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Unfortunately climate change has become a shibboleth for political tribal affiliation. To be conservative (in the tribal sense) means holding disbelief in clima

Unfortunately climate change has become a shibboleth for political tribal affiliation. To be conservative (in the tribal sense) means holding disbelief in climate change. Note that I'm not exempting liberals from this sort of behavior, many liberals believe in the existence of climate change without having the slighest understanding of it because that's what the rest of the tribe does. No amount of facts, exhortations, threats or pleas will make a difference now. Unless members of the conservative in-group change their minds and spread this message, its going to be a permanent fixture of the American worldview. My hope is that the people most responsible for spreading doubt (e.g. fossil fuel lobbyists) live long enough to see the consequences, but this is unlikely. The most likely scenario is that the brunt of this problem will be borne by future generations, assuming we don't get really unlucky and trigger an extinction event. :-( God damn, what a fucked world we live in. I wish I had the comfort of disbelief these people have.

thisisdallas 10y ago
> To be conservative (in the tribal sense) means holding disbelief in climate change To be fair it's not disbelief in climate change, it's a healthy skepticism of man made climate change.
- vonnik 10y ago
  An extremely unhealthy skepticism that is not shared by any scientist in the field. That skepticism is the result of self-interested propaganda from energy companies spreading FUD. Unmerited skepticism is just as dumb as unmerited belief.
  - ChemicalWarfare 10y ago
    >> An extremely unhealthy skepticism that is not shared by any scientist in the field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_the_mainstream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_th...
    - dwaltrip 10y ago
      The scientists on the list are any scientist, not specifically climate scientists or even related fields. Would you trust a chemist's diagnosis of your mother's cancer? Of course not. What's more, the vast majority of their statements doubting an aspect of climate change are not even part the peer reviewed scientific literature. They are simply opinion statements. And they only found a couple dozen people to put on the list? Not a very strong showing.. All of this is found in the linked Wikipedia article itself.
  - narrowrail 10y ago
    >is not shared by any scientist in the field And that seems to be part of the problem: You just made a statement that is quickly proven false[0], which leads to further skepticism from these people. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_the_mainstream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_th...
    - anon1253 10y ago
      Evidence should not be counted, it should be weighted
    - vonnik 10y ago
      And that, my friend, is a pitifully short list given the total number of climate scientists in the world. 97% say that humans are causing climate change. So yeah, keep spreading the BS and start shopping for real estate away from the coasts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_...
    - blueyes 10y ago
      This is the U in FUD. Online rando makes seemingly factual but ultimately irrelevant argument. Sure, some "scientists" are skeptical of human-generated climate change. But most of them are not climate scientists, and they have no more authority in the field than an entomologist would have when making pronouncements about theoretical physics.
    - yongjik 10y ago
      > Scientists arguing that global warming is primarily caused by natural processes I count eight people who seem to have worked in (broadly) related fields: Timothy Ball, historical climatologist, and retired professor of geography at the University of Winnipeg William Kininmonth, meteorologist, former Australian delegate to World Meteorological Organization Commission for Climatology Anthony Lupo, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Missouri Tim Patterson, paleoclimatologist and professor of geology at Carleton University in Canada. Murry Salby, atmospheric scientist, former professor at Macquarie University and University of Colorado Nir Shaviv, professor of physics focusing on astrophysics and climate science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Roy Spencer, meteorologist; principal research scientist, University of Alabama in Huntsville George H. Taylor, retired director of the Oregon Climate Service at Oregon State University You could probably raid a single decent university and find more people working on understanding AGW better. This is the equivalent of saying "Zoologist X Somebody in University of North Carolina said there's no link between smoking and lung cancer!", and keeping smoking while having a lung cancer while ignoring mountains of research, except that it's not your own lung this time.
