Hot New The Science: Kids Are Having Climate Emotions

Way, way back I ran a quarter-hearted contest for the Worst Science of the Year. Keeping up with the tsunami of dreck flowing out of academia proved impossible, however. Worse, the peer-reviewed flotsam and jetsam was so nauseatingly noisome I worried reading only bad papers would wreck my mind. So I quit.

But if I were reinstate the contest, the Dishonors would this year go to the peer-reviewed paper that gave rise to this “Interpretation” of The Science:

Climate change is causing widespread distress among US youth and affecting their beliefs and plans for the future. These effects may intensify, across the political spectrum, as exposure to climate-related severe weather events increases.

The paper is “Climate emotions, thoughts, and plans among US adolescents and young adults: a cross-sectional descriptive survey and analysis by political party identification and self-reported exposure to severe weather events”—that whole thing is the title—by R Eric Lewandowski and a bunch of others in Lancet: Planetary Health.

US youth have not experienced “climate change”, nor have they had to live through “climate-related severe weather”. As a for-instance, rhe number of tornadoes in the US is, and has been, at its long-term average, even accounting for the improvement in counting storms that historically went unnoticed (cyclones on distant farm lands often went unrecorded). The number of hurricanes is down. There were more in 1851-1860 than there were in 2011-2020 (and some might have gone unrecorded back then, too). Et cetera.

This means that any “self-report” of “exposure” of “climate-related severe weather” by “youth” is of the same value as a report on state of immigration from NPR.

Incidentally, I know you have been following the Errors of Epidemiology series, which is at pains to distinguish between exposure and dose (blog/Substack). They are not equivalent. You can be sitting warm and comfy at home, protected against the wiles of the winds and weather yet the county in which you reside experiences a low-grade tornado. You were exposed in an official sense, especially if you were bothered by Experts at school after the fact asking about how you “feel” about it. Yet you received no dose unless the winds themselves whacked you. Which is unusual.

So unusual that when the “Cint digital survey marketplace” reports that “youth” that it contacted reported “exposure”, as it did here in the name of Science, one doubts whether these “self-reported” incidents happened at all.

Here’s the opening sentence of this botch of publishing:

As the impacts of climate change increase, emotional and psychological consequences are becoming apparent.

This is pure religion, of the bad kind. Not one word of it is true. What is true is that young minds have been addled and punished by decades of idiot propaganda screaming the sky the falling. When asked for evidence of fallen skies, the propagandists screech “Denier!”

I exaggerate. Accusations of deniership are there, but not as frequent as ignorance. Lewandowski has been at this game long enough he should have realized the fleet of cargo ships laden with prognostications of climatic doom set sail since the 1970s have all sunk beneath the waves. These serial failures do not stop him. He still believes.

Never mind all that. Think about this instead: what is this mindless drivel asking kids about their feelings about “climate change”? How does this count as Science? How is this anything but chattering gossip?

Here’s what the children were asked about:

“(1) emotions and thoughts about climate change”. Why would the musings of “youth” about a physical science about which they are by-definition ignorant concern any person except parents?

“(2) perceived and desired responses to respondents’ attempts to speak about climate change”. Stunning and brave as science. Who in the world is stopping anybody from speaking about “climate change”?

” (3) perceptions of who or what is responsible for causing and addressing climate change”. Once again, the opinion of the ignorant is of no value, except as a gauge of the effectiveness of propaganda. The meter is pegging out here.

“(4) actions that respondents desire and are planning in response to climate change”. If these “youth” are ignorant of the physics of planetary thermodynamics and of energy creation and distribution, which they are, then their opinions here again are of no value, except as propaganda.

“(5) emotions and thoughts about the US Government response to climate change”. My dear readers, it is only with Herculean effort, and the stepping away from the computer for a long period, that I have been able to restrain the torrent of devastating obscenity this deserves. Emotions and thoughts forsooth!

In Everything You Believe Is Wrong, I explain the Appeal to Non-Authority Fallacy. It’s like the popular Appeal to Authority Fallacy, of which you know and of which Lewandowski is enslaved to. But the Non-Authority is different. It asks you to believe a conclusion is true because non-authorities emotionally ask you to believe.

You’d think no one would be foolish enough to fall for such as asinine ploy. But you would be wrong. Lewandowski trots out these tots and asks us to weep for them. How can we be so cold-hearted as to disagree with these wholesome waifs? We must believe in “climate change” “solutions” so that the kids do not feel bad.

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