpleasant psychological state resulting from inconsistency between two or more elements in a cognitive system. It is presumed to involve a state of heightened arousal and to have characteristics similar to physiological drives (e.g., hunger). Thus, cognitive dissonance creates a motivational drive in an individual to reduce the dissonance (see dissonance reduction). See also cognitive consonance (APA).On page three in the report, the researchers, with reference to an event, wrote:
A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts and figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see the point.In a series of experiments, psychologists Amos Tversky (1937-1996) and Daniel Kahneman demonstrated that when the future is uncertain, mental fallacies take over the mind and suppress prospective thinking.
The Swedish National Committee for Psychology has listed 26 sub-fields for psychology. Climate psychology is not included in that list, so in order to get a definition, one has to use the format used for the other sub-areas. A sub-area that intuitively can be assumed to be close to climate psychology is environmental psychology:
Environmental psychology is the area of psychology where applied and basic interdisciplinary research is conducted with the purpose of establishing and explaining the relationship between physical environment and human psychological responses as well as establishing and explaining how human actions influence the physical environment.A slight change in the text's introduction provides a reasonable definition of climate psychology:
Climate Psychology is the area of psychology where applied and basic interdisciplinary research is conducted with the purpose of establishing and explaining the relationship between the current climate and people's psychological responses as well as establishing and explaining how people's actions influence the climate.'Old but gold' knowledge (Dunker, K.(1945). On Problem Solving Wertheimer, M (1945). Productive Thinking) says that declarative symbolic representations presented in a prospective perspective (goals) create problems [spaces], which affects attention and trigger curiosity and motivation to solve the problem (attain the goal). Modern research has confirmed not only that proposition (Locke & Latham, 2002 Fenke & Schutze, 2008/2009), but that intentional prospection is the centerpiece of thinking forward in time (Szpunar et al. 2014). Accordingly, Leadership, for example, is defined as a process where one individual influences many other individuals to achieve a common goal.
Perhaps the most infamous goal-statement is John F Kennedy's (1917-1963) two speeches, one to the Congress to raise money, the other to the American people to trigger their motivation to learn new things and apply their innate creative ability to, before the end of the 1960s, place a person on the surface of the moon. Kennedy's statement established Symbolic Convergence, a common view of something clear and challenging (Bormann, 1982), and meaning (Garfield, 1987).
a generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people; harnessing the power of the Sun to enrich our lives as we move away from our crippling dependence on foreign oil (Jimmy Carter)Almost 20 years later, in 1979, Jimmy Carter, US President 1977-1981, used a similar rhetorical technique when he mounted 32 solar panels at the White House. It was a symbolic act aimed at pointing people's attention to a relatively new technology to extract energy as well as trigger peoples motivation and curiosity to learn more about the matter. However, Carter had some obstacles to overcome. The efficacy of solar panels was low at this time. They were also expensive. It should be added that relatively few people were interested in the environment and the climate. Carter's successor, Ronald Reagan (1911-2004), had a different view on environmental/climate issues and in 1986 he decided that the panels should be taken off the White House (A Brief History of White House Solar Panels). That probably delayed the work to develop solar panels with better efficacy and lower price. The panels then ended up in a few different places in the world (Where Did the Carter White House's Solar Panels Go?).
What has happened since ~ 1980s?
Through the technological development that began in the USA in the 1950s (Markoff, 2015), we now have better tools to measure and display information, including the climate). NASA's climate data is now available to all and shows, for example, that the proportion of particles in the atmosphere has varied a lot during the last 400,000 years, that is, during what is called Pleistocene (2.58 Mya - 11 600 before present), known as the Ice-age, but which in reality was an epoch with many ice-ages.
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| The graph showing variation of atmospheric CO2 for the past 400 000 years (NASA) |
The Pleistocene was marked by unstable weather, and during that time, our ancestors lived a lifestyle referred to as hunting & gathering. This was a time with low levels of atmospheric CO2.
The curve's so-called amplitude varies between 180 to 280 ppm, compared to >5000 ppm during the Cambrian. The most recent upturn began with the introduction of the Epipaleolithic (~25 000 years before the present). That's when our ancestors first settled in the Middle East (Hodder, 2018). However, unlike previous peaks, the increase did not stop as it approached 300 ppm. Instead, it continued to reach levels of today: 400 ppm. But is 400 ppm really a record high and are emissions of greenhouses equally distributed across the globe?
