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Why are people climate change deniers? Study reveals unexpected resultsThe only thing the study showed was the dire state of psychological science. For starters, researchers were oblivious to their own prejudice and incompetent background research. They can't define a climate change denier in any scientific sense, it's not a label of a group of homo-sapiens who think the climate never changes, it's just a petty kindergarten insult designed to fool, well,... psychologists. And it works. If they had spent five minutes reading skeptical web-sites they'd know that half the population have good reason to be skeptical of unaudited and unaccountable foreign committees which rely on broken models. In fact if they were looking for "motivated reasoning" in the climate debate (and they say they were) then most of it is on the believer side, where people might be motivated by billions of dollars in government grants.
Do climate change deniers bend the facts to avoid having to modify their environmentally harmful behavior? Researchers from the University of Bonn and the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) ran an online experiment involving 4,000 US adults, and found no evidence to support this idea. The authors of the study were themselves surprised by the results.
One hypothesis is that these misconceptions are rooted in a specific form of self-deception, namely that people simply find it easier to live with their own climate failings if they do not believe that things will actually get all that bad. "We call this thought process 'motivated reasoning,'...
At the center of the experiments was a donation worth $20. Participants were allocated at random to one of two groups. The members of the first group were able to split the $20 between two organizations, both of which were committed to combating climate change. By contrast, those in the second group could decide to keep the $20 for themselves instead of giving it away and would then actually receive the money at the end. "Anyone keeping hold of the donation needs to justify it to themselves," says Zimmermann, ... "One way to do that is to deny the existence of climate change."
Energex remotely cuts power to 170,000 air conditioners six times in a monthSo this is where someone owns a Hi-Tech instrument designed to keep them cool, that they can't use on the hottest days of the year. They call this the PeakSmart scheme (so you know it's stupid). Gone are the luxury days when consumers could control their own appliances, get cheap reliable electricity, and not need invasive, complicated schemes in order to keep some of their own money.
ABC News
Queensland's state-owned power grid remotely turned down almost 170,000 air conditioners six times in the past two months as part of a scheme to protect the electricity network.
Comment: See also: Nova Scotia, Canada digging out after historic snowfall