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‘Make Trump Experience Climate Pain’ Urges Alarmist Psychology Prof

From the School of Really Dumb Climate Change Solutions, a novel proposal from Lisa Feldman Barrett – a professor of psychology at Northeastern University:

The next time a city like Las Vegas has a record heat wave, as it did in June of this year (117 degrees F), we could petition President Trump to travel there. Perhaps a three-day stay at Trump International Hotel — with the air conditioning turned off — would be swelteringly educational.

Or shall we ask Vice President Pence to visit Nuatambu, one of the Solomon Islands northeast of Australia, where rising ocean levels have washed away half the habitable land and forced families to flee? Let him live there for a month or two. Or maybe Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, should survive on minimal drinking water for a few days, so he can understand viscerally what a drought feels like.

Apparently, the scientific rationale behind this is that the human imagination is not nearly as good at empathizing with future pain as it is with future pleasure.

Most of us can easily imagine the sight of polar ice caps melting, and we might feel distressed as we think about coastal cities flooding. But thanks to our brain wiring, few of us can simulate the feeling of blasting heat or the awfulness of other disasters we’d face every day in a warming world. The physical sensations of being submerged in floodwaters. The agony of starvation as crops fail and drinking water runs low. The wretchedness of disease as we’re bitten by newly arrived insects that migrate north as the country warms. We can effortlessly simulate the scenes but not the actual, physical sensations of our suffering.

This might indeed be an amazingly powerful and insightful argument were it not for one quite serious flaw: none of the stuff Barrett describes here has anything to do with climate change.

For example, the line about global warming leading to more insect-borne disease. This was comprehensively debunked years ago by Paul Reiter, an expert in tropical diseases, who once resigned from an IPCC working group in protest at the way it had misrepresented his research in order to promote an alarmist narrative.

As far back as 1998, Reiter gave a lecture on this subject to the Cooler Heads Coalition:

All attempts to link specific recent outbreaks to climate change cannot survive a confrontation with the facts. In all cases, local conditions (such as the banning of DDT, land use changes, or foreign contact) account for expansions of disease vectors or increases in infection rates.

So what Barrett is arguing here isn’t just ignorant but somewhat sinister. Politicians guilty of wrongthink, she is arguing, should be jolted into correct consciousness by compulsory re-education.

Such an approach was, of course, commonplace both in Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany. The fact that it is now also widespread amid the safe spaces of U.S. academe – and unquestioningly accepted by branches of the liberal media like NPR – ought to be a cause for some concern.

Read more at Breitbart

Comments (8)

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    Spurwing Plover

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    Oh great another intellecial egghead with a walnut sized brain and a idea they came up with while playing grab ass with a rainbow monkey doll and frankly these eco-wackos all need to be marooned on a certian tropical island and lets bring back those seven stranded castaways

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    David Lewis

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    It is okay for President Trump to experience the impacts of man made climate change. That would be zero visits since there are no such impacts. It is contrary to common sense to say that a one degree increase is having these impacts. Temperatures of 117 degrees have happened before and there much higher incidents in the 1930’s.

    A better suggestion would to have the activists visit the victims of their polices. This would include elderly in the UK who are cold and sick because they can’t afford to heat there homes after the cost impact of green energy. They should also visit some of the 330,000 home in Germany who have had their power cut off because they can’t afford the cost for the same reason.

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    Curious

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    I’m in favour of the IPCC having their next conference on a ship at the North pole!

  • Avatar

    Spurwing Plover

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    I want to see more stories of Greenpeace getting their ships trapped in the ice or snow falling on one of Al Bores estates or maybe one of DiCaprios homes and cut off their power

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    amirlach

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    On the flip side, make all cLIEmate alarmists and Gender Studies Majors live the zero Co2 life style they wish to impose on all of us.

    Sorry, no buying of fake “offsets” Al Gore. You will have to live in a mud hut and dig your dinner out of the dirt with a pointy stick, somewhere in North Korea or Venezuela.

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    Sonnyhill

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    You just nailed it. The last celebrity with a tiny carbon footprint was Mother Teresa. You go grrrl

  • Avatar

    Steve

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    What…and indulge these petulant “children” throwing tantrums about climate change fairy dust? are they for real?

    Grow up you idiots & grow a brain.

  • Avatar

    Spurwing Plover

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    Onee of the biggist deceptions of liberal cartoonists is showing Penguins and polar bears in the same enviroment they live poles apart

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