Friday, April 24, 2026

Psychologists Say "Cognitive Dissonance" Is Why So Many Still Support Trump. I Say It's Citizen Betrayal - Of the Constitution

 


"Voting for a felon should be unconstitutional. I hope everyone who voted for him loses everything financially, emotionally, socially, and psychologically. There needs to be a price to be paid for destroying America with a vote."-WaPo Comment

"Many of the millions that voted Trump into office did not vote for him. They voted against a black/Asian woman and for white male supremacy. But that vote came with more than many bargained for. It also came with exposure of the fear of change without understanding the cost they would personally have to bear thinking they were only protecting their self interest."- NY Times comment


The news in a recent WSJ piece ('Trump's Pope Feud Divides Catholics', WSJ, April 18-19, p. A4) was simply astounding - even to a former Catholic. How in the hell could “60 percent of white Roman Catholics” have voted for Trump in 2024, many of whom still take his side against the Pope? Cognitive dissonance, gullibility, inherent lower IQ and an inclination to white supremacist skullduggery are several possible reasons. But one could also cut to the chase and reduce the multiplicity of explanations to a core of citizen betrayal of the Constitution itself.

 Former megachurch pastor John Pavlovitz summed the mass betrayal last year on his Substack page :

"They shunned their responsibility as Americans, they rejected the teachings of their faith tradition, and they abandoned any kind of moral footing by enabling the ascension of a felon-rapist-scumbag mobster who lacks a single noble impulse. Through whatever combination of racism, misogyny, prejudice, intellectual ignorance, and plain old hatred, they willfully coronated him."

When one dives into current articles on how the citizen betrayal has played out in real time, one need look no further than the Trump -Pope battle. This has even divided Roman Catholics (e.g.  who all ought to be supporting the Pope's gospel stance:

“Jesus said 'blessed are the peacemakers but Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic, and political gain."

Hence, to stand with Trump against these teachings vividly shows how cultural and moral knuckledraggers can still back a toxic slug like Donald Trump - IF they embrace his lies. That includes  white Catholics like those in Boston's 'heavily Italian North end", like one Salvatore LoNano who avers (WSJ, ibid.):

"Trump is a hell of a president!  He wants to take care of the United States".

Seriously?  The roach who just launched a war with Iran with no end in sight? Murdering thousands and sending gas prices through the roof, while cost stress especially with groceries - food is coming. How bloody dense can you be? Especially adding that:

"The pope ought to stay in the Church and let Trump run this country!"

Yeah, bozo, run it into the ground, as a traitor as well as a felon.  Here we have a character who's happy betraying not only his religion but his country, all in the name of Trump. But this is where it's at. Trump has polarized Catholics like he has the whole country. As Peggy Noonan put it in her latest column ('Trump Meets His Match In Pope Leo', WSJ, op. cit., p. A13):

"While the Pope echoes Christ's words, 'Love your enemies do good to those who persecute you' Trump's motto is 'I love getting even with people. I hate my opponents and don't want what's best for them."

Noonan calls those like Trump 'hicks', and clarifies:

"Modern hickdom doesn't have anything to do with geography, class, profession or birth, What all hicks have in common is they lack respect.  They lack courtesy toward people or things that deserve a measure of homage.  They don't have the bandwidth to know what should be respected in the world, or what and who helps it turn."

So we can say Catholic non-hicks are those referenced in the main weekend WSJ piece, i.e."For Catholics who never liked Trump, his behavior solidified their opposition."

Well, because they possess a moral insight which informed them from the time Trump first appeared over ten years ago that this self-confessed pussy grabber was unfit to be president. Ditto for a thug who encouraged violence at his rallies and disrespected a Vietnam prisoner of war like John McCain.  ("I like war heroes that don't get caught!")

In the same sense one can argue those RC voters like Salvatore Lo Nano also fit Noonan's description of hicks. But maybe there are psychological dimensions to why so many Americans - not just a majority of white Catholics - expressed a preference for a classless felon, demagogue and traitor like Trump.

