Just a suggestion from an experienced editor: consider splitting this excellent overview into parts.
That said, you're missing one vital element of that 50-year program of indoctrination. In 1987, in the name of Education Reform™, Ronald Reagan ended several decades of innovation in education and reinstated the Rockefeller curriculum as the law of the land. Because federal funding for it was essential, especially in inner urban districts,schools had no choice but to bow to the establishment of standardized tests as the sole determinate of educational outcomes.
Thus, we now have an undereducated population trained not to think but to passively receive information from those they are told know what needs to be known and repeat it when called on. More recently, neurolinguistic programming has been applied to install trigger words specific to the main demographics controlled by the two branches of what has been a political uniparty since 1992. Once you know what to look for, those are easily identified.
Don't take my word for it. Just pay attention to what happens if you challenge one of the popular narratives with contradictory facts if those facts are expressed using the standard words and phrases, like "racism" and "right to life". The result is terrifyingly predictable.
Thanks for your input, Liz. This is not only a problem in the US. I am struggling to make students think in Switzerland, where I teach. After 12 years of school, many expect the lecturer to tell them what they need to know to pass the next exam. When challenged with a problem without a well-defined answer, they seem genuinely confused. This means that their "knowledge" can easily be replaced by AI, as pointed out by George Monbiot (https://www.monbiot.com/2023/07/17/thinking-about-thinking/). Bernhard Avishai was right: "The danger from computers is not that they will eventually get as smart as people, but we will meanwhile agree to meet them halfway."
This is brilliant. Excellent prose jam-packed with real whoppers; it even includes plenty of links for delving deeper.
I do believe it correctly identifies some of the fundamental cornerstones of our current predicament. Sadly, there are more than just these, which is why I believe we are fundamentally screwed no matter what (I recently began blogging about this myself). And so, the only thing left to do is try to mitigate the fallout as best we can.
Postman's book was one of my favourite reads this year. Apart from his excellent points, his prose is blistering.
Hiya, the image that followed the paragraph on the dumbing down of Zoo animals was of pigs farmed for humans to eat- very likely crammed into alleys ready for slaughter at about 6 months old.
Not only are they 'domesticated' and 'dumbed down' they unwittingly contribute significantly more to greenhouse gases than plant based diets.
The provision of animal products removed from the realities of life, pain and death has also made the consumer stupid.
Henrik Nordborg, this may be the best integral analysis of the current global predicament and the cultural and political-economic sources, I have read. It captures so much of the elements of the global emergency. Especially important is the integration of some much older essential analyses such as my old favorites, Galbraith, Borstein, and of course, Meadows, et al. This should be a 'must-read' for the many 'environmentalists' who remain trapped in the illusion of solving 'the problem' within the extant system, and who are deceived by the fossil-fuel propaganda re carbon capture, etc., as explained so well by Genevieve Guenther in The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil-Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It.
Time well spent. It resonates so well with my new book, Holding IT Together: Social Control in and Age of Great Transformation, that I feel I need to read it again.
Another excellent article from Henrik. Yes, fossil fuels have allowed humans (mainly in the West) to create a monster society which allowed people to become very wealthy and powerful, so who would want to give up that now? The fossil fuel industry has about 1 trillion dollars of profits per year, I think only Nature will eventually defeat this big monster.
"SRF: Society and politics are doing too little to combat climate change. Why?
Jens Beckert: It's a complicated matter. In my opinion, several things are important. The first problem: the fossil energy industry makes around a trillion US dollars in profits per year. They have done so for 50 years. Do you think they'll give up their profits just because the temperature is rising a little, if I can put it cynically?"
No, we would have to force them. The idea is to make the oil companies an offer they cannot refuse: 1) either they pay climate compensation and can continue to operate, or 2) we will go after them will legal action, political measures, and activism. Ideally, an fossil fuel company that does not pay should be treated like a drug cartel. Since paying climate compensation would not hurt the short-term profits of the companies, the shareholders would be likely to vote for option 1. Note that there are only a small number of fossil fuel companies. Why should we let a small number of guys in suites and ties destroy the future of our children?
Henrik- Thank you for sharing these. I particularly liked the side by side comparison on the Vatican and USB architecture as a point on who’s in charge. Hope you’re well this week? Cheers, -Thalia
This is an enlightening post. Thank you, Henrik. I’d like to add a point to your macro view on capital income. Our pension plans also reinforce this status quo. In most countries of the Global North, fear of financial insecurity in retirement keeps us heavily invested in maintaining the current system, making meaningful, sustainable change almost impossible. In this way, we have become prisoners of our system.
