A concerted effort to “norm” you has begun. And you can easily guess the source: Yes, it’s located somewhere within the Ivy-covered Ivory Tower of Academia, where its planners profess a nonpartisanship to disguise their premise.
The Cambridge, Massachusetts, Academy’s Commission
The folks at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences through their Commission on Accelerating Climate Action have a plan that will draw you into the fold of climate change activism. If that commission has its way, you’re destined to become a climate change warrior whether you want to become one or not. Their plan is simple: On their website they note, “People are susceptible to peer pressure [whoda thunk it?]. When individuals feel that their neighbors expect them to act in a more climate-friendly way, those individuals are more likely to take science-consistent climate action.” On the website they recommend finding “ways to apply social norming to all sectors of our lives and the economy” for the sake of enhancing action on climate change. *
Norming? Normalizing?
So, what’s social norming if not social conforming? Does “normal” mean you will have solar panels atop your house and buy windmill-generated electricity? Does it mean you will drive an EV (but not far), pay more for energy, wear a Jimmy Carter cardigan in winter, and open the windows for air in the summer? And if you do not comply to normalization, will there be “norming officers” calling at your door? Will you learn: 1) to eschew plastic bags because they are made from ethylene, 2) to walk on natural gravels rather than cement sidewalks because cement manufacture releases carbon into the environment, 3) to drive on dirt roads because asphalt is petroleum in disguise, 4) to have an overgrown lawn rather than use your old gasoline powered lawnmower, or 5) to cease flying to the Caribbean islands for vacation? Does it mean that your past life will become a distant memory?
You will be “normed.” And in becoming normal, you will save the planet and all its life now threatened with extinction by a slight warming of the atmosphere. In addition, once socially normed, you’ll put pressure on those around you to conform. You will become a social norming warrior.
An unquestioning warrior, I suppose, a dulce-et-decorum-est-pro-IPCC-mori warrior. You won’t question widely broadcast claims that forest fires are a “weather event” regardless of their often being the malicious acts of arsonists and the unthinking acts of cigarette smokers tossing butts onto the roadside, or poor forest management, or faulty wiring of aging power transmission lines like those that burned Maui while the water authority hesitated. You will feel secure in the belief that every local weather event, such as a snowstorm, cold spell, heat wave, tornado, or hurricane has a connection to worldwide climate change in an undeniable “butterfly effect” rather than as a result of large-scale cycles and characteristics typical of a region within the Prevailing Westerlies or Equatorial Easterlies. You will come to believe that the hurricanes that sank Spanish galleons carrying gold were somehow anomalous past weather events and that today’s hurricanes that strike highly urbanized centers on a continent with hundreds of millions of residents are exclusively driven by climate change.
Overt and Subliminal Messaging
The Commission on Accelerating Climate Action has laid out all the necessary steps to achieve social norming with regard to climate change. I invite you to click the link https://www.amacad.org/sites/default/files/publication/downloads/Climate-Communication-Principles_Brief.pdf to see how there are those out there in the elite world of “those who know” who intend to bend your will to theirs, to tell you that the fate of all life on the planet depends on your cooperation. They will recruit people close to you and use all media to drumbeat their message into your head to normalize you. And they will be relentless in their efforts.
Can you say, “Holy cow! Not another example of Orwellian manipulation and control”?Can you say “elitism of the omniscient”? Can you ask, “Is there no one to question the underlying premises?”
Where Would We Be without Our Forecasters?