Of course, many don't agree with my take on citizen constitutional betrayal, and lean to more psychological dynamics.

Three separate research papers, published together in the Journal of Social and Political Psychology, each pointed to the same conclusion, according to analysts. Psychologists surveyed 128 U.S. adults in October 2019, who indicated a preference for Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Asked how they justified their support for the GOP candidate given allegations of his sexual misconduct, over half the group said they relied simply on denial and chose to not believe the charge.

According to the Journal Futurism:

“Those results were reproduced in a second study, started in December 2019, two days after federal lawmakers voted to impeach the president. This time, 173 MAGA diehards largely either denied the accusations, or demurred by changing the topic to Trump’s policy decisions. In that study, the majority of supporters denied the accusations outright, while 15 percent declared they simply didn’t care.”

Meanwhile, the most recent study, a 2022 survey taken immediately after Trump was arraigned for his role in the January 6 riots, found that of 187 participants - over 60 percent - felt the accusations against the orange fungus were a lie, This despite video footage of Trump directly inciting violence at the Capital being readily available. According to analysis of the cumulative  findings:

“While each study is highly complex in their own right, together they reinforce the finding that denial of factual information — Trump’s seedy misdeeds, basically — is a direct response to anxiety caused by cognitive dissonance,”

According to study author Cindy Harmon-Jones, senior lecturer in psychology at Western Sydney University:

” I was motivated by real-life experiences. I’ve been puzzled and confused by the continuing support and admiration that Donald Trump’s supporters hold for him, despite the many accusations that he has engaged in sexual assault, corruption, and other immoral and illegal activities. I wanted to give those supporters a chance to explain in their own words why they support him.”

Harmon-Jones says she is also interested in cognitive dissonance outside the Trump-related breakdown. Specifically, whether supporters of Barack Obama or Bill Clinton would have reacted similarly if they learned of similar accusations against them.

  Harmon-Jones insists it "remains to be tested", but I attest that if similar accusations were made against either man as those against Trump it'd be a deal breaker. My contention is that those Democratic voters had some basic perceptions of decency - certainly to the point of not supporting a bloody traitor who incited an insurrection.

To grasp the difference it helps to recall here Thomas Jefferson's words in his  Notes on Virginia, i.e.

"Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves therefore are its only safe depositories. AND TO RENDER THEM SAFE, THEIR MINDS MUST BE IMPROVED"

Jefferson knew every government disintegrated if the "rulers" alone determined its fate. There would always be tyrants, unhinged demagogues etc, seeking to impose their will. This is why he expected the PEOPLE to become its safe depositories, i.e. in protecting their democratic Republic. 

Also, this had to go beyond "bread and butter" issues which were bound to vary year by year. So Jefferson's words meant the voters being attentive to the nation's politics and political dynamics. By NOT being misled by bogus political ads and propaganda networks. Again, it's all on the voters to be educated and responsible before making their choice of leaders.  No excuses!   

The hardcore Trump voters, whether Maggats or Roman Catholic whites, chose deliberately to be misled and for one reason only: to effect their hate against the minorities they detested. Using the hateful avatar of Trump to do their dirty work for them.

The truth is hard to swallow.

See Also:

‘Not Surprising’: New Poll Explains Why Some Voters Still Approve of Trump

by Ailia Zehra | May 19, 2025 - 5:19am | permalink

— from Alternet

According to a recent poll conducted by The New York Times and Siena College, people who were less engaged with prominent news coverage during President Donald Trump’s first 100 days were more inclined to view his performance favorably.

Roughly one in three voters reported being largely unaware of at least one major development from Trump’s first 100 days. These incidents include the erroneous deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, market volatility, or budget cuts initiated by tech billionaire Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), per the Times.

But despite these gaps in awareness, a majority of Americans say they are paying close attention to news from the Trump administration — a higher level of engagement than was seen during the initial phase of former President Joe Biden’s term.

Immigration was the issue on which Trump received his highest approval ratings, although a majority of Americans still viewed his approach negatively, according to the poll.

» article continues...