- ravitation 10y ago
  Healthy skepticism and being consciously ignorant are not the same thing.
- tapes 10y ago
  to be frank, conservatives only changed their tune on this when it was so painfully obvious that they had to. creative backtracking to still be against any action while looking less like a neanderthal != delightful open-mindedness. and many, like my dad, still call the entire thing a hoax.
  - thisisdallas 10y ago
    > to be frank, conservatives only changed their tune on this when it was so painfully obvious that they had to I guess you don't know that in the 70's it wasn't global warming that was a serious issue but global cooling? Funny how that works.
    - dwaltrip 10y ago
      Veritassium debunks this claim on climate change, along with a dozen others, in less than 7 minutes in an informative and entertaining way. It's a great video, you should at least watch it. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OWXoRSIxyIU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OWXoRSIxyIU In short, during the 70s, there were some papers on global cooling. But even then, there was still 6 times more papers on global warming. Science overall has been looking in the correct direction for a long time now. The narrative isn't changing.
      - thisisdallas 10y ago
        Ok, cool (no pun intended) thanks. I'll watch it.
- rybosome 10y ago
  I don't agree at all. Let's be honest about why conservatives have this "healthy skepticism": because the fossil-fuel industry has successfully linked belief in anthropogenic global warming with liberalism. It's a correct association to some degree in that part of the solution would mean more regulation of business, but the value of such an association is that it becomes an us-versus-them situation. You don't have to understand it to disagree with it. And to be quite frank, that's the case - the majority of people who hold a disbelief in climate change are ignorant of the basic premise. In fairness, the majority of people who hold a belief in climate change are also ignorant of the basic premise. This is because, as mentioned above, it's no longer a scientific issue in the mainstream view, it's a political one. Anecdotally, every "skeptic" I've ever met has used arguments to justify their disbelief such as: - "scientists are not always right" - "the climate changes all the time" - "the Earth is so big, how could we have any effect" - "if global warming is happening then how come it's so cold" - "CO2 rises and falls regularly" ...and on and on. These are not examples of "healthy skepticism", they are examples of ignorance. It's ludicrous to think that I could hold a "healthy skepticism" on the efficacy of heart transplants when I don't know the first thing about human anatomy, biology or medicine, but this is exactly what is happening with an equally complex scientific issue. I will treat an informed dissent respectfully, but let's not shit ourselves about how many opinions meet that bar.
  - jbattle 10y ago
    I've said this before, and I'll say it again. But I know exactly how the next 20 years will play out. Climate change skeptic/deniers will go through the following evolution in the message: - The climate isn't changing in any meaningful way - The climate is changing, but not because of people - Sure the climate is changing because of people's actions, but changing our ways is too expensive, we'll just have to adapt - Of course everyone always believed we should have done something about climate change, but liberals stood in the way of the solutions we suggested (something invented about public vs private solutions)
    - dTal 10y ago
      "Liberals" have stood in the way, in their own way. Any kind of bold technological approach immediately runs afoul of "environmentalists", who are powerless to stop the existing destruction of ecosystems but will protest till the cows come home about anything new. They would sooner see the Great Barrier Reef die of acidification than a single new nuclear plant. The perfect is the enemy of the good.
spiderfarmer 10y ago
"I don't think we're yet evolved to the point where we're clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change." -James Lovelock It's not that people are acting stupid and should know better, a lot of people are just incapable of understanding the implications of a complex situation like this.
- tobltobs 10y ago
  What is so complex about the situation? It is just that people don't wanna change their lifestyle and give a fuck about future generations.
