Theater of Operations

Global War on Disinformation

Climate Change Opinion:
Cause is Human — by Country

Proportion responding 'yes' when asked,

Temperature rise is part of global warming or climate change.
Do you think rising temperatures are … a result of human activities?

(Wikipedia, 18 January 2010)

Vocal Minority vs Silent Majority

George Marshall (1964)

Researchers in Australia found that these [media echo-chambers have] created what they call a “false consensus” effect around climate change, which led both sides to believe that their opinion was more common than it actually was.
[Because] the loud and very vocal climate change deniers were also heard far into the mainstream media, both sides tended to hugely overestimate their numbers, guessing them to make up a quarter of the population.
In fact they made up less than 7%.

When people misread the social norm in this way, it can lead them to suppress their own views, thus widening the divide and further reinforcing the false consensus — and at its most extreme, creating a society in which the majority of people keep silent because they fear that they are in the minority.
This process, known as pluralistic ignorance, helps to explain the extreme polarization around key markers of political identity such as abortion, gun control, and, increasingly, climate change.
(p 28)

[While] three-quarters of Americans still trust climate scientists as a source of information on global warming, they are nearly as inclined to trust television weather forecasters who are greatly less qualified as scientists but have a far more friendly, familiar, and approachable public profile.
Unfortunately … only half of television weathercasters surveyed [in 2010] believed that climate change is occurring and more than a quarter believed that it is a “scam.”
(p 117)

(Don't Even Think About It, 2014)

Stephan Lewandowsky (1948)

Winthrop Professor in Psychology, University of Western Australia

In Australia … the number of people who deny that climate change is happening is around 5% or 6% of the population.
[If] you then ask [those 5%] how many people they think [share] their opinion, their response is … about 50%.
[This] is called a false consensus effect [and] is usually indicative of a distortion in the media landscape.

[If people] are inflating their self-importance, that [is an indication that] the media [are] not doing their job properly.

(Attitudes to climate change, Science Show, ABC Radio National, 24 November 2012)

Green Army: Communications

Global War on Disinformation

The Right to Personal Security

Jeff McMahon

If we didn't have all these guns in the United States, we would have far, far fewer homicides.
And we have all these guns in the United States only because people want to have them.
We could have legislation prohibiting private ownership of guns and putting all guns in the hands of the police tomorrow if the gun advocates didn't oppose it.

This is one thing that I think law abiding gun owners and criminals are both complicit in.
They both want access to guns.
And the thing that is disturbing about gun owners who are not criminals is that they are willing to insist on their own private possession of guns at the cost of criminals having guns as well.

(Philosophy Bites, 17 February 2013)

Blue Army: Persons of Interest

Global War on Disinformation

Money is the God of our time.

— Heinrich Heine (1797 – 1856), March 1841.


[I am for] full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism — with a separation of state and economics, in the same way, and for the same reasons, as the separation of state and church.

— Ayn Rand (1905 – 82), The Virtue of Selfishness, 1964.


[We] have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand.

— John Keynes (1883 – 1946), The Great Slump of 1930, 1930.


[A] refusal to submit to anything we cannot understand, must lead to the destruction of our civilisation.

— Friedrich Hayek (1899 – 1992), The Road to Serfdom, 1944.

Friedrich Hayek (1899 – 1992)

We should regard as the most desirable order of society, one that we would choose, if we knew that our initial position in it would be determined purely by chance — such as the fact of our being born into a particular family.
(1940)

[John Keynes] was the one really great man I ever knew, and for whom I had unbounded admiration.
(1946)

The Constitution of Liberty (1960)

[Liberalism is] a modest and even humble creed [with] a low opinion of men’s wisdom and capacities …
(Introduction)

[The] the greatest danger to liberty today comes from [those] efficient expert administrators exclusively concerned with what they regard as the public good.
(The Decline of Socialism and The Rise of the Welfare State, Chapter 17)

It is … those intoxicated by the advance of knowledge [who] so often become the enemies of freedom …
The more men know, the smaller the share of all that knowledge becomes that any one mind can absorb.
The more civilized we become, the more relatively ignorant must each individual be of the facts on which the working of his civilization depends. …

The argument for liberty is not an argument against organization, which is one of the most powerful tools human reason can employ, but an argument:

• against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, [and]
• against the use of coercion to prevent others from doing better.

