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Political Ideology Shapes How People Perceive Temperature
benfrog writes "In what likely isn't that much of a surprise, a study has shown that political ideology shapes how we perceive temperature changes (but not drought/flooding conditions). (An abstract of the study is here. 8,000 individuals were asked about temperatures and drought/flood events in recent years, then their political leanings. Answers regarding drought/flood events tended to follow the actual changes in conditions, while answers regarding temperature tended to follow people's political beliefs."
...when looked at by political groupings, did any particular political grouping's perceptions of the temperate correlate more closely to reality than the others?
i.e. was there one or more political ideologies that was more divorced from reality than the others, by any meaningful statistical deviation? Or were they all off, just in different directions based on political ideology?
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
Basic cognitive dissonance modelling has demonstrated repeatedly that when a person encounters incontrovertible facts that contradict deeply held beliefs, the facts are discarded.
I am officially gone from
except when taxes come due, then I feel a lot of cold water on my plans.
I swear they give me mod points to shut me up.
The data is behind a paywall (click the PDF link in the abstract). Welcome to the world of scientific journals.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Look at a political map of the US, and what's the first thing that pops out at you? A lot more conservatives live in the southern US. Most of the places where conservatives tend to live are warm, while liberals tend to live in cooler areas. People in areas that are normally cooler would be more likely to notice an increase in temperature than people in areas that are generally warmer. Personally, I'm used to 80%+ humidity and upper 90s-low 100s myself, so this summer has actually seemed pretty mild in comparison to what I'm used to. But that has nothing to do with whether or not I believe in global warming. It has more to do with the kind of weather I am acclimated to.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
It seems the other way for me. I'm a rather left-leaning type and I say it's 33 right now, but the conservative in the next cube over keeps saying it's 97.
It's kind of hard to miss a flood when you live in your parents' basement. It gets damp and the sump pump wakes you up at night. But temperature? I'd have to actually go outside to know what it is. Otherwise, all I have to go on is my belief in global warming.
From what I've read, the global-warming theories call for unpredictable temperature swings - hot and cold - as the planet adjusts, so extreme cold at times is expected...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
1) Any particular year could just be a fluke. Anyone who claims a hot/cool year is evidence for/against climate change is completely ignorant of basic climate science and/or thinks you are.
2) "So maybe we're experiencing both global warming and cooling at the same time!" -- That is exactly correct -- the climate is changing. Parts will get hotter, parts will get cooler. The overall trend is up, hence the name "global warming". We're going to lose some arable land but we'll gain some as well. What scares me is sea level rise -- take a look at population density maps over the world to see what I mean.
3) There is no good faith debate on whether the climate is changing, and practically none on whether it is the result of human activities. But that doesn't mean that every climate scientist with a model knows the future, or that any particular prediction is correct. What we do know for sure is that human activities are having measurable effects on a highly chaotic system on which we depend for the survival of our civilization. I like to keep my experiments in the lab.
Well, the other answer is that people answer subjectively about a subjective question and objectively about an objective question. It is pretty hard to deny that a flood or drought is occurring, but the temperature on average changes so little (about half a degree Celcius in the last 70 years) that it comes down to a matter of opinion.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
So can I save on air conditioning, by having a cold political ideology in the summer?
And save on heating costs, by having hot political ideology in the winter?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
From what I've read, the global-warming theories call for unpredictable temperature swings
The weather model has unpredictable temperature swings built into it already. It would be disingenuous to claim phenomena which will occur no matter what is somehow dependent on a particular theory.
Chronological Age Shapes How People Perceive Temperature
"You just don't get the summers we used to get when I was a lad..."
Financial Circumstances Shape How People Perceive Temperature
"Almost froze my ass off last winter, didn't have enough newspapers stocked up since everybody's reading the bloody online bloody news these days..."
and
Number of Children / Grandchildren / Pets Shape How People Perceive Temperature
"Well, Susie has her skating class, then Molly has her hockey game, but Andy and Billy were invited to that Winter Festival / tobogganing birthday party at the same time...oh, and could you walk Rover when you get home?"
Face it, 'perception' of temperature is a pretty worthless measure overall. Stick with the measurements, assign a margin of error (note: not 'corrections') suitable for the technology / location, and go from there.
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
People who work in well air conditioned offices don't feel as hot as those who have to perfotm manual labor outside, or in less well cooled (and dehumidified) environments
And people who are very wealthy aren't concerned about global warming, they can just build a new summer home firther north.