  - spiderfarmer 10y ago
    When compared to water scarcity, climate change is a very complex problem. The solutions to water scarcity are easy. Use less water, or make more water available. Both have an immediate effect. The solution to climate change is not simple. Yes, emit less CO2 and other greenhouse gasses. But the amount of things you can supposedly do to achieve that are numerous and the effects are maybe not even visible in your lifetime.
- Balgair 10y ago
  Eh, stupidity is a pretty good reason, but I don't think it's that. If it was then the line should be : "Climate change = Shits fucked and will get even more fucked, yo." That is a simple enough line to tout even to a heroin addict. Climate change isn't all that complicated as a concept (exact predictions, yes, but like, 'the color blue' is pretty easy a concept even though like photons and retinal pigments and neurons aren't). Hanlon's Razor is: "never attribute to conspiracy what you can attribute to stupidity". Well, stupidity isn't really cutting it anymore, so I think you can start to say conspiracy is a reasonable answer now too.
  - spiderfarmer 10y ago
    What I tried to say is that there's a difference between being stupid and being able to grasp the implications of a complex situation. People tend to be dismissive of the things they can't understand. When combined with uncertainty (who can we trust anymore) and paranoia (they are plotting against me), people are finding solace in conspiracy theories.
rjsw 10y ago
I think that climate change denial is an example of a Cargo Cult, with parallels in every aspect with the ones seen in the Pacific islands. The cult leaders have spent their whole lives debating with people and poring over the wording of documents, they then see another group of people threatening to drive the narrative in society in future and react by adopting the debating style of this group and by trying to detect linguistic errors in scientific documents. They miss the point that their skillset just isn't applicable to the problem. The cult followers were in a clientelist relationship with the leaders before, they have received cargo in the past and would like to continue to receive it in the future so are happy to go along with the cult.
throwaway982357 10y ago
Conservatism could potentially be a red herring here, with the underlying colluding factor here being age. The older generations of Americans have seen amazing feats of scientific analysis and engineering since WWII and the proceeding decades of booming innovation, typically unparalleled by other nations that eventually came to assimilate technologies born out of US-led wartime R&D. Iron-clad theories of physics and chemistry were refined during these times and tested for durability with rigorous predictive precision and straightforward practical applications. The older American worldview of science is nostalgic for an era of unprecedented modeling accuracy that gave a compact summary of how the near-atomic world worked, consequently fueling a backlash against the rise of disciplines that intend to study far more complex systems albeit with the inability to perform experiments in the fashion of the basic sciences. Nutrition, psychology, economics, and climate research all tout the banner of at least using some parts of the scientific method, which to those Americans who have been spoiled by the awesome forecasting of more reductive studies, are left to question the legitimacy of fields that fundamentally cannot perform experiments with the same exacting repeatability and direct hypothesis testability that was so blazing branded into the public zeitgeist for what American STEM should be capable of accomplishing. In addition, given that at least the first three of those disciples mentioned above are notoriously abused in the US by governments and corporations as retroactive justifications for legal, social, and economic policies by paying for expert testimony and directly funding questionable studies on condition of flattering results, it is extremely hard for the American public to trust any hard-to-swallow policy-advocating scientific communities without (ir)rational skepticism. Americans dealing with science are like romantically-oblivious nerds dealing with a heart-wrenching series of rejections and betrayals. If as a scientist you want to court these delicate creatures, please proceed with gentle and loving care building trust and helping them heal from the toxic relationships that soured their faith in domain experts. Denigrading them that they should just get over the past already and put their faith in the absolute consensus of the world is truly not helpful.