(The Creative Power of a Free Civilization, Chapter 2)

[Generally speaking,] the conservative does not object to coercion or arbitrary power so long as it is used for what he regards as the right purposes. …
[Like] the socialist, he regards himself as entitled to force the values he holds on other people. …

The typical conservative … has no political principles which enable him to work with people whose moral values differ from his own for a political order in which both can obey their convictions. …

The chief evil [of our time] is unlimited government, and nobody is qualified to wield unlimited power.
The powers which modern democracy possesses would be even more intolerable in the hands of some small elite. …

The liberal differs from the conservative in his willingness

• to face [our] ignorance and
• to admit how little we know,

without claiming the authority of supernatural forces of knowledge where his reason fails him. …

[For the liberal] the spiritual and the temporal are different spheres which ought not to be confused.
(Why I Am Not a Conservative, Postscript)

Eugene Miller

[Hayek believed] that spontaneous forces of adjustment can [always] be counted on to produce beneficial order and growth in the future as they have in the past …

Friedrich Hayek (1899 – 1992):
[The] self-regulating forces of the market will somehow bring about the required adjustments to new conditions.

(p 182)

[He opposed] efforts to equalise opportunities, arguing that the public’s interest is best served by allowing individuals to make full use of the opportunities available to them, even though:

• these opportunities are limited to a few, and
• inequality is the inevitable outcome.

(p 178)

Hayek points out that some natural resources are diminished by use and are eventually used up, while others can be so managed as to yield a durable stream of benefits.
In either case, however, he has no objection to exhausting a natural resource, if that appears to be the best strategy to maximise income.
The market offers better foresight in these matters than government planning; and one lesson of advancing technology has been that new and unanticipated resources will emerge to replace existing ones. …

He recognises an exception, however, where the aim is not income maximisation, but:

• providing recreational opportunities; and
• preserving natural beauty or sites of historical or scientific interest.

Such amenities render a service to the public at large, providing advantages for which the individual beneficiary cannot be charged a price. …
Voluntary efforts in this field are desirable, but Hayek does not object to government using its compulsory powers to acquire the land needed for such amenities …
(p 175)

[Hayek defended] not only entrepreneurs, but also a leisured class, whose members likely will have grown up … to feel an obligation to take the lead in intellectual, moral and artistic affairs.
In [his view, in] most of the USA, this class [had] almost completely disappeared, so that businessmen now [lacked] intellectual leadership and [had] no ‘coherent and defensible philosophy of life.’
[He believed a] progressive society requires ‘a cultural elite within the propertied class’.
(p 85)

Value is assigned not by central authority but by the market …
Judgements of individual merit are [necessarily] subjective, [whereas market] value is an ‘objective outcome’ …
[And since] the market generally assures that value is rewarded, government’s role is primarily to facilitate market distributions by maintaining the rule of law.
Certainly it has no business pursuing social justice.
(p 88)

Hayek [assumed] that applications of the Rule of Law must be governed by the public interest.
This implies that protection for individual rights can be suspended where the interest of the community requires it.

In The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek argues [that while] legal guarantees of individual freedom are basic to ‘the normal running of society’ … they are not ‘absolute rights’ that can never be infringed …

Two such cases, which ‘can hardly be disputed,’ are

• curtailing freedom of speech in a situation of ‘clear and present danger’ and
• compulsory land purchase through government’s right of eminent domain.

(p 130)

(Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty, The Institute of Economic Affairs & Profile Books, 2010)

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Thomas Jefferson (1743 – 1826)

Nothing is more clearly written in the book of destiny than the emancipation of the blacks; and it is equally certain that the two races will never live in a state of equal freedom under the same government, so insurmountable are the barriers which nature, habit, and opinions have established between them.
(Memoirs of Jefferson, M Conseil, Editor)

In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover and wickedness insensibly open, cultivate and improve.
Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone.
The people themselves therefore are its only safe depositories.
(Notes on Virginia, quoted by Carl Sagan, Demon Haunted World, 1997, p 400)

If the last king can be strangled with the entrails of the last priest, we will have destroyed the institutions that have stood in the way of human freedom.
(John & Abigail Adams, PBS American Experience, 1997)

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past …
(Letter to John Adams, 1 August 1816)

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Balance of Forces

Theatre of Operations

Balance Of Forces
	Green Army	Non-Aligned	Blue Army
Command and Control Finance, Logistics and Supply
Governments	Countries who have signed and ratified the Kyoto Protocol (192) [Note 1]	Countries who have signed not ratified (1) or who have not signed (3) the Kyoto Protocol [Note 1]	Countries that have withdrawn (1) [Note 1]
Non-Government Organizations	Environmental International Development
Regulated Industries	Renewable Energy Nuclear Energy Efficiency		Fossil fuels Chemical Tobacco Mining Fishing
Research and Development
Scientific Bodies [Note 2]			Free market think tanks [Note 3]
Climate Researchers	97%	3%
Synthesis Reports	IPCC US Global Change Research Program Arctic Climate Impact Assessment
National Academies of Science	32
General Science	8
Earth Sciences	8	5 [Note 4]
Meteorology and Oceanography	6	1 [Note 5]
Paleoclimatology	2
Biology and Life Sciences	7
Human Health	7
Miscellaneous	5
Communications
Media Hubs			News Corporation
Network Hubs	Consensus Websites		Contrarian Websites
Field Operations
			Industry front organisations, spokespersons and "white coats". [Note 3]
Washington Lobbyists [Note 8]	Renewables (138)		Fossil Fuels (2,672)
Foot soldiers and insurgents			Tea Party (Mayer, 2010)

