Media Exhibit Cognitive Dissonance Over Global Warming

Psychologists define cognitive dissonance as the angst caused by possessing two conflicting thoughts at the same time.

According to prominent climate realist Philip Stott, this is the condition global warming obsessed media members are currently experiencing as a ten-year cooling trend -- clearly visible to all that can read a thermometer! -- refutes Nobel Laureate Al Gores's junk science concerning increased CO2 emissions causing rising temperatures.

As Stott wrote Tuesday (emphasis added throughout):

I must ask a very serious and urgent question of our media. Why do you continue to talk glibly about current climate ‘warming’ when it is now widely acknowledged that there has been no ‘global warming’ for the last ten years, a cooling trend that many think may continue for at least another ten years? How can you talk of the climate ‘warming’ when, on the key measures, it isn’t? And now a leading Mexican scientist is even predicting that we may enter another ‘Little Ice Age’ - a ‘pequeña era de hielo’.

Such media behaviour exhibits a classic condition known as ‘cognitive dissonance’. This is experienced when belief in a grand narrative persists blindly even when the facts in the real world begin to contradict what the narrative is saying. Sadly, our media have come to have a vested interest in ‘global warming’, as have so many politicians and activists. They are terrified that the public may begin to question everything if climate is acknowledged, on air and in the press, not to be playing ball with their pet trope.

After discussing the cooling that has occurred since 1998, and some of the possible reasons, Stott continued to point to media's psychological malady:

So, why are newspapers, magazines, radio, and television not telling us all this? Because they have invested so much effort over the last ten years in hyping up the exact opposite. Moreover, it is especially pathetic sophistry to claim, as dedicated ‘global warmers’ are wont to do, that ‘natural forces’ are having the temerity to “suppress” ‘global warming’. The fundamental point has always been this: climate change is governed by hundreds of factors, or variables, and the very idea that we can manage climate change predictably by understanding and manipulating at the margins one politically-selected factor is as misguided as it gets. [...]

If this cooling phase really does persist, it will be illuminating to observe how long our media can maintain its befuddled state of ‘cognitive dissonance’.

To best exemplify the problem media are facing, one must go back to 1957 when cognitive dissonance was first proposed as a psychological affectation (forgive the Wiki citation, but it sums it up best):

Social psychologist Leon Festinger first proposed the theory in 1957 after the publication of his book When Prophecy Fails, observing the counterintuitive belief persistence of members of a UFO doomsday cult and their increased proselytization after the leader's prophecy failed. The failed message of Earth's destruction, purportedly sent by aliens to a woman in 1956, became a disconfirmed expectancy that increased dissonance between cognitions, thereby causing most members of the impromptu cult to lessen the dissonance by accepting a new prophecy: that the aliens had instead spared the planet for their sake.

Does that mean climate alarmists like Gore are going to continue to push this myth even if global temperatures continue to decline in the coming decades?

Well, if you had all of your money invested in this canard, wouldn't YOU do everything within your power to perpetuate the hysteria?

Yes, that's a rhetorical question, because most people reading this have scruples, unlike those that certainly know they're lying to the public for their own financial gain.