What Gets You Fighting Mad?

As someone who studies human behavior, I am always interested in the way people react to information that they either don't agree with or don't like.

Let's take the civil rights movement during the '50s and '60s for example. Those that did not like the information they received about the end of segregation tended to react with threats, bullying and intimidating behavior toward those they perceived as their opposition.

Let's now look at today's climate debate for comparison. You don't tend to read about anyone that proposes that our climate is being affected negatively by man's influence displaying threatening behaviors toward those that don't think the world's climate is changing or is changing for that reason.

Now let's look at some quotes from yesterday's Scientific American article entitled, "Cyber Bullying Intensifies as Climate Data Questioned".................

"The e-mails come thick and fast every time NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt appears in the press. Rude and crass e-mails. E-mails calling him a fraud, a cheat, a scumbag and much worse."

"The purpose of this new form of cyber-bullying seems clear; it is to upset and intimidate the targets, making them reluctant to participate further in the climate change debate," (Clive) Hamilton wrote in a column published last week by Sydney's ABC News. "While the internet is often held up as the instrument of free speech, it is often used for the opposite purpose, to drive people out of the public debate."

"What's clear is the e-mails show anger and hostility. There's no effort to ask questions or seek what (Kevin) Trenberth called "the truth." Scientists aren't the only target; journalists covering the issue also routinely find their inbox stuffed with epithets.

"They do not tend to be reasonable," said Rudy Baum, editor-in-chief of Chemical and Engineering News, who has been covering science for the magazine for 30 years. "They do not seem to be interested in dialogue. They are shrill, they are unfriendly, and they are bullying."

"Increasingly," wrote Pulitzer-prize winning columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. in the Miami Herald recently, "we are a people estranged from critical thinking, divorced from logic, alienated from even objective truth." Added Trenberth: "In science there's a whole lot of facts and basic information on the nature of climate change, but it's not being treated that way. It's being treated as opinion."

If you take the words "climate change" and substitute the worlds "civil rights," I do believe there are some parallels to be drawn here.