Time Mag — Buttering up Believers: Why deniers brains can’t process climate change

It’s self congratulation disguised as “science”. The insults are passed off as universal human failings but the unmistakable message is that those who do believe in “climate change” are exempt. (Only the unbelievers have smaller minds and more selfish cortexes. )

You’d have to be pretty stupid not to get this message:

…We know—at least those of us not in the grips of outright climate denial—how bad it is. But we can’t seem to act to save the future.

The Time readers who haven’t cancelled their subscriptions already may like to read this and give themselves a free shot of mojo, knowing that they can process climate change. Possibly they buy Time because it tells them they’re the gifted, superior beings they hope they might be. This is manna for those with low self esteem and meaningless lives.

This is not just some random author either, Bryan Walsh, who wrote this, was TIME’s International Editor, its energy and environmental correspondent and was the Tokyo bureau chief in 2006 and 2007.

As usual, it’s projection all the way down:

There are many reasons why [we fail to act], ranging from political polarization to the disinformation campaigns of major energy companies to the sheer technical difficulty of replacing carbon-based fossil fuels. But the biggest reason is found within our own minds.

The real victims of disinformation campaigns are those who think storms and floods are “new”, and every kind of weather is a magical omen foretelling doom. And the worst kind of political polarization is the sort which makes a scientific discussion into a tribal war — it’s not 1.2 or 1.5 degrees, it’s good man : bad man, expert and “denier”?

Would you like pity with that?

Bryan Walsh even manages an air of fake compassion and understanding while he soaks in first-class condescension. I mean, those poor normals, their brains really can’t process the risks. Mere deplorables have mental flaws visible in fMRI’s:

When you think about yourself while inside the narrow metal tube of a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, a certain part of your brain, called the medial prefrontal cortex, or MPFC, will light up like Times Square on New Year’s Eve. If you think about a family member, the MPFC will still light up, though less robustly. And if you think about other people whom you feel no connection to—like, say, the inhabitants of the South Asian island nation of the Maldives, which will likely one day be erased by climate-change-driven sea level rise—the MPFC will light up even less.

You don’t need a $3 million MRI machine to know that human beings are self-centered creatures.

You don’t need a $2 MRI machine to know that this article is buttering up the needy with baseless speculation based on imaginary brain scans. Who needs data when you can just fake it up?

Let’s take the easy risk-free conformist path but pretend we are above it all, smarter than the riff raff.

Adapted from END TIMES: A Brief Guide to the End of the World by Bryan Walsh.

Image: Cerebral Hemisphere: wikimedia, Polygon data were generated by Database Center for Life Science (DBCLS)

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