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audience to "celebrate!"
The only things missing were balloons and confetti descending from the rafters.
When public opinion on the big social and political issues changes, the trends tend
to be relatively gradual. Abrupt shifts, when they come, are usually precipitated by
dramatic events. Which is why pollsters were so surprised by what had happened
to perceptions about climate change in just four years. A 2007 Harris poll found
that 71 percent of Americans believed that the continued burning of fossil fuels
would alter the climate. By 2009 the figure had dropped to 51 percent. In June
201 1 the number was down to 44 percent — well under half the population. Similar
trends have been tracked in the U.K. and Australia. Scott Keeter, director of survey
research at the Pew Research Center for People & the Press, described the
statistics in the United States as "among the largest shifts over a short period of
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time seen in recent public opinion history."
The overall belief in climate change has rebounded somewhat since its 2010-1 1
low in the United States. (Some have hypothesized that experience with extreme
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weather events could be contributing, though "the evidence is at best very sketchy
at this point," says Riley Dunlap, a sociologist at Oklahoma State University who
specializes in the politics of climate change.) But what remains striking is that on
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the right-wing side of the political spectrum, the numbers are still way down.
It seems hard to believe today, but as recently as 2008, tackling climate change
still had a veneer of bipartisan support, even in the United States. That year,
Republican stalwart Newt Gingrich did a TV spot with Democratic
congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, then Speaker of the House, in which they pledged
to join forces and fight climate change together. And in 2007, Rupert Murdoch —
whose Fox News channel relentlessly amplifies the climate change denial
movement — launched an incentive program at Fox to encourage employees to buy
hybrid cars (Murdoch announced he had purchased one himself).
Those days of bipartisanship are decidedly over. Today, more than 75 percent
of self-identified Democrats and liberals believe humans are changing the
climate — a level that, despite yearly fluctuations, has risen only slightly since
2001. In sharp contrast, Republicans have overwhelmingly chosen to reject the
scientific consensus. In some regions, only about 20 percent of self-identified
Republicans accept the science. This political rift can also be found in Canada.
According to an October 2013 poll conducted by Environics, only 41 percent of
respondents who identify with the ruling Conservative Party believe that climate
change is real and human-caused, while 76 percent of supporters of the left-leaning
New Democratic Party and 69 percent of supporters of the centrist Liberal Party
believe it is real. And the same phenomenon has once again been documented in
Australia and the U.K., as well as Western Europe.
Ever since this political divide opened up over climate change, a great deal of
social science research has been devoted to pinpointing precisely how and why
political beliefs are shaping attitudes toward global warming. According to Yale's
Cultural Cognition Project, for example, one's "cultural worldview" — that would
be political leanings or ideological outlook to the rest of us — explains "individuals'
beliefs about global warming more powerfully than any other individual
characteristic." More powerfully, that is, than age, ethnicity, education, or party
affiliation.
The Yale researchers explain that people with strong "egalitarian" and
"communitarian" worldviews (marked by an inclination toward collective action
and social justice, concern about inequality, and suspicion of corporate power)
overwhelmingly accept the scientific consensus on climate change. Conversely,
those with strong "hierarchical" and "individualistic" worldviews (marked by
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opposition to government assistance for the poor and minorities, strong support for
industry, and a belief that we all pretty much get what we deserve) overwhelmingly
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reject the scientific consensus. The evidence is striking. Among the segment of
the U.S. population that displays the strongest "hierarchical" views, only 11
percent rate climate change as a "high risk," compared with 69 percent of the
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segment displaying the strongest "egalitarian" views.
Yale law professor Dan Kahan, the lead author on this study, attributes the tight
correlation between "worldview" and acceptance of climate science to "cultural
cognition," the process by which all of us — regardless of political leanings — filter
new information in ways that will protect our "preferred vision of the good
society." If new information seems to confirm that vision, we welcome it and
integrate it easily. If it poses a threat to our belief system, then our brain
immediately gets to work producing intellectual antibodies designed to repel the
unwelcome invasion.^
As Kahan explained in Nature, "People find it disconcerting to believe that
behavior that they find noble is nevertheless detrimental to society, and behavior
that they find base is beneficial to it. Because accepting such a claim could drive a
wedge between them and their peers, they have a strong emotional predisposition
to reject it." In other words, it is always easier to deny reality than to allow our
worldview to be shattered, a fact that was as true of die-hard Stalinists at the height
of the purges as it is of libertarian climate change deniers today. Furthermore,
leftists are equally capable of denying inconvenient scientific evidence. If
conservatives are inherent system justifiers, and therefore bridle before facts that
call the dominant economic system into question, then most leftists are inherent
system questioners, and therefore prone to skepticism about facts that come from
corporations and government. This can lapse into the kind of fact resistance we see
among those who are convinced that multinational drug companies have covered
up the link between childhood vaccines and autism. No matter what evidence is
marshaled to disprove their theories, it doesn't matter to these crusaders — it's just
the system covering up for itself.
This kind of defensive reasoning helps explain the rise of emotional intensity
that surrounds the climate issue today. As recently as 2007, climate change was
something most everyone acknowledged was happening — they just didn't seem to
care very much. (When Americans are asked to rank their political concerns in