Arson, environmentalism and psychopathology

I wrote this in response to a news story about forest fires. Someone made another daft claim: "The Climate Crisis is Burning Chile", so a poster replied with ten arrested for arson as 260 fires burn and dozens of people die in Chile.

I'd been listening to a lot of psychologists talk about psychopathology recently; such as Understanding Psychopathy | with Jon Uhler, LPC. I was particularly interested in how to recognize a psychopath when talking to one. For example: 10 Signs You're Dealing With A Psychopath - How To Spot Psychopathy. An even better video than that is: signs you're dating a psychopath.

Environmentalism / psychopathology

I cannot tell the difference between a psychopath and an environmentalist. Both groups lie habitually to us. I, personally, cannot remember the last time I spoke to an environmentalist without them lying to me. So from my view-point: environmentalism has precipitated a crisis of psychopathology. Environmentalists think they have legitimate reasons to hate humanity because we are supposedly "burning the planet". This kind of language, this fanaticism, encourages their anti-humanism and promotes polarization in politics. Because the enviros live in an echo-chamber of their own they entered a pathological circle of doom. No one is allowed to tell them the truth on pain of cancellation.

I cannot remember an environmentalist telling me the truth about anything in the past 30 years. What other group of people lie uncontrollably? What other group think they will always get away lying to us? You guessed: psychopaths and sociopaths. The parallels between psychopathology and environmentalism are so striking they scare me. What can happen when we give license to an entire group to lie to us about the "earth literally burning"?, as the UN Secretary General said recently. So that they can both feel smug and save the planet with their virtuous white lies. Just a little exaggeration here and there. A little becomes a lot. 35 years of lying generates a smug feeling of entitlement to lie. I believe such a group - who have carte blanche to lie - will attract lots of other habitual liars to seek a career or fellowship within. These habitual liars are otherwise known as psychopaths. I can no longer tell the difference between the two groups. They seem to have merged.

Can the planet burn up?

There's a famous book called Fahrenheit 451. It's called that because it's the temperature at which paper spontaneously ignites. In nature the warmest temperate ever measured for the climate was at Death Valley, California in 1913: 134.1°F. 451°F is 317°F warner than 134.1°F. Paper is made from cellulose and much dried-out vegetation is mostly cellulose. So the temperature at which dried wood spontaneously ignites will be similar to that for paper. Wood is a mixture of cellulose and lignin. Research shows: Biomass with volatile content up to 78% had ignition temperatures from 236C (457°F) to 270C (518°F), while lignite with volatile content of 58% ignited at 274C (525°F). In practice this tells us that a hot, baked out field or wood cannot spontaneously ignite. It must be set alight by either arson, lightning, or an electrical fault. This is because a chemical reaction (AKA a fire) must reach an activation energy before it can start to burn. So anyone who wails that the earth is on fire is lying to us. If we let them continue to lie to us we're destroying the public sphere.