First they called global warming, and when the Earth didn’t warm they renamed it climate change. And now that people still aren’t convinced they claim it’s not the message, it’s the messenger.
Texans do not believe in Climate Change because they are a bunch of bigots and New York Jews are the ones trying to convince them the hypothesis is true, that is the gist of the message given by Gavin Schmidt, Chief NASA climate scientist. Schmidt’s broader message was that people are too dumb to understand the science so they will only listen to people like themselves.
Speaking at the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) science conference in Washington, DC, NASA’s Schmidt said:
“Now, you know there’s some communities I can’t talk to because, you know, I’m a liberal, Jewish atheist from New York City, right? So if I go to Texas and try and tell people about climate change, I’m totally the wrong messenger, right? Because we don’t have any shared values quite frankly. […] A lot of times we think, ‘oh, more science, more science’, and really we want to allow less science and more cultural understanding, and that might take us a lot further.”
Putting aside the fact that the terms Judaism and Atheism are antithetical, here’s some real truth. The supporters of the Climate Change hypothesis simply cannot believe that there are skeptics who aren’t drinking their “Kool Aid,” and are grasping at straws trying to understand why– so they reframe their message.
The the reason people don’t buy their hypothesis has nothing to do with “cultural understanding” and everything to do with the fact that the science is not settled–the “97% of scientists” claim is a lie, and many of the other claims made by the climate change community have been disprove or cast in doubt.
In fact, I too am a New York Jew, but a conservative one who is observant and believes in God. According to google analytics Texas is the #2 state in terms of traffic to this site proving that Texans will listen to a New York Jew who is not feeding them with lies.
The transcript and video below of the relevant part of Gavin Schmidt’s speech were originally posted by Climate Depot:
“You have to get to the real problem. And, the real problem is not that they don’t believe the scientists. The real problem is not that the graph was in the wrong color. The real problem is not that the animation wasn’t interactive enough. There’s another problem, right? It’s a question of values, right? What they see when you show them a graph is a rejection of some deep value that they hold dear, right? And, if that’s the way it’s going to go you’re never going to get anywhere, right? So, if you’re talking to somebody you have to find the value issue where you can actually kind of dig down and see what’s going on. And, stories can help with that, because stories can help demonstrate that we share very many of the same values. ‘We all love our children,’ well mostly, and you know and ‘we don’t want people to die,’ and ‘we’d all like to have a nice life.’ I mean, once you build it from shared things, you can go forward.
Now, you know there’s some communities I can’t talk to because, you know, I’m a liberal, Jewish atheist from New York City, right? So if I go to Texas and try and tell people about climate change, I’m totally the wrong messenger, right? Because we don’t have any shared values quite frankly. But, some people do, right? So, Katherine Hayhoe, right? So, you know she married an evangelical pastor, and I don’t know if you saw ‘Years of Living Dangerously’? She’s featured on one segment there talking to townsfolk in Plano, Texas, and she’s one of them. She’s from Canada, so she’s not quite one of them, but she’s almost one of them. So, she can talk with them in ways that don’t threaten their kind of who they see themselves as. A lot of times we think, ‘oh, more science, more science’, and really we want to allow less science and more cultural understanding, and that might take us a lot further.”