And:

The Awful Truth The MAGA Trumpies Can't Bear To Hear

And:


And:

The Last Taboo: Why Are Voters Never Held Responsible for Their Choices?

by Mike Lofgren | February 14, 2025 - 6:13am | permalink

In his book, The Present Age, the late sociologist Robert Nisbet applied a pithy descriptor to a phenomenon we have seen all too often in public life: the “no-fault” theory of political action, particularly in foreign affairs....

It would appear that Nisbet’s thesis needs revision. What he said was blatantly obvious: of course politicians rarely blame themselves for their own egregious policy failures, for it characterizes the typical behavior of ambitious, self-confident, and often corner-cutting people. 

What is more significant, and troubling, is the reaction of the people who elect them: why do they more often than not reward leaders who inveigle them into national calamity? Isn’t there also a no-fault doctrine that applies to the American voter, a doctrine that is for the most part rigidly observed by journalists, pundits, and the self-proclaimed wise men who monopolize the op-ed pages of the prestige newspapers?

 And:

Just Desserts: MAGA Suicide Pact Climaxes Its Cult of Destruction

by Robert Becker | April 19, 2026 - 5:03am | permalink

`

How DT’s DTs (Delirium Tremens) trigger the growing, circular firing squad

Swarms of MAGA Destroyers-in-chief,
Debased by malice, hatred and grief,
Unearth their matchless lose-lose blunders,
To commit matchless worst-case plunders.

Betwixt chaos-driven nincompoops
And outlaw knaves playing shock troops,
Besieged Trumpers can’t buy a win:
So moral bankruptcy fuels their tailspin.

Absorbing nada from dire defeats
Suits feckless, arrogant deadbeats;
The more bizarre the MAGA fable,
The more desperate to finagle.

» article continues...

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Thursday, April 23, 2026

The Novel Phenomenon of the Triple Transient (Discovered on Decades Old Photographic Plates) and UFOs-UAP

 

UAP captured by Navy pilots in 2017 encounter
Isolated transient and comparison star
Triple transient on 19 July, 1952 disappears hrs. later (compare the positions between the two slides)

Headlines for DC  'Saucer Swarm' in July, 1952

“I find it absolutely important to test whether the UAP phenomena can be linked to some kind of ET probes… And if I get the answer yes, then I’m going to be a complete believer into UAPs. So far, I’m agnostic.” 
— Beatriz Villarroel

Can 70+ year old photographic plates (taken at Mt. Palomar Observatory) lend themselves to a revelation of alien contact?  This is via a UAP-UFO blitz, such as occurred over Washington D.C.,  in July of 1952.  Evidently, yes, and we can thank a bold Swedish astrophysicist for this insight and contribution.  This is in terms of what she and co-workers have called a “triple transient” – an apparent configuration of 3 stars that appeared on a July 19, Palomar photographic plate – then vanished when the next plate was generated hours later the same date.

See, actual stars cannot do that. Cannot just vanish on a photographic plate.  They cannot do that because real stars are light years distant, so any change of their physical properties – such as brightness- would require light years to reach us. Take the case of the star Sirius, 8.7 light years distant. If it suddenly decreased in brightness it would take 8.7 years before we observed the effect.

In this case, of the Mt. Palomar Observatory plates, we have three apparent stars that actually vanished within the space of hours. This led the Swedish astrophysicist-  Dr. Beatriz Villarroel-  to conclude they weren’t stars but actually could be alien craft that operated outside Earth’s atmosphere.  Preposterous?  Not at all, given the famous Washington DC UFO flap e.g.

 


In other words, three of the so-called stars in the triple were actually alien craft that became part of the D.C. UFO flap.

 Dr. Beatriz Villarroel’s work begins with a question that sounds simple until you try to answer it: could a star “vanish” on a human timescale? In ordinary astrophysics, stars don’t just blink out—at least not in ways that would leave clean, catalog-friendly evidence. So if something looks like it disappeared, the explanation is usually mundane: a catalog error, a misidentification, a plate defect, or a threshold artifact.

