Hysteria

Lubos Motl
assistant professor, Cambridge, USA

from Lubos Motl's blog "The Reference Frame" Feb.07

...This hysteria occurs at the same time when the climate is cooling from 2005, the number of Atlantic hurricanes has dropped by 70 percent from the previous year, and most of the evidence for an "exceptional global warming" such as the "hockey stick graph" is being debunked by the scientific panel of the National Academy of Sciences, another panel ordered by the U.S. lawmakers, and by other scientists.

This hysteria clearly doesn't depend on science in any substantial way. If you look at these 16,800 articles, most of them are nothing else than pure crap. They offer ever crazier catastrophic predictions and ever more insane ideas how to fight with the alleged "problem" to ever less educated and ever more manipulable readers who are exerting ever more irrational pressure on the politicians. The articles blame ever more unrelated events on the global warming. The current standard is that every person who dies under the sunny skies was killed by the global warming; however, the newspapers are always very careful not to mention the climate when they write about the 25,000 Britons who froze in 2005, among dozens of similar examples.

The ecoactivists are suing the U.S. president (30 minutes ago). Various politicians want to create new committees and policies to feel even more important and attractive for the environmentalist activists than they have ever been and other politicians are doing the same thing because they are just scared by these loud and obnoxious ecoterrorists and their semi-serious allies who have literally flooded the universities, companies, and newspapers.

Both second class as well as third class scientists are presenting their irrational views on the climate that have nothing to do with their actual research. It is described how it is important to exterminate or at least eliminate all the "skeptics" who are surely being uniformly paid by the evil oil corporations. The skeptics are painted as a fringe negligible minority; nevertheless they seem capable to halt the whole international movement to fight against the "climate change".

These articles are being written by thousands of journalists who are either intellectually challenged so that they can't figure out that what they write makes no sense, or they are heavily influenced by their personal interest to be interesting, important, and to produce a lot of fictitious "stories" because these "stories" are sold well - especially to the least demanding readers. These stories are also easy to write down and it doesn't matter whether they're completely unsubstantiated because thousands of other, similarly corrupt journalists are writing the very same things so there is never any reason to be worried or to feel guilty: the group-think also acts as a nearly perfect group-shield. In many cases, the journalists suffer of both of the problems mentioned above and several more...