Essay by Eric Worrall
What kind of religion would climate change be, without some good old fashioned conversion stories?
‘I thought climate change was a hoax. Now I’ve changed my mind’
Sarah Ott spent years believing climate change was a hoax, influenced by friends at church in the US south and a popular right-wing radio host. Here she shares her journey from being a climate sceptic to becoming an advocate for clean energy, with a passion for teaching teenage school students the science of climate change. She features on this year’s BBC 100 Women list.
I spent years doubting the science of climate change and spending time with people who didn’t believe in the science either.
When I realised I was wrong, I felt really embarrassed.
…
We have a Polish Catholic background and we attended church regularly, but at the same time we were very connected to science because my mum was a nurse and my dad sold microscopes and other scientific equipment.
…
My conviction that climate change was a hoax solidified when I heard Limbaugh talk about Climategate. It was a controversy involving research from the University of East Anglia. Only much later did I learn that the material was twisted and taken out of context.
…
An independent enquiry cleared the UEA scientists of wrongdoing and concluded that “their rigour and honesty are not in doubt”.
…
That’s when the big turning point came.
I tuned into NPR, a US non-profit broadcaster. I don’t remember which show it was, or the specific news story, but I remember how they described the issue in a completely different way from what I had heard on my usual stations. And it sounded so reasonable.
…
Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-67483064
What I find most striking about Sarah’s conversion story is the lack of detail.
Sarah claims she realised how wrong she was about climate change when she started tuning in to NPR.
Would that be the same NPR / PBS which somehow blurred the signature of physics legend Edward Teller, during their rather feeble expose of the climate skeptic Oregon Petition? PBS claims Teller’s signature was blurred to emphasise other content, not to hide the fact a climate skeptic petition signatory was one of the USA’s greatest physicists.
Sarah Ott claims she doesn’t remember which NPR story triggered a fundamental re-appraisal of her life views.
I find this claim to not remember the details of such a life changing event a little puzzling. Why wouldn’t Sarah make an effort to share that special life changing story which can reach climate skeptics and Conservatives?
I don’t know about you, but the handful of life events which caused fundamental pivots in my values and life choices, I remember them like they were yesterday. Like the time I got so mad I finally decided to defend myself against the schoolyard bully. Such pivotal moments in one’s life tend to stand out.
Sarah accepts at face value that an “independent inquiry” concluded the Climategate scientists’ “rigour and honesty are not in doubt” – but doesn’t mention any specific emails she found troubling. Did she not bother to look at Climategate for herself?
The British BBC, which published this religious and political conversion story, would love for you heathen climate deniers to blindly follow Sarah’s example, to switch off conservative commentators and tune in to NPR, so you can have your scientific, political and religious views corrected. But they must think we are all really dumb, if this pathetic conversion story is their idea of persuasive marketing.
Perhaps the BBC is so used to abusing the trust of their own loyal fans, they have gotten complacent, and think everyone is easy game.
I listen to NPR in my car when I drive. (Know thine enemy) and am appalled at the lies they tell with impunity.
I haven’t subjected myself to that in over three years. Somehow I doubt things have changed much. Do they now call it ‘All Non-cis Genders Considered’ and ‘Morning Sedition’?
Last time I tried that was last week, and they were pushing some gay pornographic play. I didn’t make it to the climate lies.
She sounds rather lazy, and not inclined to seek out more information to confirm or deny her conclusions.
That seems to be a common thread with this crowd.
Plus people are subjected to propaganda almost continuously.
Is this woman for real? I’m suspicious.
There’s an echo chamber.
“I was religious despite my parents’ science connections.”
Nice implication there, bub.
Nice try, but she doesn’t say ‘despite’.
She says, “we attended church regularly, but at the same time we were very connected to science.”
There are lots pf people who attend church regularly and are ‘very connected to science’. My late father attended church every Sunday and was a member of the Royal Society of Chemistry.
nasty propaganda radio
I had a similar experience with NPR. Except mine was the other way around.
This was 20 some years ago and I was listening to NPR while driving. I had read about global warming (as it was called back then) but I hadn’t made my mind up.
The NPR story was about farmers journals. It seems that 250 years ago farmers in the UK started planting 2 weeks later in the spring than they do now.
Wow, I thought. Conclusive evidence that warming is happening! I was convinced.
But then I realized that in the entire NPR segment they never once mentioned the little ice age. That seemed to me to be an important detail. Certainly worth referencing.
The more I thought about it the more dishonest it seemed. Ok – which side was lying?
In the end I was convinced by NPR’s story, just not the way they planned.