Here's my simplistic version: too many humans using too many natural resources and producing too much pollution, including GHGs (water vapor is the most important) and heat energy/global heating. Thanks of your laudable efforts.
This is such a wide ranging article and has clearly taken much thought and time in its conception and writing. I feel like my mind has been expanded! I particularly liked the pie charts of global population versus consumption.
By your own argument, though, I should not believe all this to be true without scientific collaboration yet I do. As much as count myself a rational being I believe that all the scientific proof in the world will not turn this around until we capture hearts and minds. Have you ever had to get a sleepy teenager up to go to school?!
Propaganda has been used for millennia to condition populations and has enabled cohesion and adherence to sustainable values in the best cases and greed and belligerence in the worst. We have to tell better stories that create a positive vision for life on this planet. I think people are ready to hear them. God knows, in the global north we are wandering around the burning sun like lost children but it's the child-snatchers who are making hay.
The carbon tax is the obvious solution to induce a change on a more rapid scale and the redistribution of it to those still suffering from the economic fallout of western imperialism is a given. This can only be a short-term solution, though. Gifting money to those in need retains the power imbalance however well-intentioned. How to rectify this without reproducing the might-is-right paradigm of previous centuries is something I have yet to resolve. The best I have come up with is to lead by example. Let's get our own house in order.
Thank you for the feedback. "Thought-provoking" is precisely the sentiment I was going for. I agree with you that more research would be needed to verify some of the claims I make. However, I feel more like a criminal investigator than a scientist at this point. We need to capture the murderer before he strikes again.
"I 'know' the overall effect of CO2 in our unconstrained atmosphere is tiny…"
Don't confuse tiny amounts for tiny effects. Substitute a different three-atom gas for CO2, and we'd all be dead, at the same "trace gas" amount.S o I invite you to be put in a room with ~420 ppm of hydrogen sulphide gas.
At first, the stench of rotten eggs assaults your nose.
But it isn't getting "better" at all, rather, the H2S has destroyed your olfactory nerves. If you leave the room right now, you will live without your sense of smell for the rest of your life — which is as good as it gets, at this point.
(If we all "leave the fossil fuel room" right now, things might not be horrible soon…)
Next, you'll begin to notice that your vision has narrowed. It seems like you're looking down a long tunnel… strange! And that headache… ow!
But now, the tunnel has closed, and everything has become dark. If you leave right now, while you still can perceive a headache, you'll be blind for the rest of your life, which will be much longer than if you stay in that room.
(If we all "leave the fossil fuel room" right now, future generations may be able to live a horrible life, rather than extinction…)
Now, the headache is going away, but you're feeling sick. Getting dizzy. Nausea, getting worse. You feel something warm in your pants, although there's no smell. You fall out of your chair, and can't seem to get back up. Arms and legs no longer respond in a coordinated way.
At this point, you may begin to feel a strange sense of euphoria as portions of your brain shut down, which is good, because the rest of the symptoms are not pleasant — might as well experience them with euphoria!
You've been in that room for four hours now — congratulations! You've lasted longer than most people! But you only have a few minutes left. What might your last thoughts be? Hard to say, since your brain was irreparably damaged well before now. Coma ensues. Breathing stops.
----------------
We are in the initial stages of CO2 poisoning. Small things are bothering us — like headlines! Bad stuff happening to other people! Thank goodness it isn't ME in the flood or hurricane or tornado or drought!
But soon, it is you. You go to the store, and notice that the price of everything has gone up. Quite a bit! Must be those "other people," caught in the drought. After a while, you notice some of your favourite highly-processed food products don't seem to be on the shelves any more. In fact, they've spread things out in a thinly-disguised way to hide that there's less food in the store.
You go to fill up your tank. Yea, you shouldn't have bought that huge SUV, but they're better in an accident, right? At least if that accident is a crash — the SUV isn't so good in the accident of not noticing that non-renewable resources are going away.
Several hundred dollars later, you think about getting a bicycle — too late! When you come in for work, you're told there isn't any work for you any more. "Go pick up your final cheque!" Which is barely enough to fill up your tank or to bring a bag of food home.
You go back to your apartment, and eat everything in your "bug-out bag." Good thing you had that for emergencies! A few weeks later, they find your body amid the freeze-dried food wrappers.
