RSS
Image: Rama
Andrew Hoffman’s article “Don’t ignore climate skeptics- talk to them differently” on the Christian Science Monitor website suggests that “More scientific data won’t convince doubters of climate change. But reframing the debate as one about values could make a difference.”
Far more than science is at play on climate change. At its root is a debate over culture, values, ideology, and worldviews. One of the strongest predictors of an American’s beliefs about global warming is political party affiliation. According to a 2009 Pew survey, 75 percent of Democrats believe there is solid evidence of global warming compared with only 35 percent of Republicans.
Climate change has been enmeshed in the culture wars where beliefs in science often align with beliefs on abortion, gun control, health care, evolution, or other issues that fall along the contemporary political divide.
Hoffman examined how skeptics frame their editorials and found three key themes:
For skeptics, climate change is inextricably tied to a belief that climate science and policy are a covert way for liberal environmentalists and the government to diminish citizens’ personal freedom.
A second prominent theme is a strong faith in the free market, an overriding fear that climate legislation will hinder economic progress, and a suspicion that green jobs and renewable energy are ploys to engineer the market.
The most intriguing theme is strong distrust of the scientific peer-review process and of scientists themselves: “Peer review” turns into “pal review,” and establishment scientist-editors only publish work by those whose scientific research findings agree with their own. Scientists themselves are seen as intellectual elites, studying issues that are beyond the reach of the ordinary person’s scrutiny. This should not come as a surprise, although it seems to have mystified many climate scientists.
Calling for a more enlightened debate by moving away from positions toward values, Hoffman notes that providing more “facts” can be counterproductive, leading to further entrenchment and polarization. He highlights as examples Secretary of Energy Chu’s focus on clean energy and jobs, the Pope’s call for addressing human impacts on climate and the environment in religious and moral terms, or the Military Advisory Board calling climate change a “threat multiplier.”
But, as we explored in the recent post about Al Gore’s essay in Rolling Stone on Climate of Denial, the polarization of the issue, particularly between what the Six Americas studies call the “Alarmed” who take human impacts on the climate system very seriously and the “Dismissive” who don’t is very intense and often nasty in tone. The Dismissive, who resent being called “Deniers” as much as the Alarmed hate being called “Alarmist,” duke it out in online forums and in the media.
But a recent study by Dan Kahan and colleagues suggests that scientific literacy itself may be in part to blame; those who know enough science to be dangerous often use it to further their own cultural perspectives, filtering the science through their particular cultural frames and biases. Kahan’s paper, The Tragedy of the Risk-Perception Commons:Culture Conflict, Rationality Conflict, and Climate Change, summarizes survey results which indicate that:
On the whole, the most scientifically literate and numerate subjects were slightly less likely, not more, to see climate change as a serious threat than the least scientifically literate and numerate ones. More importantly, greater scientific literacy and numeracy were associated with greater cultural polarization: Respondents predisposed by their values to dismiss climate change evidence became more dismissive, and those predisposed by their values to credit such evidence more concerned, as science literacy and numeracy increased.
I’ll comment on these certainly provocative findings, which Kahan and his colleagues suggest is due to the conflict between individual and collective levels of rationality, in more detail in Part Deux.
But it strikes me that whether we are scientifically literate or not, Alarmed, Dismissive or somewhere in between, virtually all of us in the United States as part of the one billion primary emitters of heat trapping gases on the planet are inherently in denial.
Even if we are seriously alarmed, how many of us are “walking the talk” in terms of our carbon footprints, instead finding ways of rationalizing our copious air travel or comfortable lifestyles? And who, among those dismissive of “AGW” (code for “Anthropogenic Global Warming”) are willing to acknowledge that the nation and the world are woefully unprepared for disasters, whether natural or human-induced, and that we bare some responsibility to help those most in need?
Our affluence, however relative it may be for us individually, makes for a bubble in which we can debate scientific principles and policy prescriptions that reflect our particular cultural frames and values… while meanwhile, emissions of heat trapping gases continue to spew into the atmosphere, ice melts, sea level rises, the ocean acidifies, population continues its exponential rise, and the planet’s biosphere is radically altered by human activities.
And in the U.S. as we “debate” the science and policy implications from our often polarized cultural perspectives, little is being done to prepare for/adapt to (or help others prepare or adapt) to these global changes.
