When I was younger, I believed all we needed was to give people information to get a better grasp on reality. That was my optimism about the potential good of the internet: the ability to access a wealth of information.
Now that I'm older and have spent a lot of years reading discussion boards, my stance is people will predominantly gravitate towards sources that justify their position regardless of whether their source(s) have been wrong before.
Alas, it's true - people are not perfectly rational reasoning machines, because we aren't superintelligent with the ability to weigh every fact we've ever encountered at once. We rely on heuristics to get by.
But the imperviousness of obviously wrong beliefs in the face of what you consider rational evidence should not be taken as license to give up! Consider - if people tend to want to stick to their wrongness in the face of contradictory evidence, the wrongness still had to come from somewhere. All beliefs are caused by something, even if the cause would not meet a scientifically rigorous definition of "evidence". There's always logic in it, even if the logic isn't immediately apparent. For example, "Hard-code the beliefs of the people around you when young" and "Reject evidence that upends a large proportion of your worldview" are both highly logical heuristics that, incidentally, probably aren't nearly as likely to get you stuck in dysfunctional local attractors when attacking problems like "hungry tigers" as opposed to "gigascale global realpolitik".
All I'm saying is - don't be too cynical. At the end of the day, the truth still matters, and all we can do is keep plugging away at it. The wall is thick but not impenetrable, and we have come a long way already.
No, the vast majority of Americans think covid-19 is real. Vox had a poll saying it was in the area of 1%. The issue is many don't want to be forced to wear masks, which is dumb and selfish, but not what you are saying.
Meanwhile as of 2019, over 20% of Americans doubt climate change, a much more significant number. This is far too high in my opinion, but it is steadily improving.
About 34% of all Republicans say that the theory that the outbreak was intentionally planned is definitely or probably true.
> About a third of those who have heard this claim (36%) – a quarter of all U.S. adults – say that they think it is “definitely” (8%) or “probably” (28%) true.
You're correct that I overstated my case. I wasn't making a meaningful distinction between people who say the virus is fake, or not dangerous, or not wearing a mask, or not social distancing in a reasonable way.
Climate change is hard because nothing easy can be done. We would have to dramatically change our life style, world population would have to decrease.
Don't see a "trillion dollar financial interest", it's the lifestyle of you and me and also the media/politics which both avoid difficult questions (why e.g. allow/encourage migrants from countries with totally irresponsible population dynamics?).
This not by accident. There is a book everyone should know about: "Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming" written by science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway.
The bottom line is connection between deniers of dangers tobacco smoking, acid rain, DDT, ozone layer hole, and climate skepticism. Small number of core people and think tanks. Physicists like Fred Singer, Bill Nierenberg, Fred Seitz, ... The Heritage Foundation, George C. Marshall Institute,Competitive Enterprise Institute, ... with corporate backers that change with every issue.
I think you and GP are both presenting a very narrow and biased view here.
The thing is, there’s a huge propaganda machine behind climate change. Backed by Hollywood, politicians everywhere on the left, universities.. there have been lots of distorted and hyperbolic claims made over years and years that didn’t turn out to be true. Lots of politicians making extreme claims that are just obviously false. I’ve personally seen nearing the order of hundreds of exaggerated claims that fall apart if you look in any detail, especially on MSM news sites.
Tons of pressure is put on scientists to match the narrative (multiple Climate scandals over decades where scientists were blackballed for misalignment or caught colluding to fudge numbers to paint a picture they admit they are trying to paint).
Just this year you have two books being published by left leaning scientists who basically say climate change has become a force beyond itself. Both cite data heavily. Both were attacked heavily by the press, or ignored. One was a former activist and leader in the cause originally, used to get a lot of attention and now has his posts literally deleted from Facebook.
To me it’s like this: when you hear the “dumb Americans” going on about climate change and you can’t believe how dumb they have to be to be skeptics... what you need to realize is they saw a lot of smoke, less fire, and they basically are tired of the left puffing the flames of everything they touch. Sure, there’s probably fire there. But how much can we tell? Our universities, the media, a lot of core institutions are actually not trustworthy. Skepticism is not irrational in the face of that.
