by LadyDragonflyCC -Lamb Festival in April
Politics and self-confidence trump education on climate change
[Via Ars Technica]
This week saw the arrival of both a paper and a new survey which track the US public’s awareness of climate change. The two use slightly different sources and come to slightly different conclusions, but there’s one trend that trumps all: when it comes to climate change, politics dominates, eclipsing self-assessed knowledge and general education. In fact, it appears that your political persuasion might determine whether an education will make you more or less likely to believe the scientific community.
One set of polls, conducted by the University of New Hampshire, focused on a set of rural areas, including Alaska, the Gulf Coast, and Appalachia. These probably don’t reflect the US as a whole, but the pollsters had about 9,500 respondents. The second, published in the The Sociological Quarterly, took advantage of a decade’s worth of Earth Day polls conducted by Gallup. These each had in the area of 1,000 participants, which the authors pooled. That provided a lot more to work with statistically, but ended up pooling data on a topic where the public’s view is not fixed. In fact, the one timing analysis the authors performed showed that the gap between liberals and conservatives grew quite a bit larger over the last decade.
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The point here is not to gang up on conservatives because they are ‘wrong’ and liberals are ‘right.’ That might be the case this time but could change at another.
The point is that people’s acceptance of scientific points often has more to do with its resonance with their political views than with any real examination of the data. In many cases, conservatives become more anti-AGW the better educated they are, while liberals become more pro-AGW – the more each side knows the more they accept only that which fits their political view. Not because one side is necessarily more enlightened but because the political stance each take feeds that particular scientific view.
It takes some real training and experience – something most researchers have spent years doing – to separate the data from one’s preconceived notions. Most people do not think that way. There is an accumulating amount of data indicating that people will only accept and remember information that fits their views. And they will reject information that contradicts them.
In short, a liberal might have just as hard a time accepting data that indicated a free market solution would be the best approach as a conservative would that regulation would be best. For many, personal views color almost every bit of data that they examine.
The gap here with AGW for most people has more to do with political beliefs than with any really unbiased examination of the data. This makes it even harder for the group that really does need to change its views, to change its views.
