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David 
to wish impossible things
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: the edge of the deep green sea
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I agree with much of what you say, but must take issue with one line – slating the blame for delayed climate action home to "feckless internet mobs". Not merely because the internet played a niche role in society at the time you refer to, but because "feckless internet mobs" in general are ordinary people who may or may not be gullible and reactionary.
Those aren’t the droids you’re looking for. Delayed action on climate change wasn’t caused by uneducated pitchfork-wielding villagers, but by government, business and media elites. Think of where the powerful voices were coming from when Howard refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol; they weren’t on Facebook but in The Herald Sun. It was true in 1993, and it’s true now too. Blaming the masses is looking squarely in the wrong direction, and it’s always going to lead to the wrong conclusions.
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"Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence." – Julian Assange |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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| David wrote: | | I agree with much of what you say, but must take issue with one line – slating the blame for delayed climate action home to "feckless internet mobs". |
Short memory must have a sh-o-o-o-rt memory 
You're factually wrong in one sense, and missing the point in the other. (The)Facebook was launched in 2004 and was booming by 2008. My Space had 76M users in the US alone at its peak in 2008. Twitter was booming by 2010. Web 2.0 forums were awash with sceptic hysteria from the early 00s and were the hotbeds of the new citizen army of right-to-far-right liars and fanatics. How do I know? I spent more time on those forums and blogs following the debate, tracking the research and foiling the BS than on Nick's.
Peak hysteria was probably Climategate. Do you remember when that was? 2009. Hockey stick hysteria goes back earlier but was a central part of the same peak propaganda incident. The Stern Review and Gore's trip to Australia was 2006, heightening the histrionics. Australia's worst negligent liars on the subject - Howard, Abbott, Bolt and his ilk and their mining sponsors - were well-established in their efforts by 2007. And their lies got their reach and impact from the copy-paste internet mobs behind them.
Of course, I don't think the rest of the media and world lives on Mars. When I say 'internet mobs', I mean dumb, rabid, miles-over-their-heads halfwits giving impetus to outright lies and sub-scientific stupidity on the basis of blind ideology. That started with cable, then migrated to social media. Same people, evolving technology. (There is a lot of work re-visiting early social media and the evolution of its malign effects; next time I see a paper I'll post the link).
But you of all people ought to know the history having been an avid web 2.0 user before most people migrated to social media!
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In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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David
to wish impossible things
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: the edge of the deep green sea
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I don’t deny that even the early internet contributed to the dissemination of these ideas. And indeed, before or without that, climate scepticism would have been aired and communicated in pubs, workplaces and living rooms, along with of course talkback radio and letters to the editor. People will talk wherever they get the chance, and that talk helps shape the views of others. But my quibble isn’t about technology – we all know about the internet’s epochal capacity to democratise information transfer and boost anti-establishment views, for ill and (in my view, and I know we disagree on the extent of this) quite often for good – but about where we slate home the blame for climate inaction: from the top, or from the bottom up.
In this case, it’s actually quite easy to see that government, industry and legacy media had actively sabotaged action on climate change and fostered ideological narratives around it for at least two decades before the internet even got a chance to get its boots on – and that everything we see now, including internet discourse and baked-in ideological opposition to green policy from voting blocs, flows downstream from that.
I could be wrong but I don’t think I’m missing your point at all – I simply believe that the bête noire of uneducated opinion, amplified by new media or otherwise, played a far smaller role in this than you give it credit for. It was, on the contrary, educated and calculated dishonesty by people in power that set the wheels in motion, and that is the force that continues to primarily mould national approaches to climate to this day.
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"Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence." – Julian Assange |
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Magpietothemax 
magpietothemax
Joined: 28 Apr 2013
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^Absolutely.
The vast masses of the population are appalled and devastated that no government today offers the slightest intention to address climate change.
Capitalist governments, on behalf of their corporate backers, are hell bent on protecting profits, which means that they will do nothing to address climate change.
To blame the population for the refusal of governments to address climate change is absurd.
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Free Julian Assange!!
Ice in the veins |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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^Blind ideology, both of you.
(I just wrote a huge reply listing the massive number of major respected agencies all supporting climate change mitigation from 1995-2005 and it vanished as I was logged out during that time. I couldn't even retrieve it going back/forward in the browser. Grrrrr. Do a Google search and limit it back in time and you can see them, neoliberal or not.).
