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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.)
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.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
"...don't believe in Global Warming"
A little polar bear goes up to his mum and asks her, “Am I real polar bear?”
“Of course you are” his mum replies. “I’m a polar bear, your dad’s a polar bear, so you’re a polar bear”.
“But are you sure I don’t have any brown bear or grizzly bear in me?” he asks.
“Listen, if you don’t believe me go ask your grand-dad”
So he goes and asks his grand-dad
“Grand-dad, are you sure I’m a polar bear. I don’t have brown bear or grizzly bear in me?”
His grand–dad looks down on him and smiles.
“Listen, my boy, I’m a polar bear, my mum and dad were polar bears, and your granny, she was a polar bear, so your dad is a polar bear and so is your mum and her mum and her dad and her grand parents. We’re all polar bears so you are a pure, 100% polar bear”
The little polar bear doesn’t look convinced so his grand-dad asks him’
“What’s worrying you?”
“Well” he replies, “If both mum and dad are polar bears and all my grannies and grand-dads are polar bears, and even their mums and dads were all polar bears, and there’s no trace of grizzly or brown bear in methen why am I so fucking cold?”
We can safely discard decades of satellite data and trends on global weather and climate, and the analysis of all climatologists all around the world, because a few carefully choosen farmers in sweden think that it is not happening.
"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.
"We're gonna need a bigger re-education camp"
Some people.
My friend from Norway is paranoid about Global Warming slowing the gulf stream and leading to a localised ice age.
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.
... 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.)
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.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
You go on a viking to a place that you used to raid for wine, and find out that they don't have any because grapes don't grow there anymore?
You know, Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries are really a lot like the US. It looks really liberal if you're in the big cities but it starts to get distinctly redneck if you head out of town. The farmers there are like the farmers in the US, a conservative bent that things should stay they way they always were and that the distant remote government really doesn't understand them (same with loggers, another big industry in Scandinavia). Doesn't help that Scandinavian TV likes to portray rural people as ignorant hicks (same as US TV actually!).
So I can really understand that Swedish academics get confused if they spend their lives in the middle of Stockholm and think that the rest of the country is equally liberal. Then all these European countries feign shock and surprise when suddenly there's a surge at the elections for center and right-of-center parties. The real difference in US is that there a broader balance of political power between the urban, suburban, and rural areas.
But then again, I'm in California, and I'm always surprised by how many people assume CA is solidly liberal through and through, when we're more like a 55/45 split (all those red/blue states look purple if you look at it county by county).