I had a similar thought process, but not involving NPR. The alarmunists have simply told too many lies and waved away too many questions. The retreating glaciers uncovering ancient forests and artifacts which show the area was warmer in the past, ancient olive trees growing above the current tree lines, the Pacific islands growing in size, the zillions of failed predictions. The list is endless. People who have truth on their side don’t need to lie like that. The more they lie, the more they convince me of the opposite.
Mann’s hockey stick did it for me. I thank him, for putting me on the path of righteous climate crisis scepticism.
The Human-caused Global Cooling narrative put me on the path to climate crisis skepticism.
So when the Human-caused Global Warming narrative came along, after temperatures started warming, I was doubly skeptical. And haven’t seen any reason, in all this time, to be any less skeptical.
There is no evidence humans are causing the Earth’s global climate to change.
Indeed. Back in the 70s, I bit on the whole “Coming Ice Age” thingy- aerosols reflecting the Sun’s heat back into space? It sounded plausible.
Then, when the cooling trend failed to materialize, those worthies turned on a dime and started screaming “We’re all gonna fry!” (Thank you, Paul Ehrlich!), I realized i had been had.
Like the Israelis say, Never Again!”
NO TAX MONEY FOR PBS…NPR…WHATEVER THESE THINGS ARE ….
A great expose of the gullibility of the semi-educated virtue-seeking sycophant.
Who or what makes this “Ott” person even slightly important or relevant ??
It’s a good case study. The real idiots glue themselves to roads.
Exactly. The entire article is all about HER (and not, I’m afraid, to her credit — she comes off as lazy intellectually). She provided no data whatsoever proving the conjecture that human CO2 emissions cause meaningful shifts in the climate zones of the earth. Apparently, she did not rely on data to arrive at her conclusions: she simply jumped there. 🤨
She should have a chat with her Uncle Markus..
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tom+nelson+markus+ott
I remember that “independent inquiry” into the Climategate emails. I never listened to Limbaugh, but it didn’t take someone from the religious right to illustrate that there was about as much independence involved as Russians would experience if they challenged Putin’s view of his war against Ukraine.
Seeing the so-called academics discuss how they could politically control the publication of material that questioned their Climageddon claims is exactly what woke me up to what was only starting in academia at the time and now dominates the ivory towers.
Until I saw that discussion for myself – and I read from the email archive itself, I didn’t let some talking head influence me – I went along with that crap. I’m still firmly liberal philosophically, but I no longer have any trust for politicians or academics. Unfortunately, so many are indoctrinated today, especially those under 30, that there’s nothing anyone can do at this point other than prepare for the inevitable failure of the power grid and collapse of the economy.
“Now I have changed my mind.” It is self evident she didn’t have much of a mind to change in the first place.
Global warming IS a hoax:
Let’s go for 10.
Polar Bears are still in the Arctic.
Food crops are plentiful.
At least once a week a politician or celebrity makes foolish statements about GW.
Many virtue signaling points for her, but NO sacrifices made going forward, the hypocrite.
… it sounded so reasonable.
Mm, hm. “‘Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?'” Genesis 3:1.
Answer: No. God said was that Adam and Eve may eat from any tree except … .
Truth-twisters have ancient origins.
It’s brilliant target marketing for the warmists to go after people who already eschew the scientific method like this woman who rejected parental example to adopt religion as her guiding principle. From there it’s a simple process to switch allegiance to a different (their) religion.
We already knew the Climate Change people are running a religion but surprised they are now so open about it. Follow the scientific method – observe hypothesise experiment
Pro tip: When the Church of Climate Change “religious leaders” hand you a big cup of Flavor-Aid … DON’T DRINK IT!
50% of humanity is of below average intelligence. No prizes for knowing in which bracket Sarah is.
‘Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize that half of ’em are stupider than that!’
-the immortal George Carlin
I saw him twice in concert- a couple of the most mind blowing experiences of my life and I wasn’t even stoned!
Alas I fear, that proportion is increasing
Examples of odd wording (for one raised in the United States of America) and possible “tells” that a British English speaker wrote this for her and those words are not her own.
1. to study zoology at university
Comment: Americans say, “in college” or “at the university.” Note also: she did not, apparently, earn a B.S. in Zoology, merely “studied” it and got an B.A. in Education.
2. my mum was a nurse
Comment: U.S. children never call their mother “mum.” Always “Mom.”
It would seem possible that Sarah is a fictitious person. The pictures could be of anybody.
I did a search on her top pic. The only thing I learned was that her penguin shaped freshwater pearl neckless is on sale for $29.99.
