Swedish Farmers Have Doubts About Climatologists and Climate Change

cold fjord (826450) writes with this excerpt from ScienceNordic: Researchers the world over almost unanimously agree that our climate is changing ... But many farmers – at least Swedish ones – have experienced mild winters and shifting weather before and are hesitant about trusting the scientists. The researcher who discovered the degree of scepticism among farmers was surprised by her findings. Therese Asplund ... was initially looking into how agricultural magazines covered climate change. Asplund found after studying ten years of issues of the two agricultural sector periodicals ATL and Land Lantbruk that they present climate change as scientifically confirmed, a real problem. But her research took an unexpected direction when she started interviewing farmers in focus groups about climate issues. Asplund had prepared a long list of questions about how the farmers live with the threat of climate change and what they plan to do to cope with the subsequent climate challenges. The conversations took a different course: "They explained that they didn't quite believe in climate changes," she says. "Or at least that these are not triggered by human activities." (Original paper here.)

Comments

Weather is NOT climate

[ColdWetDog]

Repeat that after me, Mr. Fjord.

It is expected that there will be areas of happy, mild weather in any scenario you care to imagine. It is to be expected that a bunch of locals in regions suffering from happy, mild weather might not be as concerned about the issue as someone who had their house wiped out by a tornado.

But it the concerns and insights of either set of persons would be irrelevant to the discussion of GLOBAL climate change (hint, the word that is BOLDED is important).

Climate in not weather. Weather is not climate.

Re:The Earth is big. Really big.

[nospam007]

"Farmers also spend a lot of time outdoors, unlike researchers, and have a better idea of how minor human effects are."

They also shat in their fields for millenia giving all the population worms and other parasites before science told them to stop.

That was a 'human effect' too.

Re:funny

[Art Challenor]

But, but, but...

What happens if we clean up the environment and it not the cause of global warming. All we'd have then is no smog, non-polluting power and clean water.

Re:Swedish farmers are wise

[QuietLagoon]

... IPCC has been furiously back pedaling...

Furiously back pedaling? - or - Careful restatement of certain specific points based upon new information, while keeping the overall context intact?

.
I've seen so much over the top hype and hysteria from the climate change deniers, that I no longer believe their 10 word or less summaries of why climate change is not happening.

The climate change deniers need to start presenting a better level of peer-reviewed data and conclusions, and stop their unproven assertions (note: hypothetical research papers funded by the oil and coal industries, however well that funding is hidden, do not count.)

Re:Who CARES what non-science approaches "think"?

[ultranova]

While in general I agree with you - you are talking about a group of people here who do their life's work at the junction of the earth and the air. It is true they may be misguided or misinformed. But their opinions were not arrived at through talk radio.

The chances are that they arrived at them through the time-honored "head in bushes" -method: Something will cause me great harm if true. I don't really have any real power over it, nor any way to significantly mitigate the damage through preparation. Therefore, I'll disbelief it to protect myself from stress and worry.

If true, such feeling of disempowerment is a bigger problem to Sweden than climate change. The latter is ultimately a matter of enduring hardship and adapting, which is something the Nordics are quite familiar with; but the former is a spiritual malaise that ultimately leads to dysfunctional society and democracy de facto falling and degenerating to corporacy, as has happened in the US.