thisisdallas 10y ago

> To be conservative (in the tribal sense) means holding disbelief in climate change To be fair it's not disbelief in climate change, it's a healthy skepticism of man made climate change.

vonnik 10y ago
An extremely unhealthy skepticism that is not shared by any scientist in the field. That skepticism is the result of self-interested propaganda from energy companies spreading FUD. Unmerited skepticism is just as dumb as unmerited belief.
- ChemicalWarfare 10y ago
  >> An extremely unhealthy skepticism that is not shared by any scientist in the field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_the_mainstream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_th...
  - dwaltrip 10y ago
    The scientists on the list are any scientist, not specifically climate scientists or even related fields. Would you trust a chemist's diagnosis of your mother's cancer? Of course not. What's more, the vast majority of their statements doubting an aspect of climate change are not even part the peer reviewed scientific literature. They are simply opinion statements. And they only found a couple dozen people to put on the list? Not a very strong showing.. All of this is found in the linked Wikipedia article itself.
- narrowrail 10y ago
  >is not shared by any scientist in the field And that seems to be part of the problem: You just made a statement that is quickly proven false[0], which leads to further skepticism from these people. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_the_mainstream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_th...
  - anon1253 10y ago
    Evidence should not be counted, it should be weighted
  - vonnik 10y ago
    And that, my friend, is a pitifully short list given the total number of climate scientists in the world. 97% say that humans are causing climate change. So yeah, keep spreading the BS and start shopping for real estate away from the coasts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_...
  - blueyes 10y ago
    This is the U in FUD. Online rando makes seemingly factual but ultimately irrelevant argument. Sure, some "scientists" are skeptical of human-generated climate change. But most of them are not climate scientists, and they have no more authority in the field than an entomologist would have when making pronouncements about theoretical physics.
  - yongjik 10y ago
    > Scientists arguing that global warming is primarily caused by natural processes I count eight people who seem to have worked in (broadly) related fields: Timothy Ball, historical climatologist, and retired professor of geography at the University of Winnipeg William Kininmonth, meteorologist, former Australian delegate to World Meteorological Organization Commission for Climatology Anthony Lupo, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Missouri Tim Patterson, paleoclimatologist and professor of geology at Carleton University in Canada. Murry Salby, atmospheric scientist, former professor at Macquarie University and University of Colorado Nir Shaviv, professor of physics focusing on astrophysics and climate science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Roy Spencer, meteorologist; principal research scientist, University of Alabama in Huntsville George H. Taylor, retired director of the Oregon Climate Service at Oregon State University You could probably raid a single decent university and find more people working on understanding AGW better. This is the equivalent of saying "Zoologist X Somebody in University of North Carolina said there's no link between smoking and lung cancer!", and keeping smoking while having a lung cancer while ignoring mountains of research, except that it's not your own lung this time.
ravitation 10y ago
Healthy skepticism and being consciously ignorant are not the same thing.
tapes 10y ago
to be frank, conservatives only changed their tune on this when it was so painfully obvious that they had to. creative backtracking to still be against any action while looking less like a neanderthal != delightful open-mindedness. and many, like my dad, still call the entire thing a hoax.
- thisisdallas 10y ago
  > to be frank, conservatives only changed their tune on this when it was so painfully obvious that they had to I guess you don't know that in the 70's it wasn't global warming that was a serious issue but global cooling? Funny how that works.
  - dwaltrip 10y ago
    Veritassium debunks this claim on climate change, along with a dozen others, in less than 7 minutes in an informative and entertaining way. It's a great video, you should at least watch it. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OWXoRSIxyIU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OWXoRSIxyIU In short, during the 70s, there were some papers on global cooling. But even then, there was still 6 times more papers on global warming. Science overall has been looking in the correct direction for a long time now. The narrative isn't changing.
    - thisisdallas 10y ago
      Ok, cool (no pun intended) thanks. I'll watch it.
rybosome 10y ago
I don't agree at all. Let's be honest about why conservatives have this "healthy skepticism": because the fossil-fuel industry has successfully linked belief in anthropogenic global warming with liberalism. It's a correct association to some degree in that part of the solution would mean more regulation of business, but the value of such an association is that it becomes an us-versus-them situation. You don't have to understand it to disagree with it. And to be quite frank, that's the case - the majority of people who hold a disbelief in climate change are ignorant of the basic premise. In fairness, the majority of people who hold a belief in climate change are also ignorant of the basic premise. This is because, as mentioned above, it's no longer a scientific issue in the mainstream view, it's a political one. Anecdotally, every "skeptic" I've ever met has used arguments to justify their disbelief such as: - "scientists are not always right" - "the climate changes all the time" - "the Earth is so big, how could we have any effect" - "if global warming is happening then how come it's so cold" - "CO2 rises and falls regularly" ...and on and on. These are not examples of "healthy skepticism", they are examples of ignorance. It's ludicrous to think that I could hold a "healthy skepticism" on the efficacy of heart transplants when I don't know the first thing about human anatomy, biology or medicine, but this is exactly what is happening with an equally complex scientific issue. I will treat an informed dissent respectfully, but let's not shit ourselves about how many opinions meet that bar.
- jbattle 10y ago
  I've said this before, and I'll say it again. But I know exactly how the next 20 years will play out. Climate change skeptic/deniers will go through the following evolution in the message: - The climate isn't changing in any meaningful way - The climate is changing, but not because of people - Sure the climate is changing because of people's actions, but changing our ways is too expensive, we'll just have to adapt - Of course everyone always believed we should have done something about climate change, but liberals stood in the way of the solutions we suggested (something invented about public vs private solutions)
  - dTal 10y ago
    "Liberals" have stood in the way, in their own way. Any kind of bold technological approach immediately runs afoul of "environmentalists", who are powerless to stop the existing destruction of ecosystems but will protest till the cows come home about anything new. They would sooner see the Great Barrier Reef die of acidification than a single new nuclear plant. The perfect is the enemy of the good.

