Harms

9/6/2014

Hi all. I'm working on a side project, and I ask for your help.

Have you been harmed by others' judgments or perceptions of you as a climate skeptic? Please send me your stories.

Climate skeptic is broad and vague, but what matters here are others' perceptions of you as questioning human-caused warming, or questioning or doubting its future severity, and so forth.

By harmed I mean things like discrimination at work or in business, or damage to personal relationships of all kinds, due to others' perceptions of you on this topic. For example, has it ever come up in a job interview or promotion? (Seems like it wouldn't come up, but there's a lot of variance in what happens in interviews, and sometimes people will just have casual conversations about whatever, and political or social issues can come up.)

Are any of you stereotyped or marginalized as cranks, conspiracy nuts, "deniers", etc. in your workplaces? Have people ascribed any other views to you based on you being climate skeptic?

Now I wonder about something more specific. Have any of the Lewandowsky scams come up yet in real life? For example, have has anyone assumed that you believed the moon landings were a hoax? Have people assumed that you don't think that HIV causes AIDS, or that smoking causes lung cancer? Have any of these specific issues popped up?

Moreover, did people who know that you're pro-free market or an economic conservative (for Europeans, I mean an economic liberal) think that you dispute that HIV causes AIDS?

The vector here is from the journal inexplicably publishing the Lewandowsky scam paper --> the various media outlets that covered it --> people read the articles and carry the false associations in their minds.

For example, there were articles in Mother Jones, the New York Times, and countless other places, that repeated the false claims made by Psychological Science and Lewandowsky. I'm wondering to what extent it's out there in the streets, so to speak. There are 7 billion people on earth, and I think any false psychology findings ascribing beliefs to a large group of people and reported in the mainsteam media will have an impact on some number of people.

Here are some examples of what I mean:

You go out on a first date, or several dates, then the other person learns about a view you hold and they end it. This happens all the time on anything. They learn that you're an atheist and it's over (happened to me once.) Or that you're a Baptist. They learn that you're a liberal/Democrat. Or that you're a conservative/Republican. These are dealbreakers for extremely partisan people where a large part of their moral identities and self-concept is tied up in their political affiliation.

You're at work and you say something about your views on human-caused warming, maybe minimize it's long-term impact. It has a chilling effect, and coworkers see you differently from that point on, think you're a nut, don't invite you to happy hour, etc. I'm guessing this is rare. In such a case, the coworkers would likely have to be very political and caught up in the "denier" narrative. I'm even more interested in cases where the Lewandowsky scams popped up, where someone said something like "Do you think the moon landings were a hoax?" or whispered to others that you dispute that HIV causes AIDS, after reading some junk article by Chris Mooney passing on the false findings.

And again, this doesn't have to be about climate skepticism necessarily. The false associations about AIDS and smoking were linked to pro-free market views, not climate skepticism, but I think all this would likely be jumbled together in the minds of people who read a hit piece in the media.

If you have any experiences you think are relevant here, please send me your stories. Thank you!

13 Comments

Fernando Leanme link

9/6/2014 09:55:50 am

Jose, I have never run into a problem like that. But I had a tough reputation and I never debated climate sensitivity at work. We ran projects to study how to sequester CO2, discussed Arctic ice characteristics, things like that. But our shop was mostly professionals who didn't get into extremism openly. Some even wore ties.

I did run into a violent reaction from a dude from Los Alamos Lab who got mad when I criticized Bush. But later we became sort of friends.

I talked to a young guy about your question and he said his friends are all global warming nuts. They laugh at him if he questions conventional wisdom. For example, they are convinced the temperature is climbing steeply and all hurricanes are caused by global warming. He carries a plot of the temperature from Berkeley earth to show them and they even refuse to look at it. It's like they got religion.

Joe Duarte

9/7/2014 12:18:51 pm

Hi Fernando -- I'm surprised that they think temperature is climbing steeply, since it's not true on the surface, and ocean temps never move steeply. I wonder where they got that idea. The way some people try to deny the pause is puzzling to me -- it's just temp data, not a theory, not inferred. I think the SS crowd tried to call the "slowdown" a myth, which was even more puzzling since using the word slowdown is usually how people try to spin the pause.

