Researchers at Yale have profiled American opinions on climate change. No surprise, self identified Tea Baggers are least likely to “believe in” global warming, but also, quite sure that they don’t need any more information about it, thank you.
Certainly consistent with my observations. Hey, if you’ve got Fox News to rely on, what else do you need?
Also the colour is the right one: brown…
How depressingly predictable. I don’t understand how such pig-ignorant people can live with themselves.
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“Don’t confuse me with the facts, my mind is already made-up.”
That is extraordinary. Once one gets over the slightly smug “well duh” reaction, I’m still left wondering: *how?* What the bejeesus is going on that teapartyists can be a full 150% more certain than anyone else?
My own unhelpful reaction is to wonder whether we’re witnessing a `distributed cult’ – only needs to keep to closed doors on the internets, can be all over the place geographically. I’m still gobsmacked by the difference, even suspicious that it must be something wrong with the surveying method…
Hmmm, one of these groups is not like the others….
The Tea Party: Dunning-Kruger on steroids.
“What the bejeesus is going on that teapartyists can be a full 150% more certain than anyone else?”
The Tea Party is very Evangelical Christian. In my experience many of them simply do not believe that man is capable of affecting a natural phenomena that God is being seen as having created.
Anytime you inject Faith into any discussion, certainty goes up, and reasonableness goes down. As Bertrand Russel put it:
“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.”
At the heart of this is a “war on reality” that U.S. conservative are waging. The historical benefits and privileges that they have enjoyed as part of a dominant racial and religious caste are being rapidly eroded. A lot of this erosion has come from scientific refutation of religious and racial memes used to justify privileges. Rather than accept new memes inclusive of scientific findings they are engaged in an information security war.
In short, they are acting like a “stand alone server” on a closed net. No information is allowed in from the outside while information war is waged upon the outside net. Except the outside net is reality itself.