Types of People in the AGW Discourse: Revisited

Dear friends and colleagues: this is an updated version of the April 7, 2014 post. The reason we are updating it is that through your comments, we understood important additional categories needed to be added. So, here they are.

The Anthropogenic Global Warming discourse is supposed to be happening between the Deniers and the Believers but this is an oversimplification that does not fit well into the actual reality, so we are presenting below a more useful classification.



1. The Deniers: they don't believe AGW is happening and no evidence will make them change their mind.

2. The Believers: they believe AGW is happening but they have their feet on the ground.

3. The Naivers: they believe Renewable Energy (RE) will replace fossil fuels (FF) and save the day.

4. The Black Swanners: they believe in AGW but at the same time understand that humans will not voluntarily reduce their standards of living. Thus humanity will NOT reduce their FF consumption for many decades to come. The way out? A serious black swan event that will solve the emissions problem "through the back door." Examples:
     a. A gigantic volcanic eruption in Indonesia.
     b. An ebola like virus that drastically decimates human population.
     c. What have you.

5. Gamblers: they do believe AGW is happening but decide to wait and see. There might even be some unintended positive consequences of climate change. If nothing else, their investments in Greenland may become more valuable.

6. Opportunistic: the ones that make loads of money by selling the RE to the Naivers (above).

7. Liars / Lobbyists: what they believe in their heart is irrelevant. They follow the money and fully support their sponsors no matter how much they have to bend themselves backward to seem reasonable.

8. Divesters: believe that once institutional investors divest from fossil fuel stocks the carbon concentration in the atmosphere will return to normal.

9. Defeaters: they believe everything is lost and thus have decided not to do anything and wait quietly for the end to come.

10. Alice in wonderlanders: have confidence that the last freak energy experiment in an obscure laboratory will be massively scaled in a matter of years and come to our rescue.

11. Extreme libertarians: the free market, like magic, will take care of EVERYTHING.

12. Religious zealots: God won't allow humanity to destroy the Earth.

Framing people is never good, but it is certainly better to frame them in TWELVE camps rather than limit them to only two.

We hope the above classification adds something positive to the energy discourse.