In podcast interviews, Villarroel describes how she turned that question into a method around 2016: take digitized sky material from the 1950s and compare it against modern CCD-era surveys. The point wasn’t to chase folklore. It was to exploit the one asset modern astronomy can’t manufacture from scratch—a decades-long time baseline.

What she found didn’t look like the tidy “vanishing star” narrative the public tends to imagine. Instead, the archive kept producing one-off “transients”: point-like sources that appear in a single exposure and then never appear again in follow-up images. This is the kind of result that simultaneously feels like “new physics” and “classic data pathology,” which is why it becomes so polarizing so quickly.

From the start, Villarroel frames the work as hypothesis-driven rather than belief-driven. She treats technosignatures and “artifacts” as possibilities, but she doesn’t treat any single interpretation as owed. In the original interview, she is explicit: she is agnostic until an observation strategy delivers decisive evidence—not a vibe.

But in a recent airing of a program – The UFO Phenomenon  (Part 3) – Dr. Villarroel departs from her “agnosticism” and argues how and why the historical context of the transients – coinciding with the DC saucer flap – points to actual alien craft being the same as the transients. She begins the segment by pointing to others who've asked: "There's no evidence for UFOs so why waste time pursuing it?" 


Responding: "That's a Catch 22. If no one puts in even an hour working on it, researching, then you will never get evidence."

She went on to say she leads the project at the Nordic Institute of Theoretical Physics, and:

"I lead a project where we look for identifiable signatures of alien space ships".

Note, she didn't say "identifiable signatures for unknown objects"

Hence, she is not adopting an "agnostic" stance.

Further support for this comes when she points out 5 of the objects in an alignment before disappearance an hour later, in a subsequent plate, on July 27, 1952. (And not long from when the DC saucer flap began).  Merely a random, coincidental alignment? In her words:

"The probability of finding five random objects in this 'strip' is one in ten thousand."

So basically ruled out by probability considerations. (Though hard core debunkers might even cling to that to escape admitting alien craft were in the skies of DC that date.)

I support this stance. How so? Given one must eliminate actual stars, and defects of the plates themselves, as well as random coincidence of 5 objects (transients) just happening in a straight line, then one must go to the famous Sherlock Holmes quote:

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth".

And that is where I come down, having done actual transient optical phenomena research of my own, e.g.

Transient Optical Phenomena of the Atmosphere - a Case Study    

Oh yeah, one notable Harvard UFO debunker, Donald Menzel, attempted to trash the Washington DC UFO flap - which would also have negated Villarroel's theory. He did this by asserting that all the alleged lights over DC were effects from cold air temperature inversions.

BUT,  atmospheric physicist James McDonald demolished Menzel’s temperature inversion bull twaddle by directly interviewing witnesses and radar personnel, which uncovered evidence that the radar targets were solid, intelligently controlled objects rather than atmospheric mirages.

McDonald, analyzing the case in the 1960s, argued that Menzel's "anomalous propagation" explanation was physically impossible given the high-performance maneuvers reported by multiple seasoned pilots and tracked by radar operators.

In the segment McDonald is shown describing Menzel's cold air inversion malarkey as "not representing scientifically sound analyses" and the entire U.S. UFO program to the late 60s as "superficial and incompetent".  Which is what they were. As I myself have written before, if the Edward U. Condon book: Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects    had been offered as a Ph.D. thesis in advanced atmospheric physics or plasma physics it would have been flunked outright before even reaching the oral exam phase. That's how bad it was.

Astrobiologist Jacob Haqq Msra, who also appears in the program, had his reservations about the transients being actual craft, saying:

"The biggest criticism of Beatriz's work is that it's very very difficult to explain what it is you've found. So if you're left with something you can't understand, say an extraordinary hypothesis like extraterrestrials, well maybe they are. But how do you follow up on an observation made over 50 years ago."