I’m sure a lot of them would come around to admit some portions of climate change are legit, but it would take some really careful accounting. But they are in their own way calling out what they see as a bigger and more dangerous phenomenon: the distortion of fact gathering and science itself towards political gain. It’s an unfortunate reality. And really it’s hard to argue that isn’t true.
For reference, I am absolutely not a climate denialist but I would say I’ve burst my bubble that it’s so black and white after carefully looking at a lot of research. The main posts are likely true, the models have consistently overestimated our impact, and we focus on the wrong things more often than the real harms.
I totally get why people would be skeptical. Even smart people who have been right in contrarian ways have said exactly what I’m saying (look at Thiel).
So to simplify it down to “stupid righties” is always an error.
I challenge you to present your best single source of evidence to support your argument.
After you have presented that, you are not allowed to come back with more evidence. It was what you consider the best and most rock solid. Something you hang your credibility.
Usually the opinion like yours is just 'general attitude' and some individual instances of scientific fraud that is not evidence of anything being consistently biased.
I'm not a climate change denier in any way but, did any of the predictions (the ones with dates and numbers) of Al Gore in "An inconvenient truth" become reality? There has been a non trivial amount of hyperbole going on in this subject.
Again, I'm making the claim that it's been exaggerated/politicized (to what degree is hard to tell, due to so many bad incentives). I can absolutely cite many cases of missed models, corruption[0] (btw if you disagree on this one, there are many more cases like this) and fear-mongering going from the IPCC to politicians to university research that's all been shown to be anywhere from misleading to outright fudge - but - it's not some single thing. So your desire for "one piece of evidence" is not the right way to discuss this. A case has to be made.
If you want a case, here's one of the books I mentioned [1]. It's not entirely perfect, but an example of how you can absolutely make a very valid, science-based attempt at a world-view that refutes many of the central tenets of modern climate change ideology.
Don't confuse me: carbon emissions are an important problem, one we need to solve. But you have decades of people like Gore to AOC to celebrities to even legit scientists, all on the left, who make claims like "we're X years from Y major catastrophe", and they end up wrong. Then you have corruption scandals, inaccurate models and stories of suppression of non-narrative-fitting data, and the democrats beating it over everyones heads constantly.
All I'm saying is this: it's very understandable that the Average Josephine on the right is skeptical. Any claim that says "the righties are dumb / purposefully ignorant" is missing an important piece of socio-cultural dynamics and rational game theory - having a distrust of an institution thats been intensely politicized is... fairly rational.
Here in Chicago we just had an episode where a white person was selling food by pushing around a little cooler like hispanic people typically do, and we all had to learn that only certain races can do certain types of jobs or else it's appropriation.
The killings thing has to be judged _per capita_ or else you get the wrong answer, and that of course make sense but the way you phrased it, it's tricky.
I think you have to remove the effects of childbearing, hours worked, and type of job to get the gender wage gap to show the real numbers, too.
But regardless, that's a question of fairness and/or government's social policy. Not something that should be reflected in your wage (which is the exchange for productive work for your employer) or otherwise a responsibility of your employer.
Lets analyse the crowd who we must convince. These are either executives with vested interests who will not be affected by the current crisis or poor and uneducated people who have very little faith in the government or the social system. After all these people have all some point in time needed help from the government which was denied. This is open knowledge that governments are lobbied to pass laws in the interests of corporations. So people tend to lose faith. Same with society. These people have seen that they had to work very hard in life to just scrape by whereas there are others (some very young people) who just coast by. People not believing in climate change is not the problem it is the symptom of a society with very high levels of income inequality and lesser access to tools that lift people out of poverty. The cost of education just keeps rising every year and most manufacturing jobs are gone in post industrial societies. Without the tools to better your life conditions and diminishing access to tools of life improvement, when others ask these people to listen to a warning, of course they refuse.
