Institute of Environmentalism

Institute of Sustainable Environmentalism and Human Geography

The

faculty and staff of the Institute are a dedicated bunch of do-gooders committed to an oil-, metal-, concrete-, CO₂-, meat- and Conservative-free world.

Mother Earth is sacred and she bleeds when we hurt her. Dwindling numbers of ecosanctuaries are under imminent threat from irreversible catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, acidifying oceans, poisoned fish, genetic modification, wholesale burning and clear-felling of rainforests, catastrophic extinction of threatened flora and fauna, dramatic ice shelf collapse, greedy, profit-driven multinationals, terminal depletion of natural resources, set net trapping of dolphins, fragile ecosystems collapsing under ecotourism, monstrous carbuncles of wind farms looming on our precious landscapes, pesticide saturation in food chains, toxic industrial emissions, dysfunctional so-called "civilisation", radioactive contamination, artificial preservatives and, above all, callous denialist cynicism. Mother Earth's survival and our Salvation depends on us atoning for our sins.

Hidden agenda

Despite its best efforts, to date, the environmental movement has been unable to halt the march of progress, prosperity and democracy for all. Instead of hiding the decline with Mike's Nature trick, finding the original data and admitting uncertainties and error bars, we must be strong and have faith as we continue our pilgrimage to eliminate industry, supermarkets and wind farms and customary whaling rights of indigenous peoples from the Planet. We must suppress all denialist propaganda. Remember - correlation is good enough for causation!

Courses

101. Conspiracy Theory 101
102. Belief and Activism
103. The Military-Tobacco-Fishing-Industrial Complex
104. FRE: Fundamental Radical Environmentalism
105. REF: Radical Environmental Fundamentalism
106. EFR: Environmental Fundamentalist Radicalism

Required Reading

B. Lever. 2010. The Environmentalist's Guide to Mining, Fishing, Farming, Electric Power Schemes and Industry. University of the Antipodes Islands Occasional Report No. 1, 8 pp.
Download pdf (24 Kb)

Research Exemplar 1: How to exaggerate graphs and influence people

Take the standard atmospheric CO₂ poison concentrations as measured at Mauna Loa since the late 1950s (ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/trends/co2_mm_mlo.txt) and plot them on a graph. Too bad there aren't a couple of centuries of direct CO₂ toxin measurements (ice core proxy data don't quite show what we need) but, as you'll see below, this lack of historical or geological context isn't really a problem when we're just talking about the future.

CO2_2

Next, use a scientific consensus best-fit curve, say a 2nd order polynomial (red line), to smooth out the seasonal variation. The equation is from Excel, I'm not sure what it means, or if it's even correct, but 0.9902 is pretty close to 1.0000! So far, so good; even coal industry-funded cherry-picking denialists couldn't disagree with us up to this point. But that harmful CO₂ rise doesn't look nearly alarming enough, does it?

CO2_3

This is fixed by the trick of clipping the values on the y-axis and changing the aspect ratio of the plot from landscape to portrait. That's better!

CO2_4a

Now let's extrapolate our red curve backwards and forwards in time. Yes, we get an increasing rate of noxious CO₂ concentrations in the future that seems believable - a doubling in less than a century but, whoa, the deadly CO₂ curve rises back in time too. Fitting the yellow 3rd order polynomial curve is worse in the past (higher CO₂) and also worse in the future (lower CO₂). Back-extrapolation of a brown best-fit line indicates no pernicious CO₂ before 1750 (Mike - some mistake? Are there any tricks to fix this? Please check).

CO2_5A

Let's forget all the previous figures, this one on the left shows our desired result: a 4th order polynomial curve (menacing dark blue colour) produces a terrifying projected increase of poisonous CO₂, way more convincing than our earlier red and brown extrapolations. It doesn't matter that the original data points are all but obscured - we are interested only in the models. The flames in the background add an appropriate touch of apocalypse. With a little modification (right), this graph can be used for any environmental activist purpose whatsoever.

Research Exemplar 2: How to win an argument with a Denialist

Because denialists are actually on firmer ground then us, the keys to winning are confidence (us!) and confusion (hopefully them!).

In addition to standard approaches such as cherry picking, quoting out of context, We have adopted a number of successful debating techniques including Ad Hominem attacks, Appeal to Belief, Appeal to Emotion, the Bandwagon, Begging the Question, Confusing Cause and Effect, Hasty Generalisation, Poisoning the Well, Red Herring and Straw Man.

For more information see the Logical Fallacies website.

University of the Antipodes Islands

Cum grano salis