[MCN] Naomi Oreskes : When climate scientists avoid emotion -> underestimation of dangers

[Lance Olsen]

Excerpt : Well, I think there’s a couple of things going on here. I think one of the things is intimidation. I think the political pressure on the scientific community, even though scientists would like to believe that they’re immune from intimidation, uh, they’re human beings and I think they are influenced. There’s been so much political pressure on the climate science community. To not be “alarmist,” to not exaggerate, I think that they’ve bent over backwards. And the result has been the systematic slight underestimation that we talked about.

But it also has to do with certain intrinsic values of science. Scientists have a certain vision of rationality. And that vision, which goes back to Descartes, is that to be rational is the opposite of being emotional. And this is also leading with a lot of gender stereotypes and gender prejudices. So if you have a result that is very dramatic, it tends to evoke an emotional response. And part of avoiding emotion is to avoid claims that could trigger emotion.

I always tell people they need to read Antonio Damasio, who’s the most important scientist in America, because his work has shown that when you reason, the emotional centers of your brain are involved as well. And when people’s emotional centers are damaged, they make bad decisions. 

So this is why when I hear people say, you know, well, we have to calm down and be rational about this, we have to put emotions aside — for me, giant red flags.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/09/naomi-oreskes-on-changing-public-opinion-on-climate-change.html <http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/09/naomi-oreskes-on-changing-public-opinion-on-climate-change.html>

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"No one wanted to pay attention to the implications of a world four degrees warmer… It's too horrendous to think about.  And no one talked about it. 

"Then a few scientists said let's have a conference and actually talk about it. They held this conference in Oxford and I went along. 

"As the conference started, there was a kind of suppressed emotional intensity, except in the coffee breaks. It was then that I would buttonhole a couple of scientists and say: 'Well, you know we're speculating about this. But what do you really think is the situation?' And one of them just looked at me and said: 'We're f--ked.'" — Clive Hamilton 
 
Paul Kennedy. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Thursday September 07, 2017
http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/are-we-f-ked-decoding-the-resistance-to-climate-change-1.4277614



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