Statistics

Grifters vs True Believers In Lancet’s Climate Report

It’s difficult, but not impossible, to pick out the grifters from the true believers in the Lancet’sCountdown on health and climate change.

But noticing the entire thing is scientific malfeasance is easy. That can be told right from the full title: “The 2019 report of The Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: ensuring that the health of a child born today is not defined by a changing climate” (pdf).

It is scientifically impossible (I leave open the option of miraculous intervention) to stop the earth’s climate from changing. It has always changed. It always will change. Every child born anywhere and anywhen must suffer the slings and arrows of a changing climate.

This will always be so. To suggest it can be otherwise is to lie (the grifters) or to wish (the true believers). It always makes you wonder if scientists have read any history with its innumerable, endless stories of people affected by the weather. How these ill-read people got the idea “climate change” was only something that started fifty years ago, and that somehow it can be stopped, can only be the result of willful ignorance.

Grifters don’t care what the actual climate does. They will say it is bad even when it is good. True believers, excitable creatures that they are, will often regurgitate the lies told by the grifters, such as “Major hurricanes are increasing!”

You can show a grifter a chart proving his lie. What will he do? Smile. Then say “Major hurricanes are increasing!”

Show the chart to the true believer and he’ll believe it, just as the grifter did. But what will his response be? “Major hurricanes are increasing!” He’ll say this not because it’s now true—true believers aren’t liars—but because it will be true. It must be true. His true belief guarantees that.

Which is why arguing facts and “evidence” and all that does so little good. You think showing that snotnosed how-dare-you Swedish brat data proving her fantastical assertions are wrong is going to change her mind?

What’s the best strategy, or strategies, then?

Call out the grifters. And speak to the emotion of the true believers.

A true believer does not mind if you call him ignorant. He has no need of book smarts and fancy degrees, even if in some cases he has these. He knows what is true. Call him whatever name you like. It only encourages his belief. You wouldn’t “hate” him so much if his “truth” wasn’t so true!

Grifters loathe being shown wrong, being proved ignorant, being called liars, but only when these plaints come from competent authority. You and I calling out, say, Tom Steyer for his money grubbing climate BS is not going to shake the man. Have, say, Trump push his buttons, and there might be some movement. But not much.

Problem is, grifters aren’t playing for the straights. They’re aiming for the true believers, an enormous group. Any grifter called out by a politician can claim it was a “partisan” attack, which every true believer buys. Have a respected scientist do the calling out, and the sting is bigger.

In the case of an honest scientist, the grifters, aided by the indefatigable army of true believers, will find some way to soil the scientist. Such as accusing him of taking money, an accusation which you’d think would make any grifter blush till his veins popped.

You can see the problem is hard. Grifters are still flooding in in direct proportion to the evidence showing us the weather is not that bad. This is because they see the rich pickings and the increasing possibilities for lucre. True believers are in turn born listening to the speeches of the grifters. There is also wavering overlap between the groups.

Anyway, what about the report itself? Can we identify which parts are grifter-written and which true believer-written?

Just listen to this shameless pandering which opens the Lancet’s report:

A child born today will experience a world that is more than four degrees warmer than the pre-industrial average, with climate change impacting human health from infancy and adolescence to adulthood and old age. Across the world, children are among the worst affected by climate change.

Who wrote “from infancy and adolescence to adulthood and old age”, a grifter or true believer? There’s an attempt at literary merit, which leans true believer, but that it’s such a laughable preposterousity (you heard me: preposterousity) cinches it. True believer all the way.

That what-about-the-children ploy in the last sentence is diagnostic. It’s still taught first day in grifter school.

Now try this, the very next sentences:

Downward trends in global yield potential for all major crops tracked since 1960 threaten food production and food security, with infants often the worst affected by the potentially permanent effects of undernutrition…

I call this mixed: grifter before the comma, true believer after. This example is a much better attempt at the con. Crops yields are everywhere up, but this seems to say the opposite! That’s because the sentence is mute on actual crop yields, and instead speaks of crop yield “potential”. Pure grift. True believers rarely talk in so tangled a way.

The report goes on that like for so many pages it’s likely no one person read it all.

I think it would be fun for you, dear readers, to tackle the report yourself. Go through and find examples where you’re at least reasonably sure it’s gritter-written, and where you have the same confidence a passage was true believer-written.