It's really interesting how this condemnation of propaganda accepts one of the biggest frauds in human history: that human activity measurably affects the Earth's average temperature. No one changes their minds on this topic, but at least ask yourself why you believe atmospheric CO2, in the presence of nearly unconstrained convection, can store, block or trap thermal energy. Good luck.
Hi Ken, I suggest you read "The Logic of Scientific Discovery" by Karl Popper and think about the definition of knowledge. I do not believe it; I know it. My colleagues and I perform an experiment with absorption of infrared radiation in CO2 many times per year in front of the students. It is one of my favorite experiments because it never fails. Every time we fill the container with CO2, it heats up. Furthermore, I spent years working for the engineering company ABB designing high-voltage breakers. Many companies are currently working on replacing SF6, which has an enormous global warming potential, with CO2. Amazingly, the physics of heat transfer by radiation works here too. I could go on telling you about absorption spectra, molecular vibrations, and different approximations and algorithms for solving the Radiation Transfer Equation (RTE), but that would be a very long comment. An excellent textbook has been written by Michael F. Modest (https://shop.elsevier.com/books/radiative-heat-transfer/modest/978-0-12-386944-9), who is not a climate scientist but an engineer. It contains everything you need to know to make your own climate model. The physics that is used to model the climate -- convection, heat conduction, radiation, and phase changes -- is implemented in highly efficient flow solvers (computation fluid dynamics) that are used by millions of engineers worldwide to model combustion engines, jet engines, arc welding, gas discharges, and other phenomena. Using these tools, it is very easy to develop a simplified Earth model to model climate change. Amazingly, Svante Arrhenius performed a hand calculation already in 1896, which captured the main effects, even though it as not very accurate. He was a pioneer because there was no observable global warming in 1896. Today, we have been crazy enough to conduct a full-scale experiment by increasing the carbon dioxide concentration of the atmosphere by 50%, and the climate responds exactly as predicted by the oil companies in the 1970s. Remember that Exxon's internal climate models made very accurate predictions for global warming in the early 1980s (https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/science.abk0063). This shows two things: 1) Exxon had very good scientists, and 2) nature cannot be fooled, to quote Richard Feynman. It also proves that you, I, and everybody else have been lied to by the oil companies because there is a complete contradiction between internal reports produced by the oil companies and their external communication. A good overview can be found in "Merchants of Doubt" by Oreskes and Conway. I hope this helps to clear up the confusion. I will soon produce a video lecture about the physics of climate change and I will make sure to send you a link.
You put a remarkable amount of effort into answering a person who got lost down a rabbit hole; this is very magnanimous and patient of you, a sign of a true teacher.
But this is the problem with failing to teach people to think themselves, or disproving bullshit a la what Trump spews non-stop: it takes a disproportionate amount of effort to set them straight.
For all of your exposition, one key word jumped out at me: container. I have studied thermodynamics for decades and I "know" the overall effect of CO2 in our unconstrained atmosphere is tiny, but overall cooling via convection. Why is Krypton or Argon used in windows...and not CO2? You know it's been tried many times. Why doesn't it work? After two decades of arguing about this, I don't expect you to think critically. Believe what you like and have fun. Honestly, I wish your theory worked. I would love to change the temperature in my house by modulating CO2 levels. Alas.
Thank you very much for proving my -- or rather Postman's -- point. This is the kind of intellectual laziness that is killing us. Many people go through life with the belief that things they do not understand are unimportant, and they get angry when told that they actually need to invest some intellectual effort. You "know" that the effect of CO2 is small. Many people study the so-called "radiative forcing" by modeling and measurements. Their results are published regularly and synthesized in the IPCC reports, and the conclusion is that the effect is very significant: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/figures/chapter-6/figure-6-12. The question is whether we should believe the people who went the extra mile -- like Exxon's scientists -- to understand the effect, or we should believe somebody who has not even tried to read the literature. That is not for me to decide. I would not dream of telling anyone what to think. I only encourage them to use their brains. And the whole point of my article ( and of Postman, Huxley, Boorstin, and others) is that brainwashing is destroying our ability to think critically, which is precisely the purpose of propaganda.
Excellent article. When revolution?
I'm working on it ...
Just a suggestion from an experienced editor: consider splitting this excellent overview into parts.
That said, you're missing one vital element of that 50-year program of indoctrination. In 1987, in the name of Education Reform™, Ronald Reagan ended several decades of innovation in education and reinstated the Rockefeller curriculum as the law of the land. Because federal funding for it was essential, especially in inner urban districts,schools had no choice but to bow to the establishment of standardized tests as the sole determinate of educational outcomes.