At this point, a lot of (maybe even most) skeptics don't believe in man-made climate change simply because they strongly dislike the most prominent speakers against climate change, because they often also have liberal/progressive ideas. They see Bill Nye with his rap about gender and think "that's who thinks we're causing climate change ? I'm not believeing in that." It seems like climate change is a right wing vs left wing debate when it shouldn't be.
Well that and Bill Nye's attempts to convince people of global warming have been totally unscientific, ranging from an "experiment" where he filled a sphere with CO2 and took the temperature, to literally igniting a globe and saying "the planet's on fucking fire".
Putting Nye aside, can anyone name an actually good public educator for climate change? I don't think I know of one that didn't go off the rails.
Then there's all the claims around climate change that simply turn out to be untrue. People said that polar bears were drowning because of global warming, yet the polar bear population isn't struggling to say the least. Glaciers were supposed to melt by now, and when they didn't, the signs that said they would were simply removed. Some cities and small islands were said to be at risk of sinking into the ocean by a decade ago, yet they remain dry. This doesn't even include some of the insane claims made by public servants.
I think that anthropogenic climate change is real, and a problem. But I don't think the average person is an idiot for distrusting what they're being told about it. They're regularly lectured by people who are wrong about climate change over and over again. Inversely to conservatives, most liberals I know don't actually understand science at all but treat it as a religion.
Public science communicators can start by no longer making predictions like "By 2020, there will be no more glaciers here." They've not proven to accurately predict anything at the decade-resolution, so they need to just stop doing it.
I'm not sure why you've chosen glacier forecasts to pick on. At least in aggregate they're one of the most predictable effects of climate change--look at this mass balance graph [0]. If public communicators said glaciers would be gone by 2020 (which I've never seen someone say) they were wrong, but the science behind it is clear and glaciers are on the way out.
> yet the polar bear population isn't struggling to say the least.
What do you mean, "to say the least"? The polar bear population has just barely remained stable since hunting was ended. They should be growing -populations are increasing in places that are cold enough- but because their range is shrinking quickly the bears are just being forced closer together instead of reproducing.
> Glaciers were supposed to melt by now, and when they didn't, the signs that said they would were simply removed.
You are specifically referring to Glacial national park; nobody is saying that about all glaciers because the 40m sea rise would be, uh, noticeable.
124 of the original 150 named glaciers in the park are gone. It's hard to see how that's really a failure. Inaccurate yes, but far from wrong. The fact that you see it as a boondoggle is due to messaging and sentiment, not because it was untrue in any important way.
> Some cities and small islands were said to be at risk of sinking into the ocean by a decade ago, yet they remain dry.
You started by talking about "public educators"... this claim originated with a 2003 pentagon report that was nonscientific and opened with the phrase "The scientists support this project, but caution that the scenario depicted is extreme in two fundamental ways. First, they suggest the occurrences we outline would most likely happen in a few regions, rather than on globally. Second, they say the magnitude of the event may be considerably smaller."
The report was very explicitly based on a scenario with no scientific justification- they basically said that the Younger Dryas event happened suddenly after a period of warming, so maybe something like that could happen again. Then they tried to estimate political ramifications. It has nothing to do with predicting warming, yet people and notably the press just ran fucking wild with it. It's lunacy.
> Public science communicators can start by no longer making predictions like "By 2020, there will be no more glaciers here."
While there are obvious failures of messaging, the vast majority of misinformation originates with bad actors. Small signs that you don't see unless you physically visit Glacier national park? Sure- bad messaging to a tiny population. National news about Europe being underwater, twisted from a thought experiment that was itself fully fabricated? Nothing to do with scientists or even popular science.
> What do you mean, "to say the least"? The polar bear population has just barely remained stable since hunting was ended. They should be growing -populations are increasing in places that are cold enough- but because their range is shrinking quickly the bears are just being forced closer together instead of reproducing.
From your very own link:
>> Although most of the world's 19 populations have returned to healthy numbers, there are differences between them. Some are stable, some seem to be increasing, and some are decreasing due to various pressures.