The sum of what I wrote was this: every single major global and national body bar a very tiny few right across the planet, most very heavy publishers, supported mitigation. Meanwhile, sceptic content was a teeny tiny fraction limited to - you guessed it - blogs and social media, and columns like Bolt.
You're actually so ideologically and emotionally attached to the fantasy of 'you and the people versus powerful evil', you can't even contemplate that the vast majority of people chose themselves to deny climate change for petty, parochial and pocket-lining reasons. And they certainly don't support you and your ideas all by themselves.
The available content would be lucky to be worse that 80-20 climate mitigation, and 99-1 reputation (i.e., the reputation of the mitigation versus denial organisations/individuals/bloggers was impeccable, crossing politics, including every 'neoliberal' org you hate., from the WTO and OECD, to unexpected orgs like the IAEA and US EPA.
Yet people still voted for Howard and Abbott and supported their denialism. Why? Because they wanted to. They were driven by petty, ugly drives as individuals responding to their own motives and perceived self-benefit. They overlooked every major international, government, research, health, university, city and council organisation because they wanted to all by themselves.
People choose the content to suit their biases because they want to, intrinsically, contrary Chomsky's fantasies that they would all think like him if not trapped under socio-economic Stockholm Syndrome. They voted for creepy malignant narcissist Trump all by themselves for their own petty, pathetic reasons, from 'owning the libs', getting bigger high fives at church, or making more money by ignoring environmental laws and discriminating against people all by themselves.
It's as clear as day when you do even a cursory content analysis, looking at was was readily and prominently available to readers, right across the internet. The fact is that time and again, under no duress, people wilfully use their vote exactly as they want to.
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In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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Culprit 
Joined: 06 Feb 2003
Location: Port Melbourne
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LaurieHolden 
Floreat Gymnorhina tyrannica
Joined: 22 Feb 2009
Location: Victoria Park
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Thanks for the link. How good was that message to her from Daicos / The Club.
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"The Club's not Jock, Ted and Gerry" (& Eddie)
2023 AFL Premiers |
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David
to wish impossible things
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: the edge of the deep green sea
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| pietillidie wrote: | | The sum of what I wrote was this: every single major global and national body bar a very tiny few right across the planet, most very heavy publishers, supported mitigation. Meanwhile, sceptic content was a teeny tiny fraction limited to - you guessed it - blogs and social media, and columns like Bolt. |
But here’s the problem: all of those academic journals and UN/WTO/EPA press releases combined had a fraction of the readership of Andrew Bolt or listenership of people like Alan Jones and John Laws (or, in America, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and Tucker Carlson). All of the latter voices, needless to say, were funded by and linked to big industry and conservative politics – and it can’t be ignored that the most popular prime minister in the past thirty years, John Howard, was an open and strident climate sceptic. So already, right there, you have a clear divide between what Guy Rundle calls the "knowledge class" – those 25% or so of the population with university degrees living and working in urban professional spaces – and those who primarily source their information from popular commercial media and friends/family. The latter are not, as a rule, leafing through copies of Nature (hell, I’m as "knowledge class" as it gets and I don’t think I’ve ever picked up a copy myself). What discourse around scientific research or institutional statements there is for those demographics has been filtered through, guess what, The Herald Sun, Channel 9 News and Today Tonight (or, for those who don’t read, watch or listen to news media at all, the people in their lives who do consume that content). Knowing that, it’s actually a miracle that there’s any substantial support for climate action at all among the populace; I put that down mostly to the primary and secondary education system, where kids are and were growing up having ideas about caring for the environment drilled in mostly unopposed, which explains in part why young people in particular tend to be so passionate about this cause.
There’s your battleground already, and in my view the early internet barely even comes into it. In the midst of all these forces, I see the early 2000s blogosphere and message boards as a mostly neutral and democratic space where these debates and divides were being hashed out. Did it have influence? No doubt. But it wasn’t the engine behind climate denialism by any means. Even as late as 2007–2013, mining-sector-funded TV advertising was still big enough to play a significant role in tanking Rudd’s mining tax, and talkback radio’s opposition to the carbon tax – and relentless accusation of Gillard breaking her promise – was similarly important.
