The oil companies lobbied Congress and blanketed the media with claims that greenhouse gas limits would wreck the economy. They even distributed a video claiming increased carbon dioxide was positive because it would likely increase crop yields since plants need carbon dioxide for photosynthesis. They were not alone. A number of prominent scientists, including physicist Frederick Seitz, the former president of the National Academy of Sciences, and Freeman Dyson, the groundbreaking theoretical physicist from Princeton University, questioned whether global warming was the emergency that climate scientists portrayed.
Eventually, mounting evidence that climate change was not only real but already happening made outright denial unfeasible. To question the finer points of climate theory was no longer just scientific method but also a political statement.
Disputing any aspect of accepted views of global warming risked scorn, ridicule and isolation. Walzel, the retired president of the former pipeline company Houston Natural Gas, knows the feeling.
While not a household name, the year-old Walzel is prominent in Houston business and philanthropic circles. Today, he serves on the boards of charities, and, in his spare time, reads frequently about climate change — his current stack is nine books tall. But climate change is not a subject Walzel discusses with friends and neighbors. This attitude is easy to criticise, but if there are pressing concerns regarding the availability and security of food, health and safety in your life, you may be preoccupied with these things and not marching for action on climate science.
Others may simply not spend much time thinking about it, nor care very much one way or the other — such is the nature of voluntarily participatory democracy. The third category is the most problematic and arguably the most high-profile. It could be subdivided into:.
Certain combinations of the above are also possible and are probably the norm. The definition of denialism is not uniform. In psychology it is to reject a widely accepted claim because the truth of it is psychologically discomforting to that extent, there are many aspects of reality we all deny, ignore or minimise for the sake of our sanity.
In popular culture, including discussions of history and climate science, it is an active act of rebellion against the consensus and consilience of experts, often motivated by ideological factors.
These are quite distinct and it may not pay any persuasive dividend to blur them together. The latter definition does not seem appropriate for climate sceptics or for climate agnostics. Global temperature is still rising and was the hottest recorded. Climate has changed along with CO2 levels through geological time. Early 20th century warming is due to several causes, including rising CO2.
The most recent satellite data show that the earth as a whole is warming. Aerosols have been masking global warming, which would be worse otherwise. A cold day in Chicago in winter has nothing to do with the trend of global warming. El Nino has no trend and so is not responsible for the trend of global warming. Most glaciers are in rapid retreat worldwide, notwithstanding a few complicated cases. Multiple sets of independent observations find a human fingerprint on climate change.
We see a clear "short-term hot spot" - there's various evidence for a "long-term hot spot". The 2nd law of thermodynamics is consistent with the greenhouse effect which is directly observed. Weather and climate are different; climate predictions do not need weather detail.
The greenhouse effect is standard physics and confirmed by observations. Those who contribute the least greenhouse gases will be most impacted by climate change. Evidence is building that net cloud feedback is likely positive and unlikely to be strongly negative. Sea level rise is now increasing faster than predicted due to unexpectedly rapid ice melting. The oceans are warming and moreover are becoming more acidic, threatening the food chain.
Humans emit times more CO2 than volcanoes. Direct measurements find that rising CO2 is trapping more heat. When Greenland was 3 to 5 degrees C warmer than today, a large portion of the Ice Sheet melted. Methane plays a minor role in global warming but could get much worse if permafrost starts to melt.
Excess CO2 from human emissions has a long residence time of over years. CO2 levels are measured by hundreds of stations across the globe, all reporting the same trend. Multiple lines of independent evidence indicate humidity is rising and provides positive feedback. Jupiter is not warming, and anyway the sun is cooling. Hundreds of flowers across the UK are flowering earlier now than any time in years. The 'decline' refers to a decline in northern tree-rings, not global temperature, and is openly discussed in papers and the IPCC reports.
CO2 is increasing rapidly, and is reaching levels not seen on the earth for millions of years. Warming leads to increased evaporation and precipitation, which falls as increased snow in winter. The sun has not warmed since and so cannot be driving global warming. The ocean is absorbing massive amounts of CO2, and is becoming more acidic as a result. Monckton used the IPCC equation in an inappropriate manner.
An Independent Review concluded that CRU's actions were normal and didn't threaten the integrity of peer review. The actual data show high northern latitudes are warmer today than in Antarctic sea ice has grown in recent decades despite the Southern Ocean warming at the same time.
Humans are small but powerful, and human CO2 emissions are causing global warming. Microsite influences on temperature changes are minimal; good and bad sites show the same trend. If the dropped stations had been kept, the temperature would actually be slightly higher.
Scientific studies have determined that current technology is sufficient to reduce greenhouse gas emissions enough to avoid dangerous climate change. Albedo change in the Arctic, due to receding ice, is increasing global warming. This is a detail that is complex, local, and irrelevant to the observed global warming trend. Soot stays in the atmosphere for days to weeks; carbon dioxide causes warming for centuries. Spencer's model is too simple, excluding important factors like ocean dynamics and treats cloud feedbacks as forcings.
The smartphone and, therefore, electrons exists whether I choose to believe in it or not. The same basic logic applies to climate change. But from a social or political point of view, climate change belief is an extremely relevant construct to understand why skeptics exist and how we might go about changing opinions so that climate change mitigation policies are more palatable to the public.
That's why a recent paper [1] in Nature Climate Change that synthesizes all polls and studies about climate change beliefs is so important.
Tremendous amounts of research have analyzed the factors behind climate change skepticism and the subsequent opinions developed from these beliefs. This study provides a statistical summary of all these studies to describe which citizens are believers and what values are tied to skepticism. With this information in hand, we can begin thinking about targeted interventions to change public perception of climate science.
The research study analyzed data about climate change beliefs using a meta-analysis, scientific lingo for a method that combines all the findings from distinct studies and combines them into one statistical analysis to find overarching relationships between variables.
The authors pulled data from five major polling organizations, such as Pew Research, along with peer-reviewed scientific studies that found significant associations between belief in climate change and demographic or psychological factors.
Demographics included information like age, sex, gender, race, income, and education, but psychological variables provided more interesting information about what leads to climate change belief or skepticism. Theoretical models of belief systems break psychological factors into two large categories: 1 antecedent factors that lead to climate change belief, like knowledge, values, and beliefs about science, and 2 downstream factors that arise due to belief in global warming, like intention to act on environmental issues.
So how does this summary of research characterize climate change believers and skeptics? I'll break down the results based each of the factors examined. Yes, but traditional demographic indicators are not the most important factors. Climate change believers are generally younger, more educated, have more money, and are non-white which means skeptics are generally older, less educated, and white.
But all these factors are only weakly associated with climate change beliefs, which means it's crucial to go beyond simple demographics to understand the underlying belief systems. Instead, political affiliation - Democrat, Independent, or Republican - strongly predicted climate change belief, such that Democrats are more likely to believe in climate change than Republicans.
This may seem obvious, but what I found interesting is that this association is stronger than the connection between political ideology conservative or liberal and climate change belief. This might suggest that groupthink, the psychological effect of similar thinking to maintain conformity to a group, guides climate change attitudes, not just ideology alone.
Also, the characteristic image of the 'conservative white male' as the traditional global warming skeptic may persist, but it appears the conservative portion of this portrait may be most important.
Again, there are some obvious associations here. For example, objective knowledge about climate change is strongly connected to belief in its existence, a sign that education could still help change some opinions. More intriguing is a connection between climate change belief and cognitive shortcuts people use to understand complex problems.
Since it's difficult to understand in detail something as multi-faceted as global warming, many rely on shortcuts they've developed to make decisions and form opinions, known as heuristics.
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