But as Beatriz points out right after the remark, there were actually two separate cases of two transients - on July 19, 1952 and on July 27, 1952 - each of which coincided with the DC UFO flyovers on those dates. So the historical problem doesn't exist. She makes the connection of the UFO- alien craft appearances in DC with the transients already observed on her plates, which then 'vanished'. Well, 'vanished' because they then went to lower altitudes - over Washington D.C.- producing the UFO flap which had citizens and military in an uproar for days.

The same exact type of dynamic UAP behavior was described by Navy Commander David Fravor in the House hearings on UAP back in 2023, e.g.

Video Navy commander David Fravor gives detailed description of his encounter with a UAP - ABC News

What Fravor describes, an object descending rapidly from 80,000 fit. altitude to 20,000 ft. is the sort of behavior that would fit in with the 5 transients that suddenly emerge in the DC skies. 

 This is exactly why, when approaching the UAP-UFO phenomenon, continuity is essential.  In other words, the behaviors must be integrated, Beatriz Villarroel's transients to DC skies dynamics in July 1952, with what Cmdr. Fravor experienced in his own encounter. Only in this way can we move past the chronic overthinking and provincial poppycock - the desperation to always escape the ET reality by invoking mundane nonsense like balloons, or cold air inversions. Or even "laser holographs",

Brane Space: Are Laser Plasma Holographs Created By "Foreign Adversaries" Really The UFOs Reported By U.S. Navy Pilots?

Where I destroyed the 'alternative theory' that the UAP such as recorded by the Navy pilots were really laser-generated holographs. This was in much the same way James McDonald destroyed Donald Menzel's fantasy that the Washington DC UFOs were really a result of cold air temperature inversions.

At least Carl Sagan ( of 'Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence' fame) ultimately recognized the folly and provincialism of his own skepticism. This was revealed by the late Northwestern University astronomer J. Allen Hynek who disclosed Sagan had admitted he "did accept the validity of UFOs" (e.g. as alien craft) but "couldn't do so in front of his colleagues."  See e.g.


See Also:

 Brane Space: Astrophysicist Adam Frank Gets It All Wrong On UAP- UFOs

And:

Michael Shermer's Predictable Efforts To Apply Quasi Religious ('Sky god') Beliefs To Secular Acceptance of UAP

And:

Physics Today Book Reviewer Kate Dorsch Is As Clueless About UFOs As Neil DeGrasse Tyson 

And:


And: 

Youtube videos

Breakthrough UAP Discovery in Astronomy Data with Dr. Beatriz Villarroel

Are These the First Images of UAP in Orbit? With Dr. Beatriz Villarroel 

 

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Wednesday, April 22, 2026

Thoughts for Earth Day: Four Ways Climate Change Deniers Often Get The Better of the Media

 

WSJ  article from 2012 shows how free market spin has caused many to refuse to accept man-made climate change




According to recent surveys, while up to 3 out of 5  Americans now accept global warming is human-caused (anthropogenic global warming ), a significant number still attribute the source to "natural causes."  Or express uncertainty about the primary cause, i.e. the buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere.  Given the denier or climate change minimalist attacks have increased in recent years it is instructive therefore to examine some of the methods employed to grab media microphones and distort climate reality.


1) Sowing Uncertainty to Muddy the Climate Threat:

This is perhaps the biggest tactic in use and has to do with what has been called 'agnotology'.  This term,  derived from the Greek 'agnosis' - the study of culturally constructed ignorance- is achieved primarily by sowing the teeniest nugget of doubt in whatever claim is made (and as we know NO scientific theory is free of uncertainty).  Stanford historian of science Robert Proctor has correctly tied it to the trend of skeptic science sown deliberately and for political or economic ends .

The agnotologist and his ilk succeed once the following trope is emitted and embraced by the power structure:

‘There is still so much uncertainty, we shouldn’t invest billions to solve an exaggerates climate problem,’

But this is egregious on so many levels that it boggles the rational mind. First, any modern scientific pursuit must include uncertainty. Uncertainty is acknowledged every time I perform a measurement - say of the solar diameter- and express it with plus or minus kilometer values. It signifies that final measurement cannot be presumed free of measuring error which is inherent in all our physics, astronomy etc.