Richard Littlejohn recently (2 Nov 23) published an essay in the DailyMail.com ** that takes weather reporters and climate change alarmists to task for their exaggerating the impact of weather events and making false comparisons and their linking all weather to climate change. “What has changed over the years is the explosion of hyberbole from weather forecasters who appear to believe they are starring in their own Hollywood disaster movie, and reporters on rolling news channels desperate to portray themselves in the most dramatic light possible.” He makes a valid point, doesn’t he? Does a weather reporter standing under an umbrella on a rainy day add anything of importance to our understanding weather? Couldn’t the reporter just say, “If you look outside, you’ll see rain.” Almost all TV weather forecasters play the role that the Commission on Accelerating Climate Action wants them to play. Almost every severe weather event foreshadows the Apocalypse. Weather events are now “bombs” and “rain-“ or “snow-“ armageddons, such is the competition to be ever more sensational. Littlejohn begins his article with reference to the devastating storm of 1703—before the Industrial Age began spewing the now dreaded carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, where it enhances plant growth. *** That storm coincided with the birth of modern journalism. ****
From that 1703 storm to the present day, weather has become a “news” item. Today, almost all, if not all, local TV stations begin their local news with a preview of the weather forecast, and weather forecasting has become an avenue to a steady job, regardless of its many erroneous predictions and exaggerated threats. I suppose weather forecasting is much like hitting in baseball. Pitcher Bob Humphreys once told Ted Williams, the last person to hit over .400, “I would say, I’d like to have a job where I could fail six times out of 10 and be a star. You hitters make outs seven out of 10 times and think you’re good.” What’s the success rate for TV’s weather forecasters when they predict snowfall amounts or hurricane landfall strengths? Is it above the .400 average of Ted Williams? And now, those forecasters are part of the “norming” of European and American culture as they tie weather to climate change, becoming climate-change warriors for organizations like the Commission on Accelerating Climate Action.
But There Is an Upside
Climate change activism does have an upside. The civilized world has grown lazy on energy consumption. It’s easy to be a couch potato when a battery-powered remote eliminates the need to walk across the room to change a channel. It’s easy to drive to the local whatever rather than walk, and it’s easy to leave the light on in unoccupied rooms. The cheap power provided by abundant fossil fuels has made us energy gluttons. The ability to transport goods has extended into home deliveries of food or products. We live in a world of power and stuff unimagined at the beginning of the Industrial Age. We live, on the whole, in the midst of more luxury than that of medieval and ancient kings. And at the same time we live in the squalor of our own waste, the refuse of our affluence, from junkyards to landfills, from polluted air to polluted streams and soils. We build a Mount Trashmore in coastal areas like Norfolk and northern New Jersey, piling when we can’t bury our garbage, and we have a history of ocean dumping. Yes, there is a need for conservation of resources; common sense tells us that we’re on a path to degrade environments once favorable to human life. Common sense tells us that we’ve added to our Earth tens of thousands of chemical compounds of our own making, many of them harmful to life. I’ll say it again: There is a need for conservation. And I’ll add: There is a need for sustainability in a burgeoning human population all intent on acquiring material wealth.
If climate-change activism makes us all aware that there’s an upside to conservation tactics in populations numbering in the 100s of millions, then it has my approval. But I have my doubts, enough so that as in the song “House of the Rising Sun,” I’ll go no farther than to have “one foot on the platform/The other foot on the train.” If it is just another way for a group of elitists to exert control and redistribute wealth, then I’ll keep both feet on the platform; I ain’t goin’ nowhere when I don’t know where that where is.
Are We Living in an Age of Hyperbole?
Will Earth warm, and will any warming have deleterious effects? Probably. But not necessarily. We might be in a period akin to the decades before the Medieval Warm Period or we might be living at the beginning of the next Little Ice Age. We cannot deny that longterm droughts and rainy periods have checkered the past millennium; we cannot say that the next millennium will have its share of droughty warm or rainy cool periods that dwarf the same phenomena of the past 1,000 years. Did drought undo the Maya? Did it undo the Pueblo? Was a longterm drought a factor in the Raleigh’s “lost colony” when Europeans began to compete for food and land with locals of the American Southeast?
What Is “Climate-friendly” Action?
Pray tell, members of the Commission, just what is “climate-friendly action.” Does it mean that people living in an arid land should do whatever they can to maintain its aridity? Same for occupants in semiarid lands? Monsoonal and boreal lands? What exactly do you mean?
