Food and climate change and hypersensitive deniers at WUWT

In my experience, prolonged exposure to severe sharp pain can make a person hypersensitive to pain, at least temporarily.  Well I'm seeing the same effect with Anthony Watts at WUWT when it comes to fear.

Studies have suggested that some people process information via the amygdala more and they are hypersensitive to fear. That goes a long way to explaining the following. In fact it explains a lot about deniers. Deniers (ie the plebs as opposed to the disinformers) do appear to react strongly against anything that causes them to be scared. Their brain gets overloaded so they claim "it can't be true". I see it time and time again at WUWT. The words "scare" and "fear" come up a lot whenever climate science is discussed, with claims like "they are just trying to scare us".

Christopher Monckton knows very well that the threshold of fear among the denialati is much lower than average. He drafted an email which traded heavily on the scaredy cat tendency, you may recall (email here, which I discussed here). Any normal person would laugh or groan or tsk upon getting an email like that. I don't know how most deniers reacted. What I do know is that he managed to attract people to his events, so it's likely there were some people who didn't consign his email to the spam or trash folder.

Two days in a row Anthony's picked on perfectly normal headlines and claimed they are "hype".

Now hype happens all the time. Editors want to attract readers so they pick a headline that will scream for attention. Yet that wasn't the case in these two situations.  Here are the two cases (click read more if you are on the home page).

Quote of the Week - Anthony Watts himself sums up the scaredy cat deniers at WUWT

I've often observed how much Anthony Watts and his 8% dismissives at WUWT are scared of being scared.  As Anthony himself points out, his "quote of the week" sums up Anthony and all his climate science denying fans very well. (Archived here.)  Anthony writes:

David Elder of Australia, commenting on this event at WUWT, condensed what many of us feel about global warming and environmentalism into a single sentence.

A great victory over the radical green extreme. We here in Oz have found WUWT invaluable in this cause. There has got to be a better way of stewardship for the planet than by scaring the hell out of everyone.

I won't comment on his giving credit to WUWT except to observe that almost no-one I meet has ever heard of Anthony Watts and WUWT.  If they had they'd agree they were all utter nutters.

For the rest, if there ever was an article on "stewardship of the planet" on WUWT, it was likely to be some harebrained scheme to destroy natural arid areas and all the life they contain by turning them into forests - by diverting water thousands of kilometres (and destroying natural waterways in the process) or bringing hordes of cloven footed beasts to wreck Australia's natural grasslands or some other wacky idea.  Even those wacky ideas are few and far between.  Most of the WUWT articles are to encourage the burning of fossil fuels so we go down the gurgler more quickly, or irrational disbelief and mockery of mainstream science and scientists, or wacky and paranoid conspiracy theories of the "one world government", or Agenda21 and climate science is a commie, fascist, socialist, treehugging, greenie, "Lysenkoist" plot kind.  They aren't the nuttiest of the utter nutters but they are moving quickly in that direction.

Global warming makes WUWT-ers crazy scared

The key element of the quote is "scaring the hell out of everyone".  Anthony and his WUWT fans are scared shitless of being scared.  And when it all comes down to it, the findings of climate science scare them more than anything.  That's one of the main reasons they protest it so much.  That's why they deny it. (The other reason is that they don't want governments to do anything to stop it. It offends their staunchly pro-individual anti-social ideology. See Smokey's comment on my other article for a classic example of both.)

Psychology shows that the conservative brain responds to fear.  And there is barely a more conservative brain that that of the average WUWT-er.  The disability is described here at alternet.org - an excerpt:

Consider for a moment just how terrifying it must be to live life as a true believer on the right. Reality is scary enough, but the alternative reality inhabited by people who watch Glenn Beck, listen to Rush Limbaugh, or think Michele Bachmann isn't a joke must be nothing less than horrifying.

Research suggests that conservatives are, on average, more susceptible to fear than those who identify themselves as liberals. Looking at MRIs of a large sample of young adults last year, researchers at University College London discovered that “greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala”. The amygdala is an ancient brain structure that's activated during states of fear and anxiety. (The researchers also found that “greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex” – a region in the brain that is believed to help people manage complexity.)

I have no sympathy for them and their destructive desires and simple minds.  Anthony Watts and his mob at WUWT are intent on becoming more scared by rejecting climate science and by rejecting any and all ways of mitigating global warming.  Even a conservative brain unable to manage complexity shouldn't be that dumb. It's not logical!