l****z
发帖数: 29846 | 1 For years now the climate campaign and the politicized science community has
been complaining that it has a “communications problem,” which can be
solved if only they shout louder, or get the human car alarm former Vice
President Al Gore to make an Oscar-winning documentary film or something.
Because, after all, it’s just so easy for a billion-dollar effort at
pushing the climate crisis to be undone by a handful of discredited “
skeptics” with only at tiny fraction of the resources environmental groups
have spent. The whole spectacle would be pitiful if it wasn’t so pathetic,
not to mention risible.
A few months ago I wrote a post about how the climate campaign reminded me
of a T.S. Eliot poem, which concluded thus:
“What might have been and has been / Point to one end, which is always
present,” Eliot continues in Burnt Norton. Which reminds me of the climate
record (“time future contained in time past”). We don’t understand the
climate past with reasonable precision, as the intense debate about the “
hockey stick” graph showed, and the computer models predicting a 2 to 5
degree rise in the future are clearly riddled with large uncertainties,
given the range of prospective temperatures they spit out. No matter. “What
is always present” today is the cocksure certainty that catastrophic
global warming is occurring, and damn the weatherman. Think of it as the
ultimate modernist free-verse, only without literary allusions “an
abstraction / Remaining a perpetual possibility / Only in a world of
speculation.”
Well, now the whole farce is starting to remind me of Monty Python’s “dead
parrot” sketch—the climate crisis isn’t dead, it’s just restin’. A
new paper just out from the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale University
has a supremely inconvenient truth for the die-hard climate campaigners.
The opening sentences of the abstract pour cold water in the whole “
communications problem” excuse:
The conventional explanation for controversy over climate change emphasizes
impediments to public understanding: limited popular knowledge of science,
the inability of ordinary citizens to assess technical information, and the
resulting widespread use of unreliable cognitive heuristics to assess risk.
A large survey of U.S. adults (N = 1540) found little support for this
account. On the whole, the most scientifically literate and numerate
subjects were slightly less likely, not more, to see climate change as a
serious threat than the least scientifically literate and numerate ones.
Whoa there: The more science you know about climate change, the less likely
you are to think it is a crisis? This suggest that all the money
environmentalists have spent (I think the Environmental Defense Fund has
spent $300 million alone on climate change) has had a negative effect on
public opinion, and it offers the ironic possibility that the best thing Al
Gore could do to advance his cause is shut up and grow his beard back in a
Tibetan monastery.
This is by no means the first social science survey to reach an inconvenient
finding like this. The journal Risk Analysis published a similar article
in 2008. From the abstract:
By examining the results of a survey on an original and representative
sample of Americans, we find that these three forces—informedness,
confidence in scientists, and personal efficacy—are related in interesting
and unexpected ways, and exert significant influence on risk assessments of
global warming and climate change. In particular, more informed respondents
both feel less personally responsible for global warming, and also show less
concern for global warming. We also find that confidence in scientists has
unexpected effects: respondents with high confidence in scientists feel less
responsible for global warming, and also show less concern for global
warming.
The authors were clearly dismayed by their findings, writing in the
conclusion: “Perhaps ironically, and certainly contrary to the assumptions
underlying the knowledge-deficit model, as well as the marketing of movies
like Ice Age and An Inconvenient Truth, the effects of information on both
concern for global warming and responsibility for it are exactly the
opposite of what were expected. . . [I]t can not be comforting to the
researchers in the scientific community that the more trust people have in
them as scientists, the less concerned they are about their findings.”
Finally, I note with amusement that George Lucas has demanded that
Greenpeace take down a Star Wars parody advertisement they had recently
produced, claiming it violates his copyright. I’ll leave it to the
copyright lawyers to argue whether the Greenpeace ad (which may still be
floating around the interwebs somewhere) is a fair use parody, but the fact
the Lucas refuses to lend his imagery to such a fashionable liberal cause
may mean it has lost its purchase. When you can’t get a super rich Marin
County liberal to get your back. . .
To paraphrase John Cleese, “I know a dead issue when I see one. . . This
is an ex-issue!”
JOHN adds: On the slight chance that you haven’t seen the Norwegian Blue
sketch, a classic of modern comedy, here it is. Thanks to commenter Brad
Bettin for the link: |
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