It seems that “climate-friendly” means keeping Earth exactly as it is, or at least was before the industrial era in some mythical past place. Hmmnnn. When? Little Ice Age before? Medieval Warm Period before? Younger Dryas before? Wisconsin ice Age before? Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum before? Does it mean going back to the times when carbon dioxide was more abundant in the atmosphere than it currently is? No, of course, not. Was pre-Industrial Age carbon dioxide at 250 parts per million the “age” when no severe storms occurred?…oops! There was that 1703 event that Littlejohn mentions. And then there were those hurricanes that sank those Spanish treasure ships.
The Ultimate Goal
What exactly do you want, Commissioners? Wait! It just occurred to me. You want something akin to a scene from the TV series Community, the one in which John Goodman, head of the HVAC department at a community college, takes one of the students into a room with the ideal room temperature. “Ever hear of the expression ‘room temperature’? This is the room-temperature room.”***** You want Earth at consistent shopping mall temperature. You want your ideal weather; you want Hawaii without the occasional typhoon. What else could “climate friendly” mean if it doesn’t mean keeping the harshest climates, like those undifferentiated high altitude above-the-tree-line climates or those tundra climates, just as they are. You want Siberians to shiver in severe cold and the citizens of Burkina Faso to sweat in severe heat. You want a dynamic planet that houses a species intent on changing it for their own purposes to conform to your ideal, to somehow alter a dynamism that is 4.56 billion years old.
**https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-12704129/RICHARD-LITTLEJOHN-dont-need-weatherman-tell-not-end-world-know-it.html
***https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_storm_of_1703
****Just a thought here. If a storm occurs in the absence of humans, will it make the news? Did the Arawaks (Taíno) lose beach properties worth tens of millions? They surely suffered hurricanes without leaving a written record of the damage to their huts and storm deaths in their tribes.
*****See YouTube under the title “Community: This is The Room Temperature Room” posted by Roland. The phrase “room temperature” occurs after 1:16, but the whole 3:05 clip is worth watching for the recruitment strategy.
The Cambridge, Massachusetts, Academy’s Commission
The folks at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences through their Commission on Accelerating Climate Action have a plan that will draw you into the fold of climate change activism. If that commission has its way, you’re destined to become a climate change warrior whether you want to become one or not. Their plan is simple: On their website they note, “People are susceptible to peer pressure [whoda thunk it?]. When individuals feel that their neighbors expect them to act in a more climate-friendly way, those individuals are more likely to take science-consistent climate action.” On the website they recommend finding “ways to apply social norming to all sectors of our lives and the economy” for the sake of enhancing action on climate change. *
Norming? Normalizing?
So, what’s social norming if not social conforming? Does “normal” mean you will have solar panels atop your house and buy windmill-generated electricity? Does it mean you will drive an EV (but not far), pay more for energy, wear a Jimmy Carter cardigan in winter, and open the windows for air in the summer? And if you do not comply to normalization, will there be “norming officers” calling at your door? Will you learn: 1) to eschew plastic bags because they are made from ethylene, 2) to walk on natural gravels rather than cement sidewalks because cement manufacture releases carbon into the environment, 3) to drive on dirt roads because asphalt is petroleum in disguise, 4) to have an overgrown lawn rather than use your old gasoline powered lawnmower, or 5) to cease flying to the Caribbean islands for vacation? Does it mean that your past life will become a distant memory?
You will be “normed.” And in becoming normal, you will save the planet and all its life now threatened with extinction by a slight warming of the atmosphere. In addition, once socially normed, you’ll put pressure on those around you to conform. You will become a social norming warrior.
