Beyond Labels

Surveys say that most fewer conservatives than liberals believe that climate change is a global threat caused mainly by humans releasing greenhouse gasses.

Is that because they don’t understand science? If they did, would they change their minds? Are liberals convinced of the threat because they understand the underlying science?  Can research help us understand which of these statements are likely to be true?

I think that the answer to the last question is: yes.

And the research says that the answers to the others are no, no, and no.

The details are in the paper, The Tragedy of the Risk-Perception Commons: Culture Conflict, Rationality Conflict, and Climate Change,  linked through the web site of the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale University.  There’s a lot of good stuff at the site beyond this article, including some interesting studies on tribal affiliation, scientific literacy and evolution, nuclear energy, and other controversial topics.

Here’s the Cliff Notes Version of the referenced article:

If you are a liberal, the more science you know, the more you are likely to be convinced climate change is mainly caused by humans and a big problem.

If you are a conservative, the more science you know, the less you believe that. Really. That’s what the research says.

How do you do research that tells you that?

First, you develop a test that measures general understanding of science. The test itself has been well studied and vetted.

Give a bunch of people the test.  Their studies typically include 1500-200 people. Have the people give their views on climate change and their political orientation.

Analyze the results.

If it’s true that the more people understand science the more they are convinced of climate change you’d expect to see scientific illiteracy correlated with climate concern and scientific illiteracy correlated with climate skepticism.

Thus you’d expect to see ignorant people (mainly conservatives) clustered at the low end of the science knowledge scale and the knowledgeable ones (mostly liberals) at the other end.

It turns out that that’s not the way it comes out.

The range of science knowledge among liberals and conservatives is roughly the same. There is no significant correlation between science knowledge and political orientation.

You discover that for liberals, science knowledge is correlated with climate concern. The more science a self-identified liberal knows, the more likely that they are concerned about climate. That’s not surprising.

But you discover that for conservatives, science knowledge is correlated with climate skepticism. The more science that a conservative knows, the less convinced they are. That’s surprising to a lot of people.

Indeed if you look just at the most scientifically literate and numerate people you find that they are slightly less likely than average to see climate change as a serious threat.

This research does not tell us what conclusions to draw about climate change, or how concerned to be.

It does tell us, though, that tribal membership influences opinions far more than our knowledge of science does.

Whatever your opinion, it’s worth keeping that in mind.

Here’s an entertaining and fact-and-interesting-speculation-filled post by Gary Brecher, The War Nerd about ISIS.

He’s got experience in the region and credibly asserts something that I inexpertly suspected ever since ISIS released videos of their first beheading of a westerner: that they are a bunch of morons.

I mean, really, what do you expect? Public opinion in the West was, and still is divided between those who want to intervene and those who want to stay out of it. But chopping someone’s head off on YouTube pretty much guarantees that the needle moves. And in the West it moves against you.

Of course it’s great at-home marketing. People who want to see the West embarrassed are delighted! Look at what these guys can do! Look at how impotent the West is! Yay Jihadists! Let’s go join them and chop off some heads! And rape some infidel women while we’re at it!

But in the West the video has a different effect. People convinced of the value of intervention become more convinced. People who are against intervention feel the ground on which they stand become less solid. Most important, people who are undecided decide. A few decide that you are dangerous and must be avoided. Most decide that you are dangerous and must be stopped. Too bad for you.

Then the writing is on the wall, and the back room politics start to work against you. Your important allies, the ones who have been secretly funding you, start to have second thoughts. They’re not backing a winner. They’re backing idiots.

And as the money dries up, so does whatever fighting capability you had. And your ability to raise more money. Because an Army without money is doomed, no matter how many wanna- be’s join their cause.

And then your grand narrative starts to unravel. You stop being the great hope of the Islamists: the carriers of the flag around which they will rally and restore historical greatness. Instead you become the latest and least credible of a long-line of might-have-been losers. Remember when Saddam was the great hope? Remember when Osama was?  Where are they now?

Brecher’s an entertaining writer, and his analysis of what’s going on behind the scenes seems to conform to the latest facts I’ve been able to collect.  “War Nerd” is a kind of cool handle.