When it comes to climate change denial, not all human beings are created equal. As a recent study shows, conservative white males are less likely to believe in climate change.
“It’s not surprising,” said Aaron McCright, sociology professor at Michigan State University, who is a white male himself. But anecdotal evidence is not scientific, he said. “You really don’t know what’s going on until you crunch the numbers and find out.”
Besides the trend amongst skeptics, the study also found that conservative white men who self-report a high understanding of global warming — dubbed “confident” conservative males — are even more likely to express climate change denial.
McCright’s study, “Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States,” was published online in July and printed in the October 2011 issue of Global Environmental Change, which ranks first out of 77 journals on environmental studies.
The study has created somewhat of a buzz, said Riley Dunlap, co-author and professor of sociology at Oklahoma State University. The paper was well received in academic circles, but he admitted he was concerned about a backlash from the conservative movement. While there have not been any major outcries, the study appears to have raised a few temperatures in Chicago.
“This paper is a transparent effort to take the focus off the actual scientific debate and instead engage in race baiting, class baiting and other sociological devices to win a science argument,” said James Taylor, [not that James Taylor -PS] senior fellow for environment policy at the Chicago-based Heartland Institute. (the Heartland Institute is a “thinktank” that defends the rights of tobacco addicts to blow smoke in your baby’s face, among other things…PS)
“You really don’t know what’s going on until you crunch the numbers and find out.” True, but it doesn’t take very many debates to suspect what the numbers will be.
=> Dunning–Kruger effect
They’re likely to be slaves to the god of free market economics. Next question please.
“They’re likely to be slaves to the god of free market economics.”
Whoa! Let’s not mix together ideas that have nothing in common. Free market economics is entirely compatible with environmentally friendly values. It’s true that the externalities of environmental insults are more difficult to express in economic terms, but that does not constitute a significant objection to the application of market economics — we successfully apply adjustment factors to market economics with all sorts of issues whose externalities are not directly measurable.
sinchiroca,
Presumably you are a believer in Ecological Modernisation, which Arther Mol described as trying to repair “…a structural design fault of modernity: the institutionalised destruction of nature” (Mol 1996: 305).
For the full context, you may wish to read http://lackofenvironment.wordpress.com/2011/09/24/can-modernisation-be-ecological-part-1/ etc., etc..
But if not, please bear in mind I am no eco-Marxist, I have just lost faith in laissez-faire global Capitalism and, given the antics of free-market-economists like Alan Greenspan, who can blame me?
“Presumably you are a believer in Ecological Modernisation”
Hell, I ain’t even got an Ecological Modernizer!
I agree that capitalism in its current form has a lot of malfunctioning parts, but I don’t think we have any viable alternatives. The best we can do is try to patch up capitalism as best we can.
Many conservative white males don’t fully appreciate the old saying, “It’s better to be lucky than good”. Many of them have been lucky, having come from families who could afford to live in neighborhoods with the best schools (or to send them to exclusive private schools), and to send them off to college.
There are lots of equally-talented (but less lucky) people who could have done just as well, but did not have the financial resources to give them that “leg up”.
Many conservative climate-skeptics seem to have mistaken their own good fortune for talent. The result is an inflated view of their own abilities that makes them think that they are intrinsically smarter and more knowledgeable than climate-scientists with decades of professional experience.
As a result, they claim with confidence that NASA’s global-average temperature results are fraudulent, in spite of the fact that verifying NASA’s results is a college-undergraduate programming project. They also spout lines like “Mann’s singular-value-decomposition method generates hockey sticks from random noise”, even though most of them wouldn’t know a singular value from a Cingular cell-phone. They don’t have the knowledge or talent to understand how bogus these claims are, and their inflated perception of their own talent keeps them from realizing that.
as Ann Richards said, “Poor George Bush. He was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.’
Very true. As Ben Goldacre says in Bad Science, although most people think they are better-than-average behind the wheel of a car, this is a statistical impossibility. Therefore, as it is with driving, so it is with every other need for simultaneous information-processing and decision-making (otherwise known as brain use)!
Most white males I have met (and I am one of them) seem to deny climate change as another issue that disenfranchises them from jobs.
If they only knew the reality of climate change- they would know that their future is in great trouble, beyond the right left equation.
Come to think of it, I could have saved myself a bit of time simply by typing “Dunning Kruger”.