In my experience laypeople who are big into AGW activism don't know anything about the science -- they're just using a heuristic about the rumor of a consensus, and they think believing in the consensus signifies greater rationality or moral virtue. Skeptics often know more, but I think they're missing the big picture, know just enough to get into trouble so to speak. Kahan found that skeptics know more of the science, but I don't know what was asked.

I'm very curious if your friend ever got any of the Lewandowsky scams thrown in his face, or if people just ignore and marginalize him. Research tells us that people often use individuating information when available, instead of stereotypes, so I'm guessing in a lot of cases what people know about a person will trump what they read about that category of person in the NYT or Mother Jones. The false associations and attributions are more likely to be a factor in interactions with strangers.

MikeR

9/6/2014 03:23:50 pm

Jose, I don't know if you want negative reports, but I don't even know anyone who cares about global warming. I have never talked to anyone about it off the internet. I think my experience is probably pretty typical in the United States; there are lots of people who claim to be concerned about AGW, but hardly anyone who really cares enough to do anything at all. Some politicians, that's about it, and I never talk to politicians.

9/7/2014 06:00:39 am

Thanks Mike. I remember when I was in Chapel Hill, NC, and met an atheist meetup group. They felt like they were under seige -- they weren't academics, but professionals in all sorts of jobs, and they felt like they couldn't possibly allow their coworkers to discover that they were atheists. There are pockets of that kind of things all over America, especially the south and maybe the midwest. Phoenix would definitely not be a good place to be an atheist at work.

It's the same politics -- completely context-specific I imagine. I was thinking most about normal non-academic work settings, but now I'm wondering if academia would be the place for most of the harms. But I can imagine a strong environmentalist culture in some workplaces, say in Seattle or the Bay Area, where half of the people drive Priuses or ride bikes, and they're dogmatic environmentalists who would ostracize someone who carries a temperature plot minimizing the purported harms of warming, as Fernando mentioned.

I've been places where someone voting for Bush was a huge revelation and scandal, and somewhere else where someone falsely assumed I liked Bush because my libertarian views were simply encoded as conservative/Republican (they didn't know what libertarian meant.) People get judged all the time by all camps depending on the context. Climate has become a remarkably charged issue, and the consequences of scientific corruption like Lewandowsky's and the journal's planting of false associations are very interesting to me.

John M.

9/8/2014 04:55:08 am

Not exactly on topic, but this did make me think of Lawrence Keeley's book War Before Civilization, which deals with political/assumption biases on archaeology and anthropology, where he talks about how research funding can hinge in not conflicting with the prevailing opinions in the field. Not sure if you've seen this book, but it's relevant to the broader issue of politics and assumptions bussing science.

9/11/2014 02:22:07 am

Here is a blog-commenter's attack on Matt Ridley that ascribes him Lewandowsky-inferred denial due to his free market beliefs (found at this odious blog http://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2014/09/09/matt-ridley-you-seem-a-little-too-certain/).

"Ridley’s political philosophy appears to be the very epitome of laissez faire economics: "I believe that economic liberty leads to greater opportunities for the poor to become less poor, which is why I am in favour of it." Market liberalism and social liberalism go hand in hand in my view. These opinions have famously been shown to be associated with climate change denial by Lewandowsky "endorsement of a laissez-faire conception of free-market economics predicts rejection of climate science""

Thankfully blogpinions are very different to face-to-face real life contact and I haven't experienced anything like this myself, though the 97% stat has come up numerous times in my personal discussions.

In other news, my 'humanist' girlfriend decided to break up with me when I (also an atheist) opined that it was hard to rule out the possibility of *some* prime-mover creative force or other outside of physics starting the Universe a-turning. She's a charmer.

9/11/2014 03:39:20 am

Interesting. The correlation between enthusiasm for markets and climate change skepticism is almost certainly real. Though I don't know if being pro-markets makes one *likely* to be a skeptic, which is a different question and more relevant to such inferences. Correlation conceals a lot, and doesn't mean quite what people think.