An unquestioning warrior, I suppose, a dulce-et-decorum-est-pro-IPCC-mori warrior. You won’t question widely broadcast claims that forest fires are a “weather event” regardless of their often being the malicious acts of arsonists and the unthinking acts of cigarette smokers tossing butts onto the roadside, or poor forest management, or faulty wiring of aging power transmission lines like those that burned Maui while the water authority hesitated. You will feel secure in the belief that every local weather event, such as a snowstorm, cold spell, heat wave, tornado, or hurricane has a connection to worldwide climate change in an undeniable “butterfly effect” rather than as a result of large-scale cycles and characteristics typical of a region within the Prevailing Westerlies or Equatorial Easterlies. You will come to believe that the hurricanes that sank Spanish galleons carrying gold were somehow anomalous past weather events and that today’s hurricanes that strike highly urbanized centers on a continent with hundreds of millions of residents are exclusively driven by climate change.
Overt and Subliminal Messaging
The Commission on Accelerating Climate Action has laid out all the necessary steps to achieve social norming with regard to climate change. I invite you to click the link https://www.amacad.org/sites/default/files/publication/downloads/Climate-Communication-Principles_Brief.pdf to see how there are those out there in the elite world of “those who know” who intend to bend your will to theirs, to tell you that the fate of all life on the planet depends on your cooperation. They will recruit people close to you and use all media to drumbeat their message into your head to normalize you. And they will be relentless in their efforts.
Can you say, “Holy cow! Not another example of Orwellian manipulation and control”?Can you say “elitism of the omniscient”? Can you ask, “Is there no one to question the underlying premises?”
Where Would We Be without Our Forecasters?
Richard Littlejohn recently (2 Nov 23) published an essay in the DailyMail.com ** that takes weather reporters and climate change alarmists to task for their exaggerating the impact of weather events and making false comparisons and their linking all weather to climate change. “What has changed over the years is the explosion of hyberbole from weather forecasters who appear to believe they are starring in their own Hollywood disaster movie, and reporters on rolling news channels desperate to portray themselves in the most dramatic light possible.” He makes a valid point, doesn’t he? Does a weather reporter standing under an umbrella on a rainy day add anything of importance to our understanding weather? Couldn’t the reporter just say, “If you look outside, you’ll see rain.” Almost all TV weather forecasters play the role that the Commission on Accelerating Climate Action wants them to play. Almost every severe weather event foreshadows the Apocalypse. Weather events are now “bombs” and “rain-“ or “snow-“ armageddons, such is the competition to be ever more sensational. Littlejohn begins his article with reference to the devastating storm of 1703—before the Industrial Age began spewing the now dreaded carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, where it enhances plant growth. *** That storm coincided with the birth of modern journalism. ****
From that 1703 storm to the present day, weather has become a “news” item. Today, almost all, if not all, local TV stations begin their local news with a preview of the weather forecast, and weather forecasting has become an avenue to a steady job, regardless of its many erroneous predictions and exaggerated threats. I suppose weather forecasting is much like hitting in baseball. Pitcher Bob Humphreys once told Ted Williams, the last person to hit over .400, “I would say, I’d like to have a job where I could fail six times out of 10 and be a star. You hitters make outs seven out of 10 times and think you’re good.” What’s the success rate for TV’s weather forecasters when they predict snowfall amounts or hurricane landfall strengths? Is it above the .400 average of Ted Williams? And now, those forecasters are part of the “norming” of European and American culture as they tie weather to climate change, becoming climate-change warriors for organizations like the Commission on Accelerating Climate Action.
But There Is an Upside
Climate change activism does have an upside. The civilized world has grown lazy on energy consumption. It’s easy to be a couch potato when a battery-powered remote eliminates the need to walk across the room to change a channel. It’s easy to drive to the local whatever rather than walk, and it’s easy to leave the light on in unoccupied rooms. The cheap power provided by abundant fossil fuels has made us energy gluttons. The ability to transport goods has extended into home deliveries of food or products. We live in a world of power and stuff unimagined at the beginning of the Industrial Age. We live, on the whole, in the midst of more luxury than that of medieval and ancient kings. And at the same time we live in the squalor of our own waste, the refuse of our affluence, from junkyards to landfills, from polluted air to polluted streams and soils. We build a Mount Trashmore in coastal areas like Norfolk and northern New Jersey, piling when we can’t bury our garbage, and we have a history of ocean dumping. Yes, there is a need for conservation of resources; common sense tells us that we’re on a path to degrade environments once favorable to human life. Common sense tells us that we’ve added to our Earth tens of thousands of chemical compounds of our own making, many of them harmful to life. I’ll say it again: There is a need for conservation. And I’ll add: There is a need for sustainability in a burgeoning human population all intent on acquiring material wealth.