Well spotted Janice
Thank you! 😀
It’s plausible that the BBC writer is quoting what “Sarah Ott” said but is careless about writing out the words UK-style. The equivalent might be if Lord Monckton told me that Michael Mann threw a wobbly about the latest WUWT criticism of his work, but I wrote the quote instead as him saying “I thought it was most amusing they way Dr Mann had a conniption fit over Eric Worrall’s blog post.” Americanizing a British idiom, in other words.
But I see a different problem:
Why only two? The man’s show was a three hour show. If a person was any kind of serious devotee, he or she would listen to all three hours whenever possible. What “Ott” said there just doesn’t sound right, where a more realistic statement might be that she listened to two hours of his show and wished she had time for the third.
Wouldn’t be the first time a likely fake story involved a so-called “conservative” seeing the light of climate change in the blink of an eye. I described one of those alleged situations in a guest post at Steve Milloy’s JunkScience site years ago, see “Bizarre ‘Fox Lies’ video: Alleged ‘Climate-Denying O’Reilly Fan’ Now Believes Global Warming is Real’“. The so-called ‘convert’ seemed to be badly misapplying very commonly repeated greeting line which callers exchanged with radio show host Sean Hannity, and the ‘convert’ tries to portray Bill O’Reilly as a complete ‘climate denier,’ when he actually was quite neutral on the issue.
“threw a wobbly”
I’m gonna start using that! 🙂
OK, I have been reading so much by British English speakers HERE that I am starting to think of some things the way y’all say them BUT I will never waste the word by saying, for example “in a week(s time)” since “in a week” is always already referencing TIME.
I started hearing CNN and NBC etc. “readers” adding the word TIME to their reports, and knew, years ago, that they spent WAY too much TIME watching the BBC.
It doesn’t make sense to me to call a flashlight a torch.
It’s an electric torch
A British chap, who moved to the American Midwest- has made a YouTube channel out of such differences: Lost in the Pond
https://www.youtube.com/@LostinthePond/videos
That really would have screwed up Torchie the Battery Boy.
Yes. Good spot, Janice.
Daughter of Pennsylvania coal miners and raised in South Florida. She can be heard speaking a few minutes into “The Climate Question” interview: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct3kk1 These are not idioms that she would use.
The BBC producer of the piece, however, Paula Adamo Idoeta, cites United Kingdom as her country of origin. A little fudging on the “first person” narrative Sarah tells.
Then there’s the amusingly ungrammatical misquote of the PEW research poll:
PEW claims to be an unbiased polling agency, but one of the “Mission Statements” of the Pew Charitable Trust, which funds the research, declares their advocacy plainly. On the “Energy Modernization” Page:
This is one of the PEW missions. How can they NOT be biassed?
“Sarah Ott claims she doesn’t remember which NPR story triggered a fundamental re-appraisal of her life views.”
Sarah Ott also can’t make her mind up about whether she is going to talk in the first person or refer to “we”.
I’m calling AI on this one, or at least a retard.
There may also be one or two other religions who have a free-phone number where she can give them her credit card details right now.
> “There may also be one or two other religions who have a free-phone number where she can give them her credit card details right now.”
She wants to give them -our- credit card numbers.
How NPR (Nihilist Propaganda Radio) Converted a Southern Christian to the Church of the Climate Crisis
Aside: Katharine Anne Scott Hayhoe is a Canadian
atmospheric scientistCAGW Alarmist KOOK. How would a Brit pronounce her last name?“How would a Brit pronounce her last name”
Ho-hum !!
or… Hay-ho the derry-o !
Like in a children’s nursery rhyme..
How about with a silent “H?”
Which one?
Need you ask :<)
I wouldn’t if I could help it. If you absolutely force me to resond, however, I would pronoubce it as a resigned, slightly exasperated ‘Hey Ho’ as in, Hey Ho, here we go again.
Pronounce, sorry – missed that one.
Probably the biggest lie of this BBC attempt to sell wind, solar, and EV’s, etc:
An independent enquiry cleared the UEA scientists of wrongdoing and concluded that “their rigour and honesty are not in doubt”.
The bad acts of Phil “Cheers” Jones, et al., have never been declared to be right or correct or honest or even that their effort to “hide the decline” was admirably strenuous — by any bona fide “enquiry.”
Here’s the reaction to “Climategate” by one of AGW’s staunchest supporters, George Monbiot:
Yes, some of the comments have been taken out of context. But there are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad. There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released, and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request.
Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics, or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign.