Thus, we now have an undereducated population trained not to think but to passively receive information from those they are told know what needs to be known and repeat it when called on. More recently, neurolinguistic programming has been applied to install trigger words specific to the main demographics controlled by the two branches of what has been a political uniparty since 1992. Once you know what to look for, those are easily identified.
Don't take my word for it. Just pay attention to what happens if you challenge one of the popular narratives with contradictory facts if those facts are expressed using the standard words and phrases, like "racism" and "right to life". The result is terrifyingly predictable.
Thanks for your input, Liz. This is not only a problem in the US. I am struggling to make students think in Switzerland, where I teach. After 12 years of school, many expect the lecturer to tell them what they need to know to pass the next exam. When challenged with a problem without a well-defined answer, they seem genuinely confused. This means that their "knowledge" can easily be replaced by AI, as pointed out by George Monbiot (https://www.monbiot.com/2023/07/17/thinking-about-thinking/). Bernhard Avishai was right: "The danger from computers is not that they will eventually get as smart as people, but we will meanwhile agree to meet them halfway."
This is brilliant. Excellent prose jam-packed with real whoppers; it even includes plenty of links for delving deeper.
I do believe it correctly identifies some of the fundamental cornerstones of our current predicament. Sadly, there are more than just these, which is why I believe we are fundamentally screwed no matter what (I recently began blogging about this myself). And so, the only thing left to do is try to mitigate the fallout as best we can.
Postman's book was one of my favourite reads this year. Apart from his excellent points, his prose is blistering.
Delicious stuff. Thank you. SUBSCRIBED!
Hiya, the image that followed the paragraph on the dumbing down of Zoo animals was of pigs farmed for humans to eat- very likely crammed into alleys ready for slaughter at about 6 months old.
Not only are they 'domesticated' and 'dumbed down' they unwittingly contribute significantly more to greenhouse gases than plant based diets.
The provision of animal products removed from the realities of life, pain and death has also made the consumer stupid.
Henrik Nordborg, this may be the best integral analysis of the current global predicament and the cultural and political-economic sources, I have read. It captures so much of the elements of the global emergency. Especially important is the integration of some much older essential analyses such as my old favorites, Galbraith, Borstein, and of course, Meadows, et al. This should be a 'must-read' for the many 'environmentalists' who remain trapped in the illusion of solving 'the problem' within the extant system, and who are deceived by the fossil-fuel propaganda re carbon capture, etc., as explained so well by Genevieve Guenther in The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil-Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It.
Thanks. I am glad you liked it. I spent far too much time writing it.
Time well spent. It resonates so well with my new book, Holding IT Together: Social Control in and Age of Great Transformation, that I feel I need to read it again.
Another excellent article from Henrik. Yes, fossil fuels have allowed humans (mainly in the West) to create a monster society which allowed people to become very wealthy and powerful, so who would want to give up that now? The fossil fuel industry has about 1 trillion dollars of profits per year, I think only Nature will eventually defeat this big monster.
"SRF: Society and politics are doing too little to combat climate change. Why?
Jens Beckert: It's a complicated matter. In my opinion, several things are important. The first problem: the fossil energy industry makes around a trillion US dollars in profits per year. They have done so for 50 years. Do you think they'll give up their profits just because the temperature is rising a little, if I can put it cynically?"
https://www.srf.ch/kultur/gesellschaft-religion/fluten-hitze-und-bergstuerze-klimawandel-killt-heimat-warum-juckt-uns-das-nicht
No, we would have to force them. The idea is to make the oil companies an offer they cannot refuse: 1) either they pay climate compensation and can continue to operate, or 2) we will go after them will legal action, political measures, and activism. Ideally, an fossil fuel company that does not pay should be treated like a drug cartel. Since paying climate compensation would not hurt the short-term profits of the companies, the shareholders would be likely to vote for option 1. Note that there are only a small number of fossil fuel companies. Why should we let a small number of guys in suites and ties destroy the future of our children?
Henrik- Thank you for sharing these. I particularly liked the side by side comparison on the Vatican and USB architecture as a point on who’s in charge. Hope you’re well this week? Cheers, -Thalia
This is an enlightening post. Thank you, Henrik. I’d like to add a point to your macro view on capital income. Our pension plans also reinforce this status quo. In most countries of the Global North, fear of financial insecurity in retirement keeps us heavily invested in maintaining the current system, making meaningful, sustainable change almost impossible. In this way, we have become prisoners of our system.
