Scientists Study How Non-Scientists Deny Climate Change (theguardian.com)

A new research paper suggest climate change opponents are "simulating coherence by conspiracism". Slashdot reader Layzej says the paper "examines this behavior at the aggregate level, but gives many examples where contradictory ideas are held by the same individual, and sometimes are presented within a single publication." From the paper: Claims that the globe "is cooling" can coexist with claims that the "observed warming is natural" and that "the human influence does not matter because warming is good for us". Coherence between these mutually contradictory opinions can only be achieved at a highly abstract level, namely that "something must be wrong" with the scientific evidence in order to justify a political position against climate change mitigation...

In a nutshell, the opposition to greenhouse gas emission cuts is the unifying and coherent position underlying all manifestations of climate science denial... Climate science denial is therefore perhaps best understood as a rational activity that replaces a coherent body of science with an incoherent and conspiracist body of pseudo-science for political reasons and with considerable political coherence and effectiveness.
"I think that people who deny basic science will continue to do so, no matter how contradictory their arguments may be," says one of the paper's authors, who suggests that the media should be wary of self-contradicting positions.

Comments

This isn't really that hard to understand

[grasshoppa]

The problem with climate science is that it's so difficult. The average person the street has little hope of understanding all the data and how it interacts. They can never, therefore, have confidence in the results being reported to them. I'm largely in the same boat, btw; despite on and off studying over the past several years, I still don't really have a grasp on how all the data ties together and consequently I don't have a high degree of confidence in the reported conclusions of others.

Given this, attacking on the basis of "CLIMATE CHANGE" is the absolutely worst approach. The ignorance of your target audience will prompt them to respond contrary to your goals. Instead focus should be placed on the specifics; clean air emissions, water discharge standards, ect... Why? Because these are things people can understand, and they are immediately relevant to them. I don't want to live next to a factory dumping shit into the air/water, and neither does anyone else. That should be how climate change is addressed; not on the large scale, but rather the personalized one.

Re:No they aren't denying it

[Black Parrot]

Climate Change is not a religious issue for those who "deny" it. (The other side, arguably yes...) You're confusing it with Evolution.

But interestingly, the "reasoning" and rhetoric of global warming denial is almost identical to that of evolution denial.

E.g., both promote the notion that they are up against a global conspiracy of scientists.

Re:It's Politics, Not Conspiracy

[MightyMartian]

Which is why science has built-in processes to deal with bias. It isn't perfect, and it can take time, but eventually fraud or bad science is caught.

And really, at this point, with so many streams of evidence for AGW, to deny that human-caused CO2 emissions are having a significant impact on global climate really is no different than denying that all life evolved from some common ancestor, or that eating high amounts of refined sugar is hazardous to your health, or that smoking cigarettes leads to cancer and lung disorders.

Re:No they aren't denying it

[MightyMartian]

There's precious little written evidence that can actually be linked to any contemporary of Jesus Christ. The Gospels are problematic, and the earliest of them can't be dated any earlier than decades after Christ's death, and the others appear to be rewrites of early versions, with inconsistenticies (like the two geneologies of Christ). The closest to a contemporary document is Josephus's writings, and when you get rid of the helpful "interpolations" of 2nd or 3rd century writers, you're left with what amounts to "there was a holy man named Jesus of Nazareth who had a number of followers, and was put to death by the Romans."

There's about as much evidence for Jesus healing the sick or raising the dead as there is for Thor causing thunder and lightning.

Re: No they aren't denying it

[silentcoder]

Climate science is entirely falsifiable - it just hasn't been falsified despite all the fortunes spent on trying to do so. Nobody has yet managed to do a real experiment that showed CO2 NOT acting as a greenhouse gas (that would falsify it). Nobody has yet found a single shred of evidence that disproves the theory - while there are thousands of independent sources of evidence that all support it, and nobody has yet come up with a better explanation for the observations than that offered by climate change theory.
Any of these things would:
1) Falsify the theory
2) Win you a nobel prize
3) Guarantee you tenure and an endless supply of grant money for the rest of your life at any academic institution of your choosing.

Basically EVERY incentive is to disprove climate change.

The failure of those trying to actually falsify something does not imply it is not falsifiable. It implies the theory is almost certainly correct.

At this stage, the most single most tested scientific theory in the history of science is so unlikely to be false - that we will almost certainly never see it replaced, modified and gradually improved - yes, replaced probably not. At least not for the next several centuries. Because at this point the only thing that could do so is an observation that actually does not fit the theory. It took 500 years for technology to give us a measuring device that could pick up the things that didn't quite follow Newton, and I'd say it will take about twice that long before something fundamentally alters climate science.