Mass social media has changed things again of course, and has certainly displaced traditional media as a primary source of information for many people. I don’t deny that it’s played an increasing role in climate sceptic discourse in the last 15–20 years. But as I said, this is all happening in the wake of literally decades of work from elites, dating back at least as far as Exxon suppressing their own climate data in the early 1980s. You don’t have an established culture war around this issue without that backstory; many of the Boomers posting about this now and voting for people like Trump already had their views on this set in stone when Facebook was a mere glint in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye.
I don’t mean to dismiss what you’re saying about motivation; I think there’s a lot of truth to it and I certainly don’t subscribe to the discourse that Howard / News Corp made people prejudiced, etc. There’s always a complex interplay in these things. But one thing I have always believed is that our views are shaped by our environments and the information we’re taking in. So you can’t, and shouldn’t, blame ordinary people for how they think about this any more than you could blame mediaeval villagers for believing in hellfire. Any functional progressive politics must incorporate that realisation.
_________________
"Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence." – Julian Assange |
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Pi 
Joined: 13 Feb 2006
Location: SA
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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Phantom sent me the link without context, I didn't realise it was his mum but she seems OK and the douche has been denied bail, remanded in custody.
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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Culprit
Joined: 06 Feb 2003
Location: Port Melbourne
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What'sinaname
Joined: 29 May 2010
Location: Living rent free
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| Magpietothemax wrote: | ^Absolutely.
The vast masses of the population are appalled and devastated that no government today offers the slightest intention to address climate change.
Capitalist governments, on behalf of their corporate backers, are hell bent on protecting profits, which means that they will do nothing to address climate change.
To blame the population for the refusal of governments to address climate change is absurd. |
The biggest contributor to climate change is the increased population. The Earth is over populated and more land is used for farming / agriculture.
The real answer to climate change is to reduce the population of the planet.
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Fighting against the objectification of woman. |
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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I read an article the other day about how pumping out groundwater over decades, largely in the Northern Hemisphere, has resulted in a slight shift in the Earths axis meaning that the northern hemisphere gets hotter temperatures and we get cooler ones.
The biggest enemy of the climate change activists has been themselves IMO. They've been spruiking doom and gloom for decades and to date, all of their predictions have been wrong.
Go back over the history of histrionic predictions and the North Pole should have been Ice free by now.
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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| What'sinaname wrote: | | Magpietothemax wrote: | ^Absolutely.
The vast masses of the population are appalled and devastated that no government today offers the slightest intention to address climate change.
Capitalist governments, on behalf of their corporate backers, are hell bent on protecting profits, which means that they will do nothing to address climate change.
To blame the population for the refusal of governments to address climate change is absurd. |
The biggest contributor to climate change is the increased population. The Earth is over populated and more land is used for farming / agriculture.
The real answer to climate change is to reduce the population of the planet. |
Genuinely the dumbest thing you've ever said. You're easily influenced by the dim web (quite different to the dark web), but you're still normally sharp enough to avoid stepping in the worst doggie doo.
Come back when you've understood the demographic transition in depth, and grasped why no self-respecting specialist on the entire earth in any related field considers that a sensible suggestion, despite it having been used as a facepalm-inducing Facebook cut and paste for years.
Once you've dealt with the demographic transition, your next project could be beating gravity to help reduce the number of hip replacements.
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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| stui magpie wrote: | | The biggest enemy of the climate change activists has been themselves IMO. They've been spruiking doom and gloom for decades and to date, all of their predictions have been wrong. |
Not you, too! I guess what you're getting at is that they crap on about all manner of peripheral apocalyptic stuff and act as if they know things like exact dates (by 2020, whatever, whatever).
But their core point about the mechanism of global warming and its far-reaching, high-risk effects, and the astronomical costs associated with those effects, are unfortunately right enough. The data is out of hand, and their very worst 'tipping point' acceleration predictions were scarily right. Trillions of dollars of annual direct and insurance costs, and god knows what else (including genuinely scary stuff, like unpredictable effects on disease regimes), here we come. By the same token, half a degree reduction has the very opposite effects at that level of mathematical sensitivity, so the effects are genuinely dramatic whether letting the greenhouse effects run too high, or mercifully reining it on.
Their reputation works against them, but scientists and financial risk managers don't get their info from them.
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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