2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #36

Posted on 8 September 2024 by BaerbelW, Doug Bostrom, John Hartz

A listing of 34 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, September 1, 2024 thru Sat, September 7, 2024.

Story of the week

Our Story of the Week is about how people are not born stupid but can be fooled into appearing exactly so to the rest of us.

This week we posted a critique of Australian Queensland state senator Gerard Rennick  by journalist and author Peter Hadfield, sailing under his Potholer54 YouTube flag. The title “Could this be the stupidest politician in Australia?” is certainly not a flattering introduction to Rennick, but hearing the senator express his understanding of CO2’s role in Earth’s atmosphere in his own voice and words certainly gives us pause. Rennick really does sound stupid— obdurately so.

Is Senator Rennick unusually stupid? Doubtful. Rennick holds two post-graduate degrees, each from respectable institutions not prone to handing out sheepskin to all comers.  Given their knowledge domains and the typical adjacency  of commerce to laissez-faire philosophy, these degrees may however offer a clue as to how Rennick has come to be found spouting humiliatingly wrong comprehension of the interaction and behavior of energy and matter in Earth’s atmosphere. 

How does somebody come to appear as stupid while actually being reasonably intellectually competent? Indicators from a lot of research on human psychology and cognition suggests that our beliefs are heavily influenced by our ideology. In supporting our principles, we selectively choose what to believe, as a largely unconscious process. Even when reality doesn’t comport with supporting our principles, we may cling to beliefs that bolster our bedrock values.

Judging by his own words and stated policy concerns, Senator Rennick appears commited to the principle that government is overly invasive. This poses a cognitive problem in connection with human-caused climate change, given that without goverment interventions we can’t solve the problem we’ve created by our changing Earth’s climate. To resolve this uncomfortable logical collision, Rennick has apparently has sought and found explanations that avoid this dilemma by simply rearranging our perception of reality to fit his principles. Unfortunately, repeating these faulty rationalizations makes Rennick appear to be very stupid when clearly he is not genuinely unintelligent. 

How did Senator Rennick come up with the ideas he’s embarrassingly reciting into the permanent historical record of Queensland’s parliament? A generous reading of this situation is that Rennick is vulnerable and has  been victimized.  In all probability the claptrap he’s repeating is not original but rather is regurgitation of disinformation, bunk he’s found outside the space between his own two ears. Because what he hears supports his principles, Rennick is a gullible mark.

The perpetrators of the deceit Rennick has found and adopted are surely congratulating themselves for finding a parrot with such a high profile.  

Sadly it’s the case that victims like Rennick are exposed to a postive firehose of rubbish delivered by social networks. We can expect worse to come, given that so-called “AI” is being used to increase proliferation of lies such as those repeated by Senator Rennick. A paper just published in Communications Earth & Environment by Skeptical Science founder Dr. John Cook and colleagues explores how this is happening on the social media service formerly known as Twitter. 

We wish Senator Rennick would take better care of his own reputation and our collective future. He might well start by reading the review paper Science Denial, which could help by arming him for some self-reflection.  

Stories we promoted this week, by publication date:

Before September 1

• South Korean court says government must do more to fight climate change, NBC News World News, Reuters. Climate advocacy groups said it was the first high court ruling on a government’s climate action in Asia, potentially setting a precedent in a region where similar lawsuits have been filed in Taiwan and Japan.
• Air Conditioning Poses a Climate Conundrum, State of the Planet, Renée Cho. Air conditioning is leaving the realm of luxury and becoming vital to health, yet more air conditioning makes our climate problem harder.
• Business Group Sues Texas Officials Over Law That Shields Oil Industry, Climate, New York Times, Karen Zraick. “The suit challenges a measure that prohibits state entities like retirement funds from doing business with firms that ‘boycott energy companies.’ “
• The World’s Largest Wetland Is Burning, and Rare Animals Are Dying, World, New York Times, Ana Ionova. “In Brazil, wildfires have roared across the Pantanal, a maze of rivers, forests and marshlands that sprawl over an area 20 times the size of the Everglades.”
• The Quantum Mechanics of the Greenhouse Effect, Science, Quanta/Wired, Joseph Howlett. “Carbon dioxide’s powerful heat-trapping effect has been traced to a quirk of its quantum structure. The finding may explain climate change better than any computer model.”
• Harris and Trump offer starkly different visions on climate change and energy, AP News, Matthew Daley.
• Could this be the stupidest politician in Australia?, potholer54 on Youtube, Peter Hadfield.
• Labor Day weekend will start out restful for the Hurricane Hunters. Then what?, Eye on the Storm, Yale Climate Connections, Jeff Masters & Bob Henson. “The intrepid aviators may get called into duty as soon as Sunday as an Atlantic disturbance slowly organizes.”
• Guest post: Just 15 countries account for 98% of new coal-power development, Energy, Carbon Brief, Lucy Hummer, Jeanette Lim, Jelena Babajeva, Claire Pitre & Xing Zhang .