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No, we do not have
a political agenda. We are a non-profit science
organization!
This research gets funding from nobody!
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Conspiracy Theories
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The AGW models are a result of the
human psyche, what the evolutionary psychiatrist J. Anderson
Thomson describes as "We have a great deal of difficulty seeing
anything other than human causation" [1]. In other words, we
have a need to explain everything as 'caused by humans'. Applied
to climate changes: "It must
be human-caused"
This is a general form of a 'conspiracy'. Instead of thinking that things happen because they happen, humans have a need for an explanation of things. What Taleb in his book The Black Swan [2] calls the need of a narrative. In case this explanation is human-caused, we can call it a conspiracy. While generally speaking, people consider a conspiracy when it was intentional cause (and preferably also hidden), the state of mind that comes up with these explanations is in all cases similar.
As an example, in another research, presented by Scientific American [3], Timothy Melley in his book “The Empire of Conspiracy”, explains these effects. People see conspiracies everywhere. They even agree to contradictory conspiracies simultaneously. Like Saddam Houssein is dead and alive at the same time. Interestingly, the same contradictory approach is also used for the conspiracy of the human-caused climate change. Believe it or not, because of Global Warming, Europe recently both warmed up and cooled down at the same time[4]. In fact, anything that happens is explained by AGW. That is because the people are generally convinced that there is a conspiracy (in the general meaning of the word) and anything is a sign of this conspiracy, as nicely explained by Melley.
[1]: Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, p.172
[2]: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan, The Impact of the Highly Improbable, 3rd ed. (2011), Allen Lane, ISBN 9781846145650
[3]: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=moon-landing-faked-why-people-believe-conspiracy-theories
[4]: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/mar/25/frozen-spring-arctic-sea-ice-loss
For more information, contact me at The University of The Algarve,
This is a general form of a 'conspiracy'. Instead of thinking that things happen because they happen, humans have a need for an explanation of things. What Taleb in his book The Black Swan [2] calls the need of a narrative. In case this explanation is human-caused, we can call it a conspiracy. While generally speaking, people consider a conspiracy when it was intentional cause (and preferably also hidden), the state of mind that comes up with these explanations is in all cases similar.
As an example, in another research, presented by Scientific American [3], Timothy Melley in his book “The Empire of Conspiracy”, explains these effects. People see conspiracies everywhere. They even agree to contradictory conspiracies simultaneously. Like Saddam Houssein is dead and alive at the same time. Interestingly, the same contradictory approach is also used for the conspiracy of the human-caused climate change. Believe it or not, because of Global Warming, Europe recently both warmed up and cooled down at the same time[4]. In fact, anything that happens is explained by AGW. That is because the people are generally convinced that there is a conspiracy (in the general meaning of the word) and anything is a sign of this conspiracy, as nicely explained by Melley.
[1]: Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, p.172
[2]: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan, The Impact of the Highly Improbable, 3rd ed. (2011), Allen Lane, ISBN 9781846145650
[3]: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=moon-landing-faked-why-people-believe-conspiracy-theories
[4]: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/mar/25/frozen-spring-arctic-sea-ice-loss
For more information, contact me at The University of The Algarve,
Prof. Peter Stallinga