If climate-change activism makes us all aware that there’s an upside to conservation tactics in populations numbering in the 100s of millions, then it has my approval. But I have my doubts, enough so that as in the song “House of the Rising Sun,” I’ll go no farther than to have “one foot on the platform/The other foot on the train.” If it is just another way for a group of elitists to exert control and redistribute wealth, then I’ll keep both feet on the platform; I ain’t goin’ nowhere when I don’t know where that where is.
Are We Living in an Age of Hyperbole?
Will Earth warm, and will any warming have deleterious effects? Probably. But not necessarily. We might be in a period akin to the decades before the Medieval Warm Period or we might be living at the beginning of the next Little Ice Age. We cannot deny that longterm droughts and rainy periods have checkered the past millennium; we cannot say that the next millennium will have its share of droughty warm or rainy cool periods that dwarf the same phenomena of the past 1,000 years. Did drought undo the Maya? Did it undo the Pueblo? Was a longterm drought a factor in the Raleigh’s “lost colony” when Europeans began to compete for food and land with locals of the American Southeast?
What Is “Climate-friendly” Action?
Pray tell, members of the Commission, just what is “climate-friendly action.” Does it mean that people living in an arid land should do whatever they can to maintain its aridity? Same for occupants in semiarid lands? Monsoonal and boreal lands? What exactly do you mean?
It seems that “climate-friendly” means keeping Earth exactly as it is, or at least was before the industrial era in some mythical past place. Hmmnnn. When? Little Ice Age before? Medieval Warm Period before? Younger Dryas before? Wisconsin ice Age before? Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum before? Does it mean going back to the times when carbon dioxide was more abundant in the atmosphere than it currently is? No, of course, not. Was pre-Industrial Age carbon dioxide at 250 parts per million the “age” when no severe storms occurred?…oops! There was that 1703 event that Littlejohn mentions. And then there were those hurricanes that sank those Spanish treasure ships.
The Ultimate Goal
What exactly do you want, Commissioners? Wait! It just occurred to me. You want something akin to a scene from the TV series Community, the one in which John Goodman, head of the HVAC department at a community college, takes one of the students into a room with the ideal room temperature. “Ever hear of the expression ‘room temperature’? This is the room-temperature room.”***** You want Earth at consistent shopping mall temperature. You want your ideal weather; you want Hawaii without the occasional typhoon. What else could “climate friendly” mean if it doesn’t mean keeping the harshest climates, like those undifferentiated high altitude above-the-tree-line climates or those tundra climates, just as they are. You want Siberians to shiver in severe cold and the citizens of Burkina Faso to sweat in severe heat. You want a dynamic planet that houses a species intent on changing it for their own purposes to conform to your ideal, to somehow alter a dynamism that is 4.56 billion years old.
**https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-12704129/RICHARD-LITTLEJOHN-dont-need-weatherman-tell-not-end-world-know-it.html
***https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_storm_of_1703
****Just a thought here. If a storm occurs in the absence of humans, will it make the news? Did the Arawaks (Taíno) lose beach properties worth tens of millions? They surely suffered hurricanes without leaving a written record of the damage to their huts and storm deaths in their tribes.
*****See YouTube under the title “Community: This is The Room Temperature Room” posted by Roland. The phrase “room temperature” occurs after 1:16, but the whole 3:05 clip is worth watching for the recruitment strategy.
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