Guest Post By Kiminori Itoh who is Professor in the Graduate School for Environment and Information Sciences, Yokohama National University, Yokohama, Japan.
I recently wrote an article in a Japanese physics journal for laymen (“Mentality of the global warming affair: socio-psychological aspect of climate change issue,” Parity, Vol. 27, No. 1, (2012) 90-93 (in Japanese unfortunately)) on the global warming issue from the view point of social psychology. In particular, I tried to characterize the psychological origin of the very simple idea that anthropogenic emission of CO2 is a main cause of climate changes and that the reduction of its emission can reduce the climate changes. The following is an excerpt of the relevant part translated in English.
I wonder if Mr. Itoeh is, imo, “on drugs”? He has to show causality, which he hasn’t done. It is stupid, imo, and counter-productive to even TRY to “wed”/combine Science with Social Psychology! If the Science is valid, and then it is correctly represented, graphically, “Social Psychology” is irrelevant! Only where the scientific claims are extremely weak(as in climate “science”), would, imo, some idiot,–some propagandist,–some apparachek, deem it necessary to “convince” another, outside of the Data. I feel Itoeh should possibly try to illustrate children’s books, but I feel he doesn’t “make the case” for a correllation, which THEN, is NOT…necessarily causation.
Professor Itoh makes a valid point: that Western mindsets are linear and Eastern mindsets more open, however that can only apply to the IPCC, UN, Greenpeace, WHO et al.
The remainder of Westerners are actually quite capable of thinking beyond the simplistic as can be evidenced by the number of blogs, bloggers and commentators that are championing the cause of the “intellect” over the “consensus”.