Lewandowsky actually had data for that correlation; there would've been over 100 skeptics. I'm most interested in the false associations he planted, like the false linkage of pro-market views to rejecting the idea that HIV causes AIDS. There was no data there, just his statistical incompetence and malpractice. And then of course the fraudulent title linking moon hoaxism to climate hoaxism (de facto skepticism to readers), which turned out to be based on 3 people in a study was unpublishable junk from the beginning because it was just an uncontrolled online study that anyone in the world of any age could participate in or scam even though it was only about US conspiracy theories and Western politics, with broken items, bad measures, etc.

His free market endorsement measure is invalid, deeply biased to the point that it's likely to be awkward and confusing for pro-market respondents, and the items are bad just by basic psychometric standards, confusing and double-barrelled, of unclear direction. He's a comprehensive junk peddler -- so many of the measures, the items, are junky. But... I'm sure we'll still get correlations between pro-market views and climate change skepticism when we use good measures too -- we'll just have a more accurate and valid association at that point. (And there are many flavors of "climate change skepticism")

Your story was interesting too -- an atheist once broke up with me for being an atheist, which isn't something you see every day. Well "broke up" is strong since we had only gone out a couple of times. She said she wanted to be able to send the kids to church or something, and that her parents were religious and things would go more smoothly if I weren't an atheist. It seemed like she was getting way, way ahead of things, but I also was horrified that an atheist would want to send children to a church for moral finishing. She changed her mind two days later, but it didn't work out...

9/12/2014 01:54:15 am

Ha, that's a weird one. Sounds like she lacked the conviction of her atheism, whereas my girlfriend was too rigid. For her any agnostic allowance - no matter how flippant - was taken as an acknowledgment of Christianity as a plausible belief system. Interesting inability to distinguish, and is I suppose an example of what can happen where atheism is born of vehemently detesting religion, rather than just putting it to one side as implausible. For example she wouldn't 'get' a literary appreciation of the Song of Soloman, it would be too intertwined with the idea of it as scripture.

Apologies for the digression.

I take the point on the free-market endorsement / cli-scepticism link. I looked at the climate issue before I became politically engaged. I'm in my twenties and had never really applied myself politically until I started reading about climate (starting with Montford's 'HSI', then climategate-related commentary, then on to McIntyre etc) where my preconceptions got pretty much pulped and I started looking at the wider implications of what I was reading (energy policies, environmental policies etc).

I'm interested that more people aren't coming forward as being linked with the HIV, smoking or the moon-landing conspiracies. People (journalists, bloggers, politicians) seem happy enough to use the links against 'deniers'/'sceptics' as a broad-brush put down, but to target identifiable individuals is much more risky and falsifiable, e.g. Brad Keyes was able to catch Dana Nuccitelli trou-down on his Lindzen smoking defamation.

anng

10/22/2014 11:48:14 pm

The best thing to do is define God as the 'ultimate force of the universe' and no-one can deny His existence. This does of course, mean that He's not outside the universe (which is not completely described by physics). But it does normally help folk to be OK with other people's opinions.Although, I have found my grandchildren of 6 and 8 years quarrelling rather badly about creation ...

Brad Keyes link

9/16/2014 05:17:19 pm

This is like a negative result, only more verbose. :-D

Fortunately, thanks to the imperceptible and irrelevant nature of climate change itself to human beings, nobody I know has much occasion to mention it unless I'm stupid enough to bring it up, or unless it's an election year.

I almost lost one of my closest friends by bringing it up, mainly because his conditioning made him jump to the insulting conclusion that I'd been listening uncritically to what dishonest pro-tobacco, pro-fossil fuel scientists were saying. He never thought that I was any of those things *myself,* however. (Nor did he think I was a conservative or free-market absolutist—he knows me too well for that.)

He also persisted in thinking, for many months, that I was *ignoring* the evidence he kept referring me to (which he'd been taught to believe was overwhelmingly cogent, though it was insipid to the point of meaninglessness).

So it was the stereotype of climate skepticism as a self-deceptive faith system rooted in both credulity (of dodgy sources) and dismissal (of several pyramids of "evidence") that I found insulting, refractory and incompatible with pleasant discussion of the topic.

Being the quick learners that we both are according to our academic transcripts, we stopped pouring acid on our friendship within mere years. :-D

The damage done by Lewandowsky-style rhetoric is less to us as social beings, I suspect, than it is to our ability to be heard on climate change. Its purpose—or at least its effect—is to discredit us before we even open our mouths (*on this topic*). We barely ever get a minute of mainstream airtime in Australia because the media simply take it for granted that whatever we say will be reducible to crank conspiracist ideation.