Notes

1. Wikipedia.  List of Kyoto Protocol signatories, 7 July 2017.
   Signed and ratified: 192 parties.
   Signed but not intending to ratify: United States.
   Former parties: Canada renounced the convention effective 15 December 2012.
   UNFCCC members but not signatories: Andorra, Palestine, South Sudan.
2. Wikipedia (2011):
   Since 2007, when the American Association of Petroleum Geologists released a revised statement, no scientific body of national or international standing rejects the findings of human-induced effects on climate change.
3. Exxon Secrets
4. Wikipedia (2011):
   American Association of Petroleum Geologists
   American Geological Institute
   American Institute of Professional Geologists
   Canadian Federation of Earth Sciences
   Geological Society of Australia
5. Wikipedia (2011):
   American Association of State Climatologists
6. Goodell, Jeff.  As the World Burns, Rolling Stone Politics, 6 January 2010.

   [According] to the Center for Public Integrity, the number of lobbyists devoted to climate change had soared by more than fivefold since 2003, to a total of 2810 — or five lobbyists for every lawmaker in Washington. …
   Only 138 of the lobbyists were pushing for alternative energy — the rest were heavily weighted toward the old fossil-fuel mafia, most of whom oppose tough carbon caps.

Reference

• Mayer, Jane, 2010.  Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama, The New Yorker, 30 August.

Right-Wing Authoritarianism and Integrative Complexity

Philip Tetlock (1954) [Annenberg University Professorm University of Pennsylvania]:
[This study used] the integrative complexity coding system to analyze confidential interviews with 89 members of the British House of Commons.
The primary goal was to explore the interrelation between cognitive style and political ideology in this elite political sample.
Results indicate that moderate socialists interpreted policy issues in more integratively complex or multidimensional terms than did moderate conservatives who, in turn, interpreted issues in more complex terms than extreme conservatives and extreme socialists. …
These relations between integrative complexity and political ideology remained significant after controlling for a variety of belief and attitudinal variables.
(Cognitive style and political belief systems in the British House of Commons, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46(2), 365-375, 1984)

Right-Wing Authoritarianism

Right-wing authoritarianism … is defined by three attitudinal and behavioral clusters which correlate together:

1. Authoritarian submission — a high degree of submissiveness to the authorities who are perceived to be established and legitimate in the society in which one lives.
2. Authoritarian aggression — a general aggressiveness directed against deviants, outgroups, and other people that are perceived to be targets according to established authorities.
3. Conventionalism — a high degree of adherence to the traditions and social norms that are perceived to be endorsed by society and its established authorities, and a belief that others in one's society should also be required to adhere to these norms.

… The "right wing" in right-wing authoritarianism does not necessarily refer to someone's politics, but to psychological preferences and personality.
It means that the person tends to follow the established conventions and authorities in society.
In theory, the authorities could have either right-wing or left-wing political views.

Milton Rokeach's dogmatism scale was an early attempt to measure pure authoritarianism, whether left or right.
The scale was carefully designed to measure "closed mindedness" without regard to ideology.
Nevertheless, researchers found that it correlated with British political conservativism. …

There have been a number of other attempts to identify "left-wing authoritarians" in the United States and Canada.
These would be people who submit to leftist authorities, are highly conventional to liberal viewpoints, and are aggressive to people who oppose left-wing ideology.
These attempts have failed because measures of authoritarianism always correlate at least slightly with the right.
There are certainly extremists across the political spectrum, but most psychologists now believe that authoritarianism is a predominantly right-wing phenomenon.

Although authoritarians in North America generally support conservative political parties, this finding must be considered in a historical and cultural context.
For example, during the Cold War, authoritarians in the United States were usually anti-communist, whereas in the Soviet Union, authoritarians generally supported the Communist Party and were opposed to capitalism.
Thus, authoritarians generally favor the established ways and oppose social and political change.

(Wikipedia, 8 September 2011)

Integrative Complexity

Integrative complexity … refers to the degree to which thinking and reasoning involve the recognition and integration of multiple perspectives and possibilities and their interrelated contingencies. …

Integrative complexity is a measure of the intellectual style used by individuals or groups in processing information, problem-solving, and decision making.

Complexity looks at the structure of one's thoughts, while ignoring the contents.

[Integrative] complexity has two components: …

• Differentiation refers to the perception of different dimensions when considering an issue.
• Integration refers to the recognition of cognitive connections among differentiated dimensions or perspectives.

(Wikipedia, 5 November 2011)