Thanks for laying it out so explicitly, Yuyutsu.

You've proposed three groups (C-MOB, R-MOB, S-MOB) and suggest that, in principle, experiments or deception could reveal their relative sizes.

But this doesn't resolve the unfalsifiability problem, it merely restates it because your framework assumes motives first and classifies people accordingly:

- Support for mitigation is treated as socio-political (C-MOB).
- Opposition to mitigation is treated as socio-political (R-MOB).
- Only those who behave in a narrowly defined, expectation-conforming way qualify as S-MOB.

As a result, evidence-responsiveness is never allowed to explain mass behaviour. It is ruled out by definition.

That's why S-MOB must always be small, marginal, and methodologically elusive in your model. The conclusion |S-MOB| << min(|C-MOB|, |R-MOB|) is not being tested - it's built into the classification scheme.

Your four scenarios reinforce this rather than challenge it.

In none of your scenarios is there a possible outcome in which widespread concern about climate could count as sincere, evidence-driven engagement. Whether the climate improves or worsens, motives are interpreted as political in advance.

That's exactly what I meant by unfalsifiability: no empirical outcome is permitted to revise the underlying diagnosis.

You're right that testing motives directly would require mind-reading or unethical manipulation. But that isn't a rescue, it's the tell.

A claim whose truth depends on internal states that are declared inaccessible - and whose behavioural evidence is dismissed as pretextual - cannot be corrected by ordinary evidence. That's what makes it insulated.

So basically, you haven't identified something I was "missing". You've made explicit an assumption that was previously implicit (i.e. that evidence cannot, even in principle, explain large-scale climate concern).

Once that assumption is realised, the rest of the analysis follows. Which means the stance isn't neutral, detached, or evidence-responsive in the way scientific inquiry requires.

I hope this is clear.

Dear John,

What can I say - the social sciences involving humans are more tricky and fragile than other branches of science. There may be more nuances and subtle corrections, but in essence my model stands.

Let me clarify that S-MOB is not narrowly defined: anyone who either supports, opposes or is indifferent to "mitigation" on purely scientific/climatic grounds is counted in the S-MOB. Common to all these people, whether they support or oppose, or however they understand or misunderstand the science (or even know nothing about it), is that when climate improves they are happy and when climate worsens they are sad - that regardless of how improvement is achieved or what causes the climate to worsen.

Also, your use of "mitigation" is shifting the goal-posts, because I was referring to one's attitude towards the IDEA of climate-change rather than to what (if any) they like to actually do about it.

Having clarified that, I see no reason for you to further object to the logic of my division of people into these 3 categories as defined in my previous post.

«In none of your scenarios is there a possible outcome in which widespread concern about climate could count as sincere, evidence-driven engagement. Whether the climate improves or worsens, motives are interpreted as political in advance.»

Suppose you see the same people unconditionally happy when climate improves and unconditionally sad when climate worsens, that clearly indicates their belonging to S-MOB and if you can find enough of them then that would refute my claim.

Yuyutsu,

Thank you for the clarification. It helps, but it doesn't resolve the issue I raised.

Broadening S-MOB after the fact doesn't address the core problem, because the defining criterion remains an assumed internal motive rather than an observable epistemic stance.

You now say S-MOB consists of those who are "unconditionally happy when climate improves and unconditionally sad when it worsens, regardless of cause." But that is not an empirical category. It is a psychological idealisation inferred from behaviour.

There is no reliable way to establish that a person's emotional response is:

1. unconditional,
2. solely climate-driven, and
3. independent of trade-offs, uncertainty, ethics, or collateral consequences.

So while you describe a possible refutation in principle, it is not operationally accessible. That is exactly what makes the claim insulated.

This is why my objection was not about the size of S-MOB, but about how the framework treats evidence-responsive concern by default. Large-scale engagement is never permitted to count as sincere unless it matches a psychologically pure template that real humans rarely meet.

That's not scepticism. It's classification by exclusion.

So we're back to the same point: the model does not allow evidence, in practice, to explain widespread concern. Political motivation is assumed first, and alternative explanations are ruled out by definition.

That's the claim I've been analysing. Your clarifications don't remove that structure; they restate it.

Dear John,

«Broadening S-MOB after the fact»

No, it is what I meant all along, I just had to clarify it because you suggested otherwise:
The S-MOB asks "what does climate-science say?" because they care for the climate and nothing else.

(I know, you could bring in a fourth group: H-MOB, of sociopaths who hate the climate and rejoice to see the earth flooded by the ocean, burned down and swept by hurricanes, but I assumed that they are rare enough to ignore)

«There is no reliable way to establish that a person's emotional response is:»

Psychology is more difficult than other sciences, so much that some argued that it is not a science at all, yet it still constitutes a respectable scientific field, with the necessary cautions, so experiments need to be designed more carefully and are also fraught with ethical issues.

Here, looking at the issue as a case for climate-science because it is easier than psychology, is akin to looking for the lost coin under the lamppost.

«So while you describe a possible refutation in principle, it is not operationally accessible»

Patience: it sometimes took scientists decades to design a good and practically full-proof experiment; and we gave it only a few hours so far.

«the model does not allow evidence, in practice, to explain widespread concern.»

And the concern is?

You seem to claim that the concern is about earth's climate (which scientists already research extensively). I claim that it is our socio-political climate that is at stake and only a rather-small minority cares more about the earth's physical climate than about the social conditions they will have to put up with.

Yuyutsu,

We're now going in circles, and I think it's worth being explicit about why.

Whether S-MOB was "meant all along" to be broad or not doesn't matter. What matters is how the model actually operates. And it still operates by treating internal motive as decisive, while treating all observable behaviour as politically contaminated by default.

That's the structural issue.

You keep suggesting that with enough patience, better psychology, or future experiments, this could be resolved. But at the same time, you insist that widespread public concern cannot count as evidence-responsive because it is already presumed to be socio-political in origin.

Those two claims can't both be true.

If evidence-responsiveness is only allowed to count when it takes the form of a psychologically "pure" emotional response that is:

- unconditional,
- internally motivated,
- disentangled from social trade-offs,
- and identifiable independently of behaviour,

then the category is not just hard to observe. It is methodologically inaccessible in practice.

That's not a limitation of psychology. It's a consequence of how the framework is set up.

And that's why redefining "the concern" doesn't help. Each redefinition simply ensures that evidence which doesn't fit the diagnosis is excluded in advance.

So to be clear: my objection has never been that psychology is difficult, or that motives are complex. It's that your model requires motives to do all the explanatory work while simultaneously declaring them unreachable except by assumption.

That's the insulation I've been pointing to from the start.

At this point, I don't think we disagree about facts so much as about what kinds of explanations are allowed to count.

Dear John,

«At this point, I don't think we disagree about facts so much as about what kinds of explanations are allowed to count.»

If so then we do not need to go on, but I am not quite sure what facts exactly you wish to explain?

The facts of climate science - I am not even going into it.

The facts about people's present attitudes towards climate and climate science?

If this is what you meant, then as we agree on the facts as you say, we can agree on the fact that MOST people today treat the topic of "climate-change" as political and are therefore not genuinely interested in climate-science (except as a political tool, so long as it supports their political views). Thus also, most people's attitude towards "mitigation" follows their political persuasion, so most of both those who support or oppose "mitigation", even while claiming otherwise, are in fact, first and foremost, seeking solidarity with their camp rather than some physical and/or economical outcome.

Is that agreed?

Around 1990 that was different.
At the time, myself and nearly everyone naively believed that climate means climate and science means science.