(Source: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/23/monbiot-issues-an-unprecedented-apology/ )
While there were some “investigations”, there was never an independent one.
Instead of listening to NPR, she needs to sit down and read her Bible to see how much God controls the climate. The plague of hail in Egypt (Exodus). God brought drought to King Ahab for two years (1 Kings 17:1),. And God brings rain after the drought (1 Kings 18:41). And the 7 years of abundance in Egypt, followed by the 7 years of famine where the crops were scorched by the east wind (Genesis 41:25-32). And what about the great flood where Noah built the ark? I could write pages and pages about how, according to the Bible, God controls the climate and the weather.
Well, then it’s obvious to me that CO2 is really another incarnation of Lucifer, the evil angel, trying to overthrow God! I’ll have to publish a peer reviewed paper about this revelation! /sarc
Thirty years ago, millions of people suspected NPR was biased and Limbaugh helped articulate and expose that bias. Those millions became Dittoheads. So, here we have a single young-skull-full-of-mush who went the other way… and became 1 of a hundred who the Left are now honoring. Oh, my, that’s so powerful. /sarc.
The danger is that the 1 wayward sheep gets public exposure and a megaphone to influence millions while the 99 normal ones are never heard from.
“gets public exposure and a megaphone to influence millions while the 99 normal ones are never heard from.”
That describes the leftist/marxist modus operandi to a tee. !
“… and became 1 of a hundred who the Left are now honoring.” Yep… rather slim pickin’s. Guess they have to latch on to anything they can find :<)
BUT she kept on using fossil fuels, so she became a HYPOCRITE if not one before.
They know they are losing and we are winning. The CAGW crowd has nothing to prove its case. They can only lie, cheat and hoodwink. We really need to pour on the coal and whip these buggers.
It couldn’t have been a very recent conversion considering how entrenched she appears to be in the climate propaganda machine.
https://ncse.ngo/sarah-ott
I get a news feed on my laptop. A headline shouted out 15 skeptics share their reasons for not believing in climate change. So I read it and basically it was a list of why this Climanista believed people didn’t believe. Turns out she was a GenZ tour guide with no technical knowledge at all.
It sounds to me as if the charming Ms Ott had a brief phone chat with a journalist at the Beeb, who then ghost-wrote the article to fit into a nice tale of conversion and redemption, filling in with some rather vague and inconsistent details. And making a nice contrast between what we are invited to assume are the rabidly racist, misogynistic, slavering lies of Rush Limbaugh and the calmly measured objective truths of NPR.
That’s what journalists do – all of them – they take your words and hammer them into something you might not even recognise. Here’s a couple of probable journalistic artifacts.
“I remember the first time I ever encountered the term “climate change” … in the late 1990s and I read an article…” Well, someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t recall hearing or seeing “climate change” until it became obvious that “global warming” wasn’t alarming enough for the alarmists, in about the early 2010s [I suspect that the journalist is young and may not even know there was a time when it was only global warming].
There’s also a disconnect between Sarah apparently being a Roman Catholic and the juxtaposition of “all I had in my social circle was my church group” with “Protestantism in the US south tends to have a strong anti-intellectual background” (which the reader is intended to interpret as “knuckle-dragging, gay-bashing, pistol-toting, black-lynching, cross-burning, immigrant-hating Neanderthals”).
Excellent detective work! Logic! Logic!! 🙂
First time I drove down south from ultra sophisticated and superior Wokeachusetts back in the early ’70s, that’s exactly what I expected to see in the Dixie population. I was amazed to see it wasn’t true. Sure, there’s some people like that in that region but plenty here in WK too.
The fact the BBC covered this on their website is beyond parody. Reveals just how low this once great organisation has sunk. There’s no news value in the piece and it’s really one big own goal given that religion appears the only reason this woman changed her view. From one religious belief to another, apparently.
She comes across as a very confused lady. She fits the type of back
in the ’60s would be taking “mothers little helpers. She has
her religion and sexuality confused among other things.
“Beware of false prophets” is what comes to my mind. Specifically applied to this situation but generally applied to the “AGW religion” in general (see Matthew 7:15)
This reads more like a comedy skit for SNL!
“I went on to study zoology at university and became a science teacher”.
“We listened to Rush Limbaugh, a radio host known for his controversial opinions on topics such as race, LGBT rights and women, and I would hear him every day for two hours.
He would talk about how climate change was just a hoax.
Up to that point, I had been exposed to a lot of misinformation about evolution in my church groups, but I had studied the theory of evolution at university, so I was equipped to spot it.
But I didn’t have that same skill set for climate change.”
