Agnotology: The Surge - 7

Modified graph from Skeptical Science

This series discusses Agnotology, which is the discipline of studying "ignorance generators" within society.

What is an ignorance generator?

Generically it is anything that originates and/or spreads ignorance within society.

More specifically, since information media such as news corporations, movie corporations, magazines, TV, the Internet, book publishers, and anything else that communicates or spreads information, can be a subject of study in the discipline of Agnotology.

As long as that subject of study originates and/or spreads ignorance in our society.

What Agnotology is not concerned with is IQ of individuals, naturally debilitating cognitive impairment in individuals, that is, Agnotology primarily concerns organs of society that convey information --rather than primarily concerning individuals who convey information (e.g. The Deceit Business, The Ways of Bernays, Blind Willie McTell News, and In the Fog of The Presstitutes).

Regular Readers know that Dredd Blog is of the opinion that once ignorance generators become institutionalized in a society, that society loses the ability to correct its flaws on issues related to that particular ignorance, because it loses touch with the reality of those flaws (e.g. A Decline Of The American Republic - 3).

Some examples of ignorance generators would be The Marshall Institute and The Heartland Institute, which are studied carefully by Agnotologists (cf. The Exceptional American Denial).

Those two Oil-Qaeda funded institutions have worked feverishly to infect, and have infected, substantial portions of the government and the general public with ignorance.

They have done so to the point that currently there can be no recovery from the ignorance they have generated about global warming induced climate change (e.g. How Fifth Graders Calculate Ice Volume - 2).

One of many examples is their generation of ignorance, and corporate media's echoing of that ignorance about whether global warming has slowed down:

After hyping an alleged "pause" in global warming, mainstream media have entirely ignored a groundbreaking study finding that warming over the last 16 years has actually proceeded at the same rate as it has since 1951 with no "pause" compared to that time period.

(Faux Pause: Media Ignore Study ... Twice As Fast As Thought). Another way of putting it is:

A new study by British and Canadian researchers shows that the global temperature rise of the past 15 years has been greatly underestimated. The reason is the data gaps in the weather station network, especially in the Arctic. 

(Global Warming Since 1997 Underestimated by Half, bold in original). The dangerous impact of this ignorance is that nothing will be done about the pollution of the Earth and the catastrophes which that severe pollution is causing.

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.