No surprises in a new study of how people’s views on climate change correlate with various social factors. (In the graph below, “Liberal” should be “liberal”):
SMH takes up the story:
It appears the adage that climate change sceptics are typically conservative white men is only partly true, with a new study finding the political party you support to be a much stronger marker of where you line-up on global warming than gender, age and race.
But if you do accept the scientific evidence humans are causing climate change by burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests, the same research also suggests that does not mean you lead a greener private life.
In an effort to tease out what shapes individual views and actions on climate change, Australian researchers analysed almost 200 studies and polls covering 56 countries.
They found that political affiliation was a much larger determinant of a person’s willingness to accept humanity’s role in climate change than other social fault lines. Conservative voters were more likely to be sceptical, while progressive voters typically believed the science.
A person’s broader political ideology, such as whether they saw themselves as conservative or liberal, also had a notable effect, albeit weaker than party support.
Other variables such as age, gender, education, income and race had a much lower, and often negligible, impact. The same was also true for individual experiences of extreme weather events.
“Although a ‘conservative white male’ profile has emerged of climate change sceptics in the United States, our analysis of polls across multiple nations suggests that the ‘conservative’ part of that equation would seem to be more diagnostic than the ‘white male’ part,” finds the paper, which was published in the journal Nature Climate Change on Tuesday.
Matthew Hornsey, a psychology professor at the University of Queensland and one of the authors of the study, said climate science was far too complex for the vast majority of people to be totally across, meaning for most it was a matter of trust.
Some have an implicit trust in scientists and their methods, he said, but others turned to “gut feelings that are largely about their values, their politics, their world view”.
“Age, sex and race aren’t the issue: it’s your deeper philosophies about the free market, about big versus small government, about individualistic versus socialistic ways of responding to societal problems, about whether or not you have a moral suspicion of industry,” Professor Hornsey said.
Read more:
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/age-gender-race-climate-scepticism-is-predominantly-party-political-20160222-gn05y0.html