Lewandowsky doesn't need us thrown in prison, like Soviet dissidents. Just silenced.

9/16/2014 05:27:35 pm

Jose,

you may want to ask Dennis Jensen MP (tweet @DennisJensenMP), the only PhD scientist in Australian parliament, how his well-known skepticism has harmed him.

geoff chambers link

1/9/2015 08:28:38 am

It's an indication of how small the sceptical world is that I feel I know two of your previous commenters intimately.
Fernando comments frequently on climate articles at the British Guardian. He is one of the few sceptical voices heard there, because the rest of us have been banned. I've been banned five times, under different names, despite the fact that I've responded politely to aggressive comments, including one from a Guardian contributor (his unique contribution, afaik was an adulatory interview with one John Cook about his religious beliefs) who made derogatory remarks about the size of my virile member (a comment which is still up) and expressed a desire to bend me over a table and roger me, (despite the fact that we've never met, let alone been properly introduced).
There's a lovely irony in the fact that the Guardian's opinion pieces are labelled CommentisFree (or, in my preferred version, Kommentmachtfrei) from the slogan of a famous early 20th century editor of the Guardian, CP Scott: “Comment is free, but facts are sacred”. CP Scott, as I discovered quite recently, is my great-great uncle.
Brad Keyes is Australian. That's all I know about him, except that he wrote something once that I found so funny that I put it on my blog.
Being banned from commenting at my preferred journal counts for me as “being harmed by others' judgments or perceptions of [me] as a climate skeptic”. Imagine a New York liberal prevented from communicating with the New York Times. This is the kind of ruling made by courts which prevent violent ex-husbands from approaching their ex-wives.
I also consider the cooling of friendship because of a difference of opinion about climate change at least as harmful as “discrimination at work or in business”. Is that a symptom of my left-wing bias? I don't think so.
I've published several articles on my blog about two shows at the Royal Court Theatre, London which exhibited global warming hysteria of the most extreme kind by two scientists who are charlatans in the Lewandowsky mould - Stephen Emmott and Chris Rapley- in the course of which I criticised the director of their two one-man-shows, a highly respected figure in the London theatre world who has frequently expressed her green credo.
It so happens that one of my few remaining friends in my native country is a writer whose plays have been directed by this person, and he was naturally upset that I should criticise her, so that a google search of her name should turn up a reference to my site. I tried to justify my criticisms, and it turned out that my friend, a well-informed intellectual, was entirely unaware that temperatures hadn't risen for eighteen years. He read the Guardian and he just didn't know.
I've read the Guardian all my life, but for the past six years I've been comparing it to Pravda. There's a difference though, because no Russian intellectual has take any notice of what Pravda says since at least 1948. British intellectuals continue to trust the Guardian (as US intellectuals trust the NYT or the Los Angeles Times).
I'm a bit of a lone voice on the climate sceptic blogosphere, arguing for a sociological analysis of climate hysteria. Most climate sceptics are right wing, for obvious reasons, and are therefore suspicious of the social sciences, just as most social scientists are left-wing, for obvious reasons, and therefore follow the herd. I'm not complaining, merely making the observation of a social scientist manqué.

Bradley Keyes link

1/9/2015 12:45:21 pm

If it isn't my old accomplice Geoff Chambers! Small skeptical world, as they say.

"I'm a bit of a lone voice on the climate sceptic blogosphere, arguing for a sociological analysis of climate hysteria."

I'm not 100% confident what sociology is, but it sounds scientific so I'll second your petition.

"Most climate sceptics are right wing, for obvious reasons,"

Sure, most of the active, out-of-the-closet climate infidels would appear to sympathise in that direction.

"just as most social scientists are left-wing, for obvious reasons,"

They may be obvious, but could you indulge my learning difficulties and list them anyway?

"That's all I know about him, except that he wrote something once that I found so funny that I put it on my blog."

I haven't told you this, but nobody had ever laughed at my comments before. In fact it was your encouragement, more than any other factor, that empowered me to start my own comedy blog.

I hope you can live with yourself.

Harms

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José L. Duarte

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