Here's my simplistic version: too many humans using too many natural resources and producing too much pollution, including GHGs (water vapor is the most important) and heat energy/global heating. Thanks of your laudable efforts.
Good luck with the sleuthing!
This is such a wide ranging article and has clearly taken much thought and time in its conception and writing. I feel like my mind has been expanded! I particularly liked the pie charts of global population versus consumption.
By your own argument, though, I should not believe all this to be true without scientific collaboration yet I do. As much as count myself a rational being I believe that all the scientific proof in the world will not turn this around until we capture hearts and minds. Have you ever had to get a sleepy teenager up to go to school?!
Propaganda has been used for millennia to condition populations and has enabled cohesion and adherence to sustainable values in the best cases and greed and belligerence in the worst. We have to tell better stories that create a positive vision for life on this planet. I think people are ready to hear them. God knows, in the global north we are wandering around the burning sun like lost children but it's the child-snatchers who are making hay.
The carbon tax is the obvious solution to induce a change on a more rapid scale and the redistribution of it to those still suffering from the economic fallout of western imperialism is a given. This can only be a short-term solution, though. Gifting money to those in need retains the power imbalance however well-intentioned. How to rectify this without reproducing the might-is-right paradigm of previous centuries is something I have yet to resolve. The best I have come up with is to lead by example. Let's get our own house in order.
Many thanks for a thought provoking piece!
Thank you for the feedback. "Thought-provoking" is precisely the sentiment I was going for. I agree with you that more research would be needed to verify some of the claims I make. However, I feel more like a criminal investigator than a scientist at this point. We need to capture the murderer before he strikes again.
"I 'know' the overall effect of CO2 in our unconstrained atmosphere is tiny…"
Don't confuse tiny amounts for tiny effects. Substitute a different three-atom gas for CO2, and we'd all be dead, at the same "trace gas" amount.S o I invite you to be put in a room with ~420 ppm of hydrogen sulphide gas.
At first, the stench of rotten eggs assaults your nose.
"ARGH! Please stop the stink! Gawd, that's bad! Stop it, now! Ah, that's getting better, thanks."
But it isn't getting "better" at all, rather, the H2S has destroyed your olfactory nerves. If you leave the room right now, you will live without your sense of smell for the rest of your life — which is as good as it gets, at this point.
(If we all "leave the fossil fuel room" right now, things might not be horrible soon…)
Next, you'll begin to notice that your vision has narrowed. It seems like you're looking down a long tunnel… strange! And that headache… ow!
But now, the tunnel has closed, and everything has become dark. If you leave right now, while you still can perceive a headache, you'll be blind for the rest of your life, which will be much longer than if you stay in that room.
(If we all "leave the fossil fuel room" right now, future generations may be able to live a horrible life, rather than extinction…)
Now, the headache is going away, but you're feeling sick. Getting dizzy. Nausea, getting worse. You feel something warm in your pants, although there's no smell. You fall out of your chair, and can't seem to get back up. Arms and legs no longer respond in a coordinated way.
At this point, you may begin to feel a strange sense of euphoria as portions of your brain shut down, which is good, because the rest of the symptoms are not pleasant — might as well experience them with euphoria!
You've been in that room for four hours now — congratulations! You've lasted longer than most people! But you only have a few minutes left. What might your last thoughts be? Hard to say, since your brain was irreparably damaged well before now. Coma ensues. Breathing stops.
----------------
We are in the initial stages of CO2 poisoning. Small things are bothering us — like headlines! Bad stuff happening to other people! Thank goodness it isn't ME in the flood or hurricane or tornado or drought!
But soon, it is you. You go to the store, and notice that the price of everything has gone up. Quite a bit! Must be those "other people," caught in the drought. After a while, you notice some of your favourite highly-processed food products don't seem to be on the shelves any more. In fact, they've spread things out in a thinly-disguised way to hide that there's less food in the store.
You go to fill up your tank. Yea, you shouldn't have bought that huge SUV, but they're better in an accident, right? At least if that accident is a crash — the SUV isn't so good in the accident of not noticing that non-renewable resources are going away.
Several hundred dollars later, you think about getting a bicycle — too late! When you come in for work, you're told there isn't any work for you any more. "Go pick up your final cheque!" Which is barely enough to fill up your tank or to bring a bag of food home.