spiderfarmer 10y ago

"I don't think we're yet evolved to the point where we're clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change." -James Lovelock It's not that people are acting stupid and should know better, a lot of people are just incapable of understanding the implications of a complex situation like this.

tobltobs 10y ago
What is so complex about the situation? It is just that people don't wanna change their lifestyle and give a fuck about future generations.
- spiderfarmer 10y ago
  When compared to water scarcity, climate change is a very complex problem. The solutions to water scarcity are easy. Use less water, or make more water available. Both have an immediate effect. The solution to climate change is not simple. Yes, emit less CO2 and other greenhouse gasses. But the amount of things you can supposedly do to achieve that are numerous and the effects are maybe not even visible in your lifetime.
Balgair 10y ago
Eh, stupidity is a pretty good reason, but I don't think it's that. If it was then the line should be : "Climate change = Shits fucked and will get even more fucked, yo." That is a simple enough line to tout even to a heroin addict. Climate change isn't all that complicated as a concept (exact predictions, yes, but like, 'the color blue' is pretty easy a concept even though like photons and retinal pigments and neurons aren't). Hanlon's Razor is: "never attribute to conspiracy what you can attribute to stupidity". Well, stupidity isn't really cutting it anymore, so I think you can start to say conspiracy is a reasonable answer now too.
- spiderfarmer 10y ago
  What I tried to say is that there's a difference between being stupid and being able to grasp the implications of a complex situation. People tend to be dismissive of the things they can't understand. When combined with uncertainty (who can we trust anymore) and paranoia (they are plotting against me), people are finding solace in conspiracy theories.

rjsw 10y ago

I think that climate change denial is an example of a Cargo Cult, with parallels in every aspect with the ones seen in the Pacific islands. The cult leaders have spent their whole lives debating with people and poring over the wording of documents, they then see another group of people threatening to drive the narrative in society in future and react by adopting the debating style of this group and by trying to detect linguistic errors in scientific documents. They miss the point that their skillset just isn't applicable to the problem. The cult followers were in a clientelist relationship with the leaders before, they have received cargo in the past and would like to continue to receive it in the future so are happy to go along with the cult.

throwaway982357 10y ago

Conservatism could potentially be a red herring here, with the underlying colluding factor here being age. The older generations of Americans have seen amazing feats of scientific analysis and engineering since WWII and the proceeding decades of booming innovation, typically unparalleled by other nations that eventually came to assimilate technologies born out of US-led wartime R&D. Iron-clad theories of physics and chemistry were refined during these times and tested for durability with rigorous predictive precision and straightforward practical applications. The older American worldview of science is nostalgic for an era of unprecedented modeling accuracy that gave a compact summary of how the near-atomic world worked, consequently fueling a backlash against the rise of disciplines that intend to study far more complex systems albeit with the inability to perform experiments in the fashion of the basic sciences. Nutrition, psychology, economics, and climate research all tout the banner of at least using some parts of the scientific method, which to those Americans who have been spoiled by the awesome forecasting of more reductive studies, are left to question the legitimacy of fields that fundamentally cannot perform experiments with the same exacting repeatability and direct hypothesis testability that was so blazing branded into the public zeitgeist for what American STEM should be capable of accomplishing. In addition, given that at least the first three of those disciples mentioned above are notoriously abused in the US by governments and corporations as retroactive justifications for legal, social, and economic policies by paying for expert testimony and directly funding questionable studies on condition of flattering results, it is extremely hard for the American public to trust any hard-to-swallow policy-advocating scientific communities without (ir)rational skepticism. Americans dealing with science are like romantically-oblivious nerds dealing with a heart-wrenching series of rejections and betrayals. If as a scientist you want to court these delicate creatures, please proceed with gentle and loving care building trust and helping them heal from the toxic relationships that soured their faith in domain experts. Denigrading them that they should just get over the past already and put their faith in the absolute consensus of the world is truly not helpful.