Polar bears overall are deemed "vulnerable". It's a bad thing because we'd like to see more polar bears, I suppose, but that's not even close to extinction. That's not to say I don't think they could go extinct in the next century. But there are plenty of polar bears, which is what someone who doesn't know better is going to read and then doubt climate change. The polar bear argument hasn't helped the climate change cause, except to embolden people who are already sold on it.
> You are specifically referring to Glacial national park; nobody is saying that about all glaciers because the 40m sea rise would be, uh, noticeable.
I don't think you've actually met many climate change deniers or skeptics.
When people in positions of authority forecast things beyond their ability, and then those forecasts turn out to be completely wrong, that's what people remember. The average person doesn't give a shit data and evidence. That stuff's boring! All they know is that yet another authority figure made an arrogant prediction that turned out to be wrong.
> 124 of the original 150 named glaciers in the park are gone. It's hard to see how that's really a failure. Inaccurate yes, but far from wrong. The fact that you see it as a boondoggle is due to messaging and sentiment, not because it was untrue in any important way.
Doesn't matter. The story was that yet another prediction about climate change was wrong. I know that you are intelligent enough to look at the numbers, but that's not how the average person thinks and that's not how climate change deniers are going to communicate their "evidence" to their followers.
This is why scientists and politicians making hard predictions is a horrible and destructive idea. If everyone was an intellectual, the situation might be different, but we're stuck trying to communicate the issues to non-intellectuals. If you say that "By 2050, there will be no more ice caps", and then it turns out 10% of the ice caps are still there by that point, people will say "Look, those scientists were wrong again!"
Do you understand?
> The report was very explicitly based on a scenario with no scientific justification- they basically said that the Younger Dryas event happened suddenly after a period of warming, so maybe something like that could happen again. Then they tried to estimate political ramifications. It has nothing to do with predicting warming, yet people and notably the press just ran fucking wild with it. It's lunacy.
Yes, for sure. That completely supports my point.
> While there are obvious failures of messaging, the vast majority of misinformation originates with bad actors. Small signs that you don't see unless you physically visit Glacier national park? Sure- bad messaging to a tiny population. National news about Europe being underwater, twisted from a thought experiment that was itself fully fabricated? Nothing to do with scientists or even popular science.
Then there's an assload of bad actors, and the vast majority of them are sanctioned by the mainstream media. And if this misinformation primarily originates by bad actors, then the scientific community has absolutely failed to communicate this to the public.
So your solution to bring together the left and right wing on climate change is nuclear power? Lets break down every level that is wrong on:
1. "Green people" are a tiny portion of the left wing and have little overlap with the two parties that actually matter in any way.
2. Right wing people are certainly not pro-nuclear, they're pro fossil fuels. You win virtually nobody new if every single democrat went 100% for nuclear.
3. Anti-nuclear people cross the political spectrum roughly evenly... conservatives hate it because it is essentially a government brainchild and because the government has such an interest in the byproducts.
4. People who want to actually address global warming (like Rep AOC) as opposed to simply being pro-nature ARE fans of nuclear. The Green New Deal now encourages nuclear power.
5. Nuclear power is not a magic bullet. It's more expensive than solar and wind. It has the same distribution issues as solar and wind. It requires batteries like solar and wind (although less seasonal storage). It's not because of public opposition, or regulations, or any nonsense like that, it's because nuclear power is fantastically complex and expensive to build. If it was cheap and easy Texas would be dotted with reactors, but instead they have wind turbines.
This whole "nuclear vs. renewables" thing is a relatively isolated scuffle between a minor but visible group of anti-nukes and a much larger but less invested pro-nuclear group that mistakes NIMBYs as the former and is generally low-knowledge on the topic. Enthusiasm for nuclear power is already widespread and generally unopposed. It is not a divisive issue between people who disagree about climate change. It is also not a significantly better solution to climate change than normal renewables.
The goal of climate change denialists is to deny climate change by any excuse necessary. If the hot button topic wasn't the existence of different gender identities, they'd find something else as a wedge issue.