The matter of "too much uncertainty" is also the wrong way to look at the issue for any scientific model or measurement, because they can as easily UNDER-estimate a potential threat or occurrence as over estimate it. Let's take the case of city -busting asteroids which were the topic for discussion on one CBS Early Show several years ago, with physicist Michio Kaku.  Kaku reported that in fact we have had to readjust our estimates of asteroid impacts based on new observations. Where we once expected a city-buster (say one that could take out a city like New York) every 150 years, we now have to expect it such a killer every 30 years!

In a similar vein, the uncertainty attached to climate models could also be in the direction of under-reporting or under-estimating the full impacts. Thus, the uncertainty could well be such that the runaway greenhouse effect could erupt fifty to one hundred years earlier than previously thought. Or the rising of the sea level owing to melting Arctic (and Greenland) ice sheets could incept a 10m rise as opposed to a 3 m one. This is why uncertainties are expressed as plus and minus values at the end of the measurement.

My point is that the trope expressed above doesn't take into account that the uncertainty implies that the problem is more likely to be worse than expected in the absence of that uncertainty. 


2) Using 'Affordability' To Claim A Higher Priority Over Climate Change:

This tactic has come more and more into vogue given how the affordability metric has attained so much prominence since the Covid pandemic. (Which naturally caused a spike in prices for sundry goods on account of supply chain problems.)  A recent example is Greg Ip's recent WSJ climate piece ('The Climate Crisis Clashed With Affordability and Affordability Won)'. Ip writes:

"Why have climate alarmists suddenly gone quiet? The science and the economics haven't really changed. Carbon emissions are still rising and the climate is still getting warmer."

Ip isn't kidding on the matter of rising CO2 emissions and warming..  Over the past ten years, from 2015 to 2024, have been the hottest on record, with 2024 being the warmest year overall, according to scientific and weather organizations. This marks a significant shift, as all the warmest years in recorded history have occurred within this recent decade. So what gives? What's changed? Ip provides what he believes is an answer:

"What's changed is the politics. Climate warriors persuaded the public to take climate change seriously, but not to pay for it, especially after the cost of living shot up in the wake of the pandemic and Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The share of respondents calling climate and the environment their most important issue has dropped from 14% in early 2020 to 6% now according to Yougov. By contrast 25% describe inflation as the top priority."

But the point being missed here is that economics and pocketbook issues, pounded over and over in the media- no doubt aided by overemphasis and misalignment in many polls. Thus, affordability began to assume supremacy in Americans' minds over climate. Despite the fact climate onslaughts, i.e. floods, tornadoes etc. were driving much higher home repairs, fuel, food, other expenses. 

 The Yougov poll intentionally or not, has sown confusion, namely that higher prices and inflation trump climate instability. They do not.  Hence cannot be a more important issue objectively - i.e. in objective reality.

3) The degree of Consensus Among Climate Scientists Remains Under Reported

Alas, much denial and minimization of climate change has worked because too many Americans are not aware of the real consensus among real climate scientists that anthropogenic global warming is a FACT that must be acted upon. Perhaps the first researcher to scientifically and statistically establish this was science historian Naomi Oreskes - who first published an initial survey of global warming literature, entitled  “Beyond The Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change.”

Oreskes analyzed “928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords ‘climate change.’” She found that 75 percent of papers accepted the consensus view “either explicitly or implicitly,” while “25 percent dealt with methods or paleoclimate,” and took no position on AGW.  Remarkably, she found that none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.  

Later studies have found a small sliver of dissenting views, but the more the consensus has been studied, the sturdier it appears, while the dissenting literature is dogged with repeated problems. For example, in Eos Transactions, Vol. 90, No. 3, p. 22 , P. T. Doran and M. Kendall-Zimmerman found that (p. 24)

“the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely non-existent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes.”

In their analytic survey for which 3146 climate and Earth scientists responded, a full 96.2% of specialists concurred temperatures have steadily risen and there is no evidence for cooling. Meanwhile, 97.4% concur there is a definite role of humans in global climate change.