Seriously, a SCIENCE teacher was getting her science from Limbaugh?
Now, the same SCIENCE teacher gets her science from NPR?
Don’t they have internet where she lives?
Any person with a 5th grade education knows how to use the Internet to research and learn about millions of topics, from basic knowledge to the most complex.
We’re supposed to believe that a SCIENCE teacher, never thought to use the internet to learn about climate SCIENCE? Especially one so smart because she studied SCIENCE at University.
On a related not. As a meteorologist the past 41 years (11 on television, 1982-1993) I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to speak at 100+ schools about the weather.
It’s always science classes that are studying chapters about weather.
7 years ago, a science teacher at one of the schools where I’m the chess coach at(1 of the 5 schools I coach chess at), asked if I would give a talk to her 5th graders (who were studying weather).
Heck yes! I love educating young minds! So she arranged to have all 4 classes of 5th graders together at 1 time. I actually know some of what they teach the kids now, which is that CO2 is a pollutant that’s destroying the planet.
As an invited guest, I had to be very respectful of that and it would be inappropriate (and be confusing/ineffective) for me to contradict the climate crisis narrative IN THAT SETTING. Especially since I was invited to discuss how we measure and forecast weather.
However, that didn’t prevent me from bringing up an extremely relevant element to climate change and increasing CO2, that they had recently just learned about in their SCIENCE class.
Photosynthesis.
When I told the class that the increase in carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is massively greening up the planet and increasing world food production because of its key, beneficial contribution as part of the law of photosynthesis, the SCIENCE teacher blurted out loudly….. “Wow, I never thought about that!!”
Maybe she was like the science teacher in this story…….getting her climate science lessons from NPR (-:
Despite this, the teachers at the schools that I coach chess at, overall are wonderful, dedicated people who teach mostly things based on solid principles.
Shock Horror. World News. Breaking Headlines. Read All About It. World Exclusive
oh yeah, what’s this all about then…
<reads 1st paragraph>
“”Human Female Changes Her Mind About Something””
we are lost, we are soooo dooomed
“What kind of religion would climate change be, without some good old fashioned conversion stories?”
Wow, born again climatistas!
“An independent enquiry cleared the UEA scientists of wrongdoing and concluded that “their rigour and honesty are not in doubt”.”
And we KNOW that we can TRUST those who did the inquiry. Sure we can. After all, it’s independent!
“switch off conservative commentators and tune in to NPR”
Yuh, like Limbaugh, now that he’s dead.
I miss Rush. A voice of reason in the Wilderness.
The Left hated him because he exposed the Left for what they are, and it’s not a pretty picture.
And they hate DJ Trump for giving Rush the Medal of Freedom at the State of the Union speech right in front of Queen Nancy (Pelosi).
I have a brother-in-law who is the program director of a PBS FM radio station. That’s about as impressive as being the VP for the fax machine division for Canon or HP. Just to get to FM radio in my car I have to switch to the Mazda app which brings up the default settings on the screen, then I have to scroll to FM, at which point you’ll find that that it is tuned to the lowest frequency on the FM dial because I never use the thing to create preset stations. NPR is going the way of the pay phone.
There are plenty of radio stations on the internet, the key is finding those you like who DON’T use NPR.
Me, I like Jazz, One of my favorites is WWOZ (New Orleans), all volunteer, no NPR, Live 24/7, 2 Week Archive. Check out Breaux Bridges, Wednesdays 6-9 AM Central Time.
Just music to listen to whilst reading Wuwt.
Sarah might be a real person and the convenient climate conscious story of her conversion might even be a real event. But the message I got from the short version above is that the Sarah, real or not, formed her opinion on a topic critical to health and flourishing of human society on the flimsiest foundation of personal impression and the appearance of authority. Not a shred of critical thinking and logical thought to be found. That is perhaps the real truth that needs be unpacked from this anecdote of idiocy.
Which is pretty pathetic, coming from someone who claims to be a science teacher.
How NPR Converted a Southern Christian to the Church of the Climate CrisisWhat has the residence of this person got to do with anything? Is it an attempt to associate her with Southern Baptists or something? If she lived in New York would the headline have referred to “A Northern Christian”. I’m not even sure that her religious background is even relevant, She says that she has a Polish-Catholic background (whatever that means) and “attended” (past tense) church regularly.” She doesn’t say that her well-found belief that there is no climate emergency had anything to do with her religion, assuming she still has one. She merely states that she was “influenced by friends at church”. Which church, she doesn’t say. But it was the friends who influenced her, not her church.