[MCN] “Global warming” and “climate change” fail to convey the dangers

[Lance Olsen]

“Global warming” and “climate change” are disasters at conveying our environmental predicament

https://qz.com/1539285/global-warming-and-climate-change-are-disasters-at-conveying-our-environmental-predicament/ <https://qz.com/1539285/global-warming-and-climate-change-are-disasters-at-conveying-our-environmental-predicament/>

Excerpt
“Global warming” was never the right term to use. It doesn’t come close to capturing the catastrophe that’s in our foyer and about to sweep through the house. “Climate change,” which has largely replaced “global warming” in the 2010s, is a bit better, but still doesn’t do the trick—likely because those same bad-faith actors that twisted “global warming” have done the same to “climate change.” Consider, as Michael Coren wrote for Quartz earlier this week <https://qz.com/1535932/global-warming-will-hit-states-supporting-donald-trump-hardest/>, that up and down the mostly deep-red Mississippi River Valley, Republican mayors, after facing $200 billion in climate-related damages over the past decade, have begun to push climate-change adaptation policies that buck the party line of their DC colleagues—but have only been able to do so by avoiding calling it “climate change.” Instead, they call it “disaster resistance” or “disaster preparedness.”

As Politico reported earlier this week, the main takeaway from the annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society was exactly that: “Climate change” carries too much political baggage <https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/01/27/climate-change-politics-224295>. This is silly, but nontrivial. And, to be fair, whatever it took to get us here, those local legislators in the cities by the Mississippi are in fact being quite accurate with their terminology. This is a disaster, and we need to be prepared.


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“That social influences shape every person’s practices, judgments and beliefs is a truism to which anyone will readily assent."

“How, and to what extent, do social forces constrain people’s opinions and attitudes? This question is especially pertinent in our day.”

Solomon E. Asch. Opinions and Social Pressure.

Scientific American. November 1955

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“Thirty-five years ago, Yale psychologist Irving Janis published an essay in the Yale Alumni Magazine explaining how a group of intelligent people working together to solve a problem can sometimes arrive at the worst possible answer.”

"Members consider loyalty to the group the highest form of morality.”

“Nobody today says, My area is groupthink. But what emerged subsequent to groupthink was an area called "judgment and decision making," which is one of the most important areas in all of psychology. In fact Danny Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel Prize based on his research into how rational people make irrational decisions.

Philip Zimbardo '59PhD
Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Stanford University

https://yalealumnimagazine.com/articles/1947/a-brief-history-of-groupthink





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