A 2010 paper, Expert credibility in climate change, reconfirmed the 97 percent consensus figure, and found that “the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC [or AGW] are substantially below that of the convinced researchers.” A 2013 paper, Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature, examined “11,944 climate abstracts from 1991–2011” and found that “97.1 percent endorsed the consensus position,” while a parallel self-rating survey found that “97.2 percent endorsed the consensus.”

Despite that, an actual Mensa member, writing in a prominent Mensa Bulletin piece in 2010, actually posed these questions:

- Why does the media imply that the IPCC report reflects the consensus of thousands of scientists, when – as reported by CNN – there are dissenting scientists, like Richard Lindzen of MIT?

- If there’s consensus, why on Dec. 20, 2007, did the U.S.  Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Policy issue a report that 400 scientists now believe the evidence doesn’t support that “consensus"?

Nemko interpreted “consensus” in these questions to mean 100% agreement, but this isn’t the case at all.  A consensus in the accepted English definition means the concurrence of an overwhelming majority.

By confusing the meaning of "consensus" these objectors seek to try to make the public believe the issue isn't settled when it is.  Our media needs to do much more to make this climate consensus known.

4)  Adoption of Climate Change Minimalization Using "Adaptation" Distraction

This tactic has been epitomized by none other than Bjorn Lomborg

Bjorn Lomborg - he of the now discredited "Copenhagen Consensus" -  has escaped a lot of media scrutiny.  This is perhaps because he knows how to shovel the B.S.  Namely offering "adaptation" as the "less costly" alternative to things like lowering fossil fuel consumption, say by using gasoline taxes.  Because the latter is so tied in with the affordability issues noted earlier, it often works. But it's a fool's errand.

Lomborg presents himself as a hard-headed climate realist (not outright denier) asking tough questions about the costs and benefits of climate policy. But he's more in line with a climate dilettante who cherry picks at will while invoking numerous strawman arguments on why the approaching climate catastrophe isn't the biggest crisis facing humanity. 

In one 2021 WSJ op-ed ('Climate Change Calls For Adaptation, Not Panic', Oct. 21 he more or less doubles down on his adaptation twaddle, writing:

"Adaptation doesn’t make the cost of global warming go away entirely, but it does reduce it dramatically. Higher temperatures will shrink harvests if farmers keep growing the same crops, but they’re likely to adapt by growing other varieties or different plants altogether. Corn production in North America has shifted away from the Southeast toward the Upper Midwest, where farmers take advantage of longer growing seasons and less-frequent extreme heat. When sea levels rise, governments build defenses—like the levees, flood walls and drainage systems that protected New Orleans from much of Hurricane Ida’s ferocity this year.   

Nonetheless, many in the media push unrealistic projections of climate catastrophes, while ignoring adaptation. A new study documents how the biggest bias in studies on the rise of sea levels is their tendency to ignore human adaptation, exaggerating flood risks in 2100 by as much as 1,300 times. It is also evident in the breathless tone of most reporting: The Washington Post frets that sea level rise could “make 187 million people homeless."

Lomborg appears not to grasp adaptation to a  post tipping point climate change world is a non-starter -  for the simple reason human biology isn't designed to survive weeks without a reprieve from 120-130F day temperatures that only dip minimally at night. And for which most places do not have the luxury of air conditioning. e.g.

As I noted therein, 


Lytton, B.C.  reached a high of 49.6C (121.3F) on Tuesday, the day before its residents evacuated as raging wildfires devastated the town.  In Portland according to one official:

“People were literally crawling to the Sunrise Center because it was so hot. They were vomiting, burnt and dehydrated,  

And what of the power grid that supports it? We're informed now that the residents of Seattle and Portland are trying to get a/c for their homes - and orders are backed up.  But as one official pointed  out, 'Our grid is not designed for such intensive use of air conditioning.  The grid will be overloaded.."  


But this is typical of Lomborg in ignoring facets of climate change emerging at tipping points. One of which we are currently in.

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