Yeah. That Heritage Foundation are CRIMINALS for designing such a policy!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
... because they are slightly closer to hell.
Oh and just for good measure, this:
http://act.350.org/signup/reckoning/?akid=2086.624457.CWuv92&rd=1&t=2
Here's the analogy. We're all on a ship in the ocean. Engineering below has alerted the captain that we're definitely headed for an iceberg. The rich people who are partying on the ship don't want the party to stop.
Since they're the Big Money on board and have the Big Connections , they have outsized say in what the captain decides to do. They shout down the engineers, accusing them of being jealous of the first class passengers.
The rest of the passengers are worried but unable to get captain to change course.
After a while, engineering gets more and more agitated and the passengers can see the panic in their faces. The first class passengers become more even recalcitrant and adamant because now it's a matter of pride.
The rest of the passengers start quietly meeting amongst themselves, talking in low voices, moving about the ship in small groups.
You guess how this movie finishes.
OK times up. It finishes with a lot of well heeled people floating lifelessly in the frigid waters as the ship veers safely past the iceberg with the passengers on board, safe and going home to their loved ones.
No one is going to let deniers crash this ship and kill everyone on board. There comes a time when no one cares what your "rights" are or if SCOTUS has decided that money is speech or even what fucking SCOTUS says. Civilization at its core isn't based on "civil rights" or "free speech" or SCOTUS decisions. We got by without any of that shit for a few, ten thousand years. It's based on survival. Anyone who threatens survival will find themselves outside of the laws of civilization pretty fucking fast.
The Constitution is not a suicide pact. If you make people fight for their survival, if you're identified as one of the deniers who drove civilization to the brink of extinction you can pretty well plan on dying a pretty fucking barbaric death, possibly involving blow torches and such like medieval -level implements of torture . It's nothing I'd wish on anyone, but moderate, peace loving, live and let live liberal bunny people like me aren't going to be able to hold back revenge seekers very well. Prominent personalities deeply involved with denialism may want to take pause here.
My colleagues think we should spare you from the full horror of what's going to happen when, say, the food web in the ocean begins to collapse. They think that because they think by building bridges we can eventually bring you along, but if we paint the full picture of what the future will bring to your flesh, you'll fucking tighten up, become defensive and go full off into denialand and "stand your ground" until the bitter end.
I have another perspective. I think by explicitly laying out for you likely or possible scenarios and what part you'll play in them your brain will start to work in favor of your own survival despite your pansified, airy-fairy post-modernist "you have your experts and I have mine, you have your reality and I have mine" bullshit you learned from cocksucking FoxNews.
Don't think your money or guns or survivalist skills are going to count for jack fucking shit when the world's intelligence agencies collectively decide that you're a clear and present danger to humanity and bring to the party everything in their labs and the kitchen sink to make sure that your dealt with. That's how this is going to go down in the end because you know what? The Constitution is not a suicide pact.
I would think geographical location during the persons upbringing would have an effect on the perception of temperature. It would also have an effect on political ideology. Correlation != causation. Perhaps temperature perception shapes political ideology.
Condition of housing may also have an effect. Living in a cold area in an expensive warm house would not be the same as living in a cheap cold house. The difference there is the cost of the house and implies a higher family income.
They connected the wrong dots. Different political affiliations typically means different age groups which means one has seen more decades of weather which contained other floods and droughts and heat waves so they are less inclined to think there's a change going on.
Hmm... Let's see. The average adult male weighs around 70 kg (155 lbs) and has 40 liters of water. If we assume all 7 billion humans have 40 liters of body water (I know, an overestimation) then human bodies collectively have 280 billion liters of water in them. The oceans contain about 1,300,000,000,000 billion liters (1.3 billion km^3). That's something like 9 orders of magnitude difference.
There is a measurable amount of water stored in reservoirs but it's one of the more minor components of sea level. I'm not sure where we could put enough reservoirs to make a difference.
The way it appears to me is that the insurance companies would have put a vast amount of effort into stopping it dead if there was no bribe in it for them. Hillary took their side. Of course the entire thing under even the most extreme proposals was far less "socialist" than Nixon's suggested plan years earlier.
Both sides are to the right of Nixon these days and would call Eisenhower an outright communist. Rupublican Judges stay in the role long enough and the shift is happening so quickly that they look like Democrats before they retire.