19 Comments

I was pretty concerned the first time the world was going to end back in the 1980's. I have gotten used to it by now.

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LOL.

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Great book except, fearing the "conspiracy theory label", the book denies that cultural entities (social organisms) can be designed and controlled for nefarious purposes by powerful ruling class organs through scripting of cultural entity narratives! The evidence is overwhelming after studying the activities of the Rockefeller Foundation complex, the Bilderberg Group, the Council on Foreign Relations, Chatham House, the Trilateral Commission, etc.

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Thank you for your review of Andy A. West's important book regarding the psychology of climate catastrophism - and for the link to a PDF of his book.

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Very nice review Leap.

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Thanks so much for promoting this book. I'm perhaps late to the game so don't understand the driving forces behind climatism. Looks like I'm about to learn.

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Really great article. Loved it. Big fan of Shellenberger, Koonin and Curry.

People don’t function rationally when they are fearful and have anxiety. I truly believe many of them are frightened and anxious all the time about climate change. It is the only reason I can think of that they would behave this way. I hate to see anyone living in constant fear. I think many of these young people are suffering. Probably explains the amount of anti depressants that get sold every year

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I think you might have a solid thesis on the anti depressants. Slowly but surely I’m hearing more and more people taking them. It’s actually quite disturbing.

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Sounds like a good book. Culture is quite a broad aspect of human interaction with many pieces and dynamics, as a type subtle in operation, and many different aspects are analyzed to reveal features of operation. In the 'Project State' Charles Maier describes the explosion of 'governance' (aka civil society) since the late 70s, the establishment of bodies within knowledge/skill/topic domains by practitioners based on 'self evident' benefit. This has been fertile soil and instrument of the wack woke or New Puritan wave through administrative orgs in education, government, social science fields, business, and even hard science. The neutrality of science toward ethics, the position that ethics are personal private beliefs, has logically morphed into forcing the democratic right of persons to destroy themselves, students to not socialize toward challenge and stable emotions, adults to sink into addiction, and punitive censoring, deplatforming, and explusion/termination of critics. In science 'correct' conclusions are imposed prior to research results being obtained and analyzed. A munchausen bureaucracy has been created in social fields, that feathers its nest with ever more victim clients, human wreckage it can empathize to death, at a high salary of course. A common feature of the religious like aspect is victim worship, Mother Nature, the intersectional alphabet, junkies, fatsos, really every one is a potential victim to be brokered by the empathic overlord admins. Another source of this culture is the obsolescence of non degreed jobs in the advanced economies by technology advance / creative destruction. The loss of this job security, the dispiriting of a generation of parents, made their children vulnerable to lack of confidence, fleeing the challenge of learning, and tangenting off into distractions, and for many unstable emotions and psychosis. The irony of the waste of intellectual talent in pious brokering of suffering, is that emerging modern economy, cloud intelligent / 'AI' demands that labor raises its skills, and whole fields of state capacity - institutions able to coordinate and distribute information processing economy - need intellectuals to build them.

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I understand analyzing a social group with social psychology, looking to see how norms shape behaviors and all that, but I don't understand how doing so allows us to ignore or deny the obvious physical reality that the earth is getting hotter and hotter, that the AMOC is stopping, etc. Just because you don't like the group of people calling attention to the problem does not make the problem go away.

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It’s in part the apocalyptic nature of it and the piss poor “solutions” those who believe in it are imposing.

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OK you want neither weak solutions nor catastrophism...I give you PETROCOMMUNISM https://open.substack.com/pub/thespouter/p/the-solution-to-petrocapitalism-is?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=3916x

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Damn right the planet is getting hotter!

Where I was born, raised and spent most of my adult life, was under thousands of feet of ice thousands of years ago. The planet will continue to get warmer until the Beaufort gyre breaks, the AMOC fully stops and all manner of other consequences occur. Then the Earth will revert to its usual condition which is a giant snowball. It will remain so until some galactic/solar influence starts the process all over and creates another short window of what humans call a habitable climate.

It is truly amazing that my SUV can cause all that.

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its more the entire capitalist system than your SUV

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Why does climate change depend on the political views of people. And how does the capitalist system change the climate on Venus, Jupiter and even Pluto which doesn't even have an atmosphere?

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huh? wha are you taking about?

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You said the consumption based on capitalism is somehow more responsible for climate change than consumption based on other socio/economic systems.

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versus the economic system on pluto?

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The world is not getting “hotter and hotter”, at least not because of man-made CO2. Global temperatures have net flatlined since 1998 excluding the recent spike which, by its suddenness, was obviously natural, like a mega 1°C El Nino and unlike any of the transient El Ninos which have punctuated this 25-year period. Hint: the verboten-to-mention Hunga Tonga undersea volcanic eruption: https://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah6/from:1998.

And who says the AMO has stopped? If you disregard the Hunga Tonga spike (partly accentuated by a now-dissipated El Nino), the trend since 2016 looks very much like the waning warm phase of the AMO cycle. Next stop is back to the cold phase which we last experienced in the 1960/70s, when scientists thought that a new ice age was about to kick off.

My debunking of the climate change hoax: https://metatron.substack.com/p/debunking-the-climate-change-hoax.

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