That the entire thing is a con is proved by more than just the title. I’ll let you figure how we know this, with only one hint: engagement

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Categories: Statistics

6 replies »

  1. You are describing my family—grifters and true believers. I finally disowned them. It may be the only answer—build that invisible compound from Atlas Shrugged and start over (not in Colorado, though. The stupid is too strong there.) I can truly state these individuals are unreachable. The grifter loves money and the win (Tom Steyer types, Zuckerberg, Anschutz, etc) or loves money and hates people (Soros). You cannot never change that. Only God with a bolt of lightening can do that. True believers are the most difficult to reach because as noted, they TWIST everything. I actually had a family member who rejected photographic evidence of the truth. Said member actually saw what they believed, not what was there. You “we can just show them and they’ll see their way” types—you’re as far gone as the true believers, trust me. You CANNOT show them, EVER. The best you can hope for is the flash-in-the-pan reaction of Michael Moore to wind energy (look it up, since it was over a week ago and few remember any of it). Even then, the person simply drops the belief and moves on, as did Moore. He may still believe, but he does not and will not act on that belief. True believers are lost until reality hits them so freaking hard they can’t ignore it anymore. A tough way to learn, but the only way.

    Honestly, the children of the future will be damaged by climate change, but not the rain, snow and so forth. By the lies, the hatred, the violence, the perversion wrought by too many true believers in the lies and too many grifters fighting till “there is only one”. Ruling the world is a time honored reason for mass murder. Children’s futures are dark and dismal, but it’s the climate of anarchy and worship of humanity’s basest actions that will destroy their hope, NOT some stupid people terrified of, or profiting from, weather.

  2. Two other tactics that may not work but at least provide some satisfaction: 1) with the grifter use mockery, the wittier and more subtle the better; 2) with the true believer, use questions, the gentler the better. The former must be shown you know their game; the latter must have seeds of doubt sown. Both methods will probably bring you some grief, but, you know, climate change made you do it.

  3. We only have 2, count em, 2 …million years to save the world (give or take…).
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjlmFr4FMvI

    Unlike climate true believers and the grifters who play on their belief for profit, Patrick Moore makes a good case, not for worrying about too much, but about too little CO2.

    Also, when the consequences of the policies they advocate would be (and are already becoming) so disastrous, that differentiating between grifters and the willfully blind true believer, who at his level of responsibility should know better, is making a distinction without a difference.

    “Downward trends in global yield potential for all major crops tracked since 1960…” – article
    No words…
    https://www.c3headlines.com/2014/03/fundamental-lies-of-the-uns-ipcc-food-production-harmed-by-co2-warmer-temperatures.html

  4. What you are describing is the essence of cult behavior – see Festinger et al.
    The right (and only) known way to deal with a large cult is to recognize that most people are neither members (true believers) nor fellow travelers (grifters). Show the majority that the minority is captive to a cult and their response will draw off the fellow travelers and the consequent lack of social support will eventually reduce the cult to a handful of the most deeply committed. They’ll end up dead or living on the street wearing pasteboard signs, and that’s sad,but unimportant to society as a whole.

  5. Yes, the Climate “true believers” are typical doomsday cult members.

    Like all cults, the leaders are a mixture of charlatan/prophet/seer/con man. Do they really believe, or not?
    In the end, it really does not matter.
    All doomsday cults operate the same: charismatic “prophet” foretells soon-to-arrive horrible and scary doom. Provides a survival mechanism–belief in his snake oil. Warns that non-believers are dangerous, insane, hateful losers. Demands believers sacrifice for the cause–usually involving sacrificing their worldly goods to him. Stokes the fires of hatred, fear, damnation, and just-us-against-the-world.
    The end comes in different flavors–some endings taste like kool-aid; some endings just fizzle out; some metamorphize into another cult or belief; some disappear.
    Climate Cult will likely just fizzle out–in a few decades it will be as quaint as Freudian analysis, phlogiston, or Scientology.
    But there’s lots of room for damage, and alternate endings.
    Stay tuned.
    In the meantime, best to get smart on cults:
    https://www.culteducation.com/mind-control.html

    Facts will not change their minds. Better scientific explanations don’t work either.

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