I agree, Peter. If people must insist on using the right-left thing then I’m with the German Green Party who said, “Greens are neither left nor right, but out in front!” However, given that the reality of limits to growth are now becoming ever-more apparent, I prefer Carter’s ecocentric/anthropocentric dichotomy; and to try and to push people away from a strongly anthropocentric position; at least as far as a weakly-ecocentric one (i.e. one which sees at least some intrinsic value in nature).
Reference: Carter, N (2007), The Politics of the Environment.
Conservative males tend to be left-brainers, given more to logic than to emotion. They want to see the numbers, to calculate the odds and risks and cost-benefit ratios.
When a right-brain liberal hears an alarming claim (“the polar bears are in trouble!”), his or her response is apt to be, “we’ve got to do something! Let’s cap CO2 emissions!”
When a left-brain conservative hears the same news, he wants the proof: “if polar bears are in trouble now, then how’d they make it through the MWP, RWP, etc? And why aren’t their numbers down?”
He also wants to see the cost-benefit analysis: “What will this proposal cost the American people? $400 billion? With a B?? Wow, that’s a big hit! Well, then, will it solve the problem? If we spend $400 billion on renewable energy subsidies, carbon sequestration, etc., then how much effect will that expenditure actually have on global temperatures?”
When the answer is, “uh, well, none, actually,” or, “it might buy a 2-4 week delay in reaching a hypothetical tipping point,” the left-brain conservative says, “well, then, what a completely stupid idea!” But the right-brain liberal says, “So what? We’ve got to do something,” and supports the proposal anyhow.
In the first place, the old left-brain/right brain thing is rank pop psych with very little empirical support. And there is absolutely zero logic in the denialist positions that reject mountains of empirical evidence, avalanches of detailed analysis, and a plethora of scientific papers on the topic.
Moreover, the MWP was nowhere near as intense as current warming.
Furthermore, the logical way to analyze the problem is not to compare costs with “whether it works” but to compare costs with benefits. Economic analyses are still in their infancy, but what we do have definitely shows the costs of climate change easily running into the trillions of dollars. A proper cost-benefit analysis is not yet within our grasp, but the first-cut cost-benefit analyses suggest that some measures will be quite cost-effective.
By the way, I’d love to see the cost-benefit analysis carried out by all those left-brain conservatives regarding the costs and benefits of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Costs: 5000 American lives, 20,000 disabled Americans, roughly $2 trillion in present and future costs, several hundred thousand dead Iraqis, a great loss of diplomatic clout. Benefits: replacement of dictatorial Iraqi regime with a less dictatorial Iraqi regime. Yep, those left-brain conservatives sure figured that one out.
sinchiroca, you beat me to it.
those conservative males sure did a great job applying their ana-malytical skills during the Bush administration.
Saddam’s ~23 year death toll is generally estimated at aprox. 2,000,000 (i.e., avg. ~240/day). Some sources estimate more, some less, but all sources agree it exceeded 1,000,000. He was filling Iraq with mass graves. He committed genocide against the Marsh Arabs, and ecocide against their marshes.
The United States and her allies put a stop to all that. But I guess you don’t care, do you? Well, I do.
What’s more, if we hadn’t taken out Saddam, then Ghadaffi would have had 9 more years to work on his A-bomb project. I, for one, am glad that he didn’t have time to finish it before the Libyan civil war.
http://www.webcitation.org/5Tx9Cl8lU
Saddam’s killing machine was all the more effective with the intel support it got from the Reagan administration. (remember Rumsfeld’s good ol boy handshake?)
http://articles.latimes.com/1992-03-10/news/mn-3540_1_intelligence-sharing
meanwhile, the invasion ‘put a stop to that”, and started a whole new era – the deaths post invasion are in the hundreds of thousands, with millions maimed, childless, father/mother-less, or homeless.
And such a bargain!!
get out yer spreadsheet and show us how climate change will be a cake-walk, too.
“The United States and her allies put a stop to all that. But I guess you don’t care, do you? Well, I do.”
So your response to all that killing was “We’ve got to do something! Let’s invade Iraq!”
What about all the killing in Rwanda? Darfur? Congo? Were you eager to invade these countries to save those people?
Or do you “care” selectively?
Rwanda? Shoot, do they have oil???