If ordinary voters are getting you down, like Joe Biden, who just blamed the deplorables’ sexism and racism for the defeat of his goofy VP in the 2024 election, Grist may have the solution you’ve been waiting for. Apparently “Scientists just found a way to break through climate apathy”. And while progressives generally applaud the non-binary, here it’s graphing things as either-or not as trend lines. Yup. That’s the ticket. They must really think we’re fools. To the point that they’re no longer reluctant to say so publicly, and share with us their plans for manipulating us into passive compliance.
A Guardian columnist recently erupted in related fashion about Tony Blair, who just tried to warn his old Labour party against being too fanatical on climate as a few years back he also did about being too woke. Even though he supports the incumbent Labour administration’s Net Zero policies, Zoe Williams flayed Blair’s hide off for being a shill for corporate interests. If it turns out the public hold similar views, well, you can’t deplore them as part of the “tech broligarchy” but you can regard them as deplorables.
Interestingly, Williams seemed to be criticizing Blair when she said “he’s not the charmer of crowds in the service of low-key progressive medicine they might not otherwise swallow.” As if tricking the rubes into accepting left-wing proposals was the very essence of enlightened statecraft. Which apparently it is.
Thus in that Grist piece the specific case in point is the claim that Princeton’s Lake Carnegie used to freeze and people skated and had warm family experiences and were generally bucolic. But now thanks to the dreaded climate change, it doesn’t. And the dumbos didn’t get it:
“‘People definitely noticed that they were able to get out onto the lake less,’ said [Grace] Liu, who’s now a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University. ‘However, they didn’t necessarily connect this trend to climate change.’”
And why not? Are they cement-heads? So it would seem since according to the piece “Princeton’s winters have warmed about 4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1970”. Yup. A particular city in New Jersey is (drum roll please) warming faster than the average. But what to do?
Well, social science to the rescue:
“Liu worked with professors at Princeton to test how people responded to two different graphs. One showed winter temperatures of a fictional town gradually rising over time, while the other presented the same warming trend in a black-or-white manner: The lake either froze in any given year, or it didn’t. People who saw the second chart perceived climate change as causing more abrupt changes.”
A co-author insisted that “We are not hoodwinking people”. See, it’s more like nudge theory, a progressive fantasy that they could alter people’s behaviour on the cheap because they were so docile that a mere tap rather than a big subsidy would have them all in the pen munching happily on the preferred grass. And Grist is on board, hailing:
“The climate binary/ Both charts demonstrate the same warming trend, but the gradual temperature data is less striking than the binary lake data.”
Also known as how to lie with statistics? The Grist author says not:
“The findings suggest that if scientists want to increase public urgency around climate change, they should highlight clear, concrete shifts instead of slow-moving trends.”
Well, yes. But only if there are clear, concrete shifts rather than slow-moving trends or none at all. And here we think it not irrelevant that “Lake Carnegie” is in fact a man-made reservoir (by the Andrew Carnegie) not a natural feature. So its behaviour is not entirely natural. Maybe it’s too much to expect journalists to Google things, but Wikipedia explains that:
“Due to its initially shallow depth, flooding and siltation (carried by Stony Brook) became problems for the area surrounding Carnegie Lake. Another problem was the rapid deposit of sewage carried by the Millstone River from nearby towns, where expansion of treatment facilities had not kept pace with rapid population growth. The lake has been dredged three times since its opening—first in 1927, in the late 1930s, and most recently in 1971. The 1971 dredging gave the lake a uniform depth of nine feet at a distance of 35 feet from the shoreline. In its 2002 report on water quality, the United States Environmental Protection Agency rated Lake Carnegie as ‘impaired.’ This status indicates that the lake cannot support one or more of its designated uses. The sources of this nonpoint source pollution are varied – litter, chemicals (fertilizers and pesticides), automotive waste (oil and gas), and goose droppings have all contributed to the decline in water quality. Unsafe levels of mercury in the lake have led to an advisory on fish consumption.”
Think any of that stuff affects its tendency to freeze?
And another thing: We looked up historical temperatures for Mercer County, New Jersey, where Princeton is located, and found that the average January temperature in 1970 was 22.8 and in 2025 it was 28.5. But in 1972 it was 33 and in 1975 it was 35.1, and the 30-year average is 32.1. So where’s the trend? (Nor should anyone be surprised that the monitoring station for that county is located at… the biggest airport, in the state capital of Trenton.)
All these things are secondary to this question of manipulating people by finding the charts that most incline them to your point of view and instead of hiding it in some Madison Avenue boardroom, shouting it from the university rooftop.
As G.K. Chesterton prophetically warned nearly a century ago:
“We have seen the end of the age of Reason; and that we live in the age of Suggestion. Perhaps for the first time, the degradation of Man has been openly declared; in a theory that he can be persuaded without being convinced.”
And what’s most extraordinary about this story isn’t the fact of manipulation, including via graphics. It’s that like the Pompidou Centre this stuff has the ugly mechanics on the outside in plain view instead of hidden behind an attractive façade.
Of course treating people like idiots does have rather a sorry history of causing them to dislike you and neither vote nor agitate the way you want.