First, climate is not a short term phenomenon, the climate has existed since the creation of the Earth about 4.6 billion years ago. But to understand climate, the Chronostratigraphic chart uses the last 12%, which is marked by the introduction of the Phanerozoic era and the Cambrian explosion 540 million years before the present, when the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide was >5000 ppm. Since then, most (~90%) of the CO2, through something called the Carbon cycle, has moved from the atmosphere to the bedrock, forests, and the seas. Some of that CO2 is now leaking back into the atmosphere.
And if you only look at the western world, the picture looks different. In the United States, emissions of particles to the atmosphere have decreased by 40% and sulfur dioxide by 80% over the last 30 years (Pinker, Is the World getting better or worse? A look at the numbers, TED). As the global proportion of particles in the atmosphere has increased during the same period it must be concluded that emissions continue to increase elsewhere in the world. But where?
... the Aral Sea has been shrinking since the 1960s after the rivers that fed it were diverted by Soviet irrigation projects. By 1997, it had declined to 10% of its original size, splitting into four lakes – the North Aral Sea, the eastern and western basins of the once far larger South Aral Sea, and one smaller intermediate lake. By 2009, the southeastern lake had disappeared and the southwestern lake had retreated to a thin strip at the western edge of the former southern sea; in subsequent years, occasional water flows have led to the southeastern lake sometimes being replenished to a small degree. Satellite images taken by NASA in August 2014 revealed that for the first time in modern history the eastern basin of the Aral Sea had completely dried up. The eastern basin is now called the Aralkum Desert(Wikipedia).During the 1900s, the Marxist autocracy Soviet Union (1917-1991) wiped out the 68,000 square-kilometer Aral Sea to water cotton crops and farmland. The purpose was to show that Western democratic capitalism did not stand in comparison with Marxism. A whole ecology was sacrificed on the altar of communism according to the principle: if you want to make an omelet, you have to crack some eggs. Here is a detailed description from the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe: Drainage Basin of the Aral Sea Surface Waters in Central Asia.
On the same premise, another Marxist autocracy - China - entered the scene and gave the West an offer of commodity production no one in the West could compete with; In closed dictatorships, there is no international control, and the Chinese factories did not take into account labor laws or aspects of the environment/climate.
As a parallel example, a study in Nature shows that the lion's share (86%) of the plastic in our oceans comes from Asian countries. Also via popular science in Where Is the Plastic in the Ocean Coming From? Try Asia. Note: Central- & North America, and Europe together contribute 1.22%.
Also compare the development of two car brands, Trabant produced under Marxist principles in Communist East Germany and Audi, produced by the standards of Democratic West Germany.
However, in the 1980s China began to implement principles for the market economy. As a result, extreme poverty within the country fell, from 88% in 1981 to just 1.85 % in 2013 (Our World in Data). And at Swedish Vinnova's annual conference 2010, a Chinese mayor announced that he and another 249 of 650 Chinese mayors had decided to create Eco-cities.
Conclusion. The main function of the mind is to form intentional prospects. We do that by using a combination of memories and perceptions. That means that the information mentioned above, together with the information in our minds, "convey information forward in time for computational use in the indefinite future" (Galistel, 2017). This way of thinking is challenged by the many mental fallacies - simplified: Dysrationalia.
Marxism has never brought anything good to us humans.
Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas which is needed for photosynthesis.
Despite claims about the opposite, most things on Earth are better than ever (Pinker, 2018). In his TED talk mentioned above, Dr. Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at Harvard University, argues that people who call themselves intellectuals hate progress. These people are progressofobics, i.e., accommodates an irrational fear for progress.
Epilogue. Dr. Hans Rosling (1948-2017), who was a professor of global health, spoke at his lectures about the problem of ignorance. Instead of elaborating scenarios based on validated facts about the current state, people in general use [unstable] memories from the 1980s. Dr. Rosling most likely borrowed a phenomenon from psychological research called “Perception versus facts”.
Read about Pär Holmgren's disciple who promotes School strike for the climate "Perception versus facts" Is School Strike for Climate just another Doomsday Prophecy? (UH).
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