You go back to your apartment, and eat everything in your "bug-out bag." Good thing you had that for emergencies! A few weeks later, they find your body amid the freeze-dried food wrappers.
CO2, or H2S? Pick your poison!
It's really interesting how this condemnation of propaganda accepts one of the biggest frauds in human history: that human activity measurably affects the Earth's average temperature. No one changes their minds on this topic, but at least ask yourself why you believe atmospheric CO2, in the presence of nearly unconstrained convection, can store, block or trap thermal energy. Good luck.
Hi Ken, I suggest you read "The Logic of Scientific Discovery" by Karl Popper and think about the definition of knowledge. I do not believe it; I know it. My colleagues and I perform an experiment with absorption of infrared radiation in CO2 many times per year in front of the students. It is one of my favorite experiments because it never fails. Every time we fill the container with CO2, it heats up. Furthermore, I spent years working for the engineering company ABB designing high-voltage breakers. Many companies are currently working on replacing SF6, which has an enormous global warming potential, with CO2. Amazingly, the physics of heat transfer by radiation works here too. I could go on telling you about absorption spectra, molecular vibrations, and different approximations and algorithms for solving the Radiation Transfer Equation (RTE), but that would be a very long comment. An excellent textbook has been written by Michael F. Modest (https://shop.elsevier.com/books/radiative-heat-transfer/modest/978-0-12-386944-9), who is not a climate scientist but an engineer. It contains everything you need to know to make your own climate model. The physics that is used to model the climate -- convection, heat conduction, radiation, and phase changes -- is implemented in highly efficient flow solvers (computation fluid dynamics) that are used by millions of engineers worldwide to model combustion engines, jet engines, arc welding, gas discharges, and other phenomena. Using these tools, it is very easy to develop a simplified Earth model to model climate change. Amazingly, Svante Arrhenius performed a hand calculation already in 1896, which captured the main effects, even though it as not very accurate. He was a pioneer because there was no observable global warming in 1896. Today, we have been crazy enough to conduct a full-scale experiment by increasing the carbon dioxide concentration of the atmosphere by 50%, and the climate responds exactly as predicted by the oil companies in the 1970s. Remember that Exxon's internal climate models made very accurate predictions for global warming in the early 1980s (https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/science.abk0063). This shows two things: 1) Exxon had very good scientists, and 2) nature cannot be fooled, to quote Richard Feynman. It also proves that you, I, and everybody else have been lied to by the oil companies because there is a complete contradiction between internal reports produced by the oil companies and their external communication. A good overview can be found in "Merchants of Doubt" by Oreskes and Conway. I hope this helps to clear up the confusion. I will soon produce a video lecture about the physics of climate change and I will make sure to send you a link.
You put a remarkable amount of effort into answering a person who got lost down a rabbit hole; this is very magnanimous and patient of you, a sign of a true teacher.
But this is the problem with failing to teach people to think themselves, or disproving bullshit a la what Trump spews non-stop: it takes a disproportionate amount of effort to set them straight.
For all of your exposition, one key word jumped out at me: container. I have studied thermodynamics for decades and I "know" the overall effect of CO2 in our unconstrained atmosphere is tiny, but overall cooling via convection. Why is Krypton or Argon used in windows...and not CO2? You know it's been tried many times. Why doesn't it work? After two decades of arguing about this, I don't expect you to think critically. Believe what you like and have fun. Honestly, I wish your theory worked. I would love to change the temperature in my house by modulating CO2 levels. Alas.
Thank you very much for proving my -- or rather Postman's -- point. This is the kind of intellectual laziness that is killing us. Many people go through life with the belief that things they do not understand are unimportant, and they get angry when told that they actually need to invest some intellectual effort. You "know" that the effect of CO2 is small. Many people study the so-called "radiative forcing" by modeling and measurements. Their results are published regularly and synthesized in the IPCC reports, and the conclusion is that the effect is very significant: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/figures/chapter-6/figure-6-12. The question is whether we should believe the people who went the extra mile -- like Exxon's scientists -- to understand the effect, or we should believe somebody who has not even tried to read the literature. That is not for me to decide. I would not dream of telling anyone what to think. I only encourage them to use their brains. And the whole point of my article ( and of Postman, Huxley, Boorstin, and others) is that brainwashing is destroying our ability to think critically, which is precisely the purpose of propaganda.
Hello Henrik and all. Please see/share our research and help us improve it if you can. Thank you!
https://michaelatkinson.substack.com/
Sincerely,
Michael
🦖