By the way, how come none of the groups have more than 50% worrying a great deal about climate change? Seems to me that liberals as well as conservatives are failing to take the cue from mainstream media to see the problem as overwhelming.
November 14, 2017
Why does more education have the opposite effect on Democrats and Republicans when it comes to climate change?
Look at this graph, which accompanies the NYT article "The More Education Republicans Have, the Less They Tend to Believe in Climate Change":
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Difference in the nature of the education.
Republicans would have a much higher proportion of technical training.
Democratic education stats are also badly skewed by a vast number of school teachers.
I think more educated conservatives have learned to be very very skeptical of liberal panics.
Less educated Republicans still put some trust in the NY Times and CNN. More educated Democrats understand that "climate change" is Progressive glamour for bigger and more powerful government.
Maybe because more educated liberals are more affected by peer pressure? Is peer pressure—the wish to be well thought of by one's friends and colleagues—more powerful on the left?
Democratic education stats are also badly skewed by a vast number of school teachers.
I'd like to see what the numbers look like without the teachers and the Angry Studies degrees.
The conservatives are lovers of reality. They can deal with whatever the truth is and go on from there.
But the Progs insist on living in a Disney World Propaganda Land's narrative that empowers them to rule of the world. There is no other choice, you see. And turn in your guns, NOW!
More real education leads to a better understanding of science.
Knowing how science is supposed to be done (for example, when you publish a paper, you must give anyone who wants it all the tools & data behind your paper, so they can replicate, or disprove, your results. Except in climate "science" (see ClimateGate)), educated Republicans look at the follies of the climate "scientists" and say "that's politics, not science."
I'd go with the type of education the conservatives have. Electrical Engineering vs. Women's Studies, Chemistry vs. Art History, Mathematics vs. Music. And follow up job history after that, where wrong decisions can be measured by results. Things that don't work or blow up or fall down that can't be fixed with another group meeting to assuage bad feelz.
Fox Butterfield, Is That You?
You're not supposed to believe in science. Science is demonstrated, not felt.
Try expanding the data to include the type of higher education.
Graduates with STEM degrees tend to be Republicans.
Graduates with liberal arts degrees tend to be Democrats.
Fabi said...
You're not supposed to believe in science. Science is demonstrated, not felt.
Fabi wins the thread
"Maybe because more educated liberals are more affected by peer pressure? Is peer pressure—the wish to be well thought of by one's friends and colleagues—more powerful on the left?"
I think this is plausible given the culture is of the left and being an educated Republican means swimming against the current in academia. However the implication that follows is that belief in climate change is more about cultural peer pressure than about science (which is true, but contrary to the claims).
Just spitballing here, but it might have something to do with conservatives studying fields that will provide a real word job (engineering, physics, et al) whereas liberals study the "feelz" like sociology or journalism. The former requires analysis and critical thinking.
Possibly because we read more. Did you know some German climate scientists now said that yes, we are in global cooling, and predicted global warming from I think 2050 to 2130 then global cooling to 2200?
"Mainstream media" has been in a multi-year feeding frenzy on this topic. You can't turn a corner without someone saying something about climate change, which was renamed from "global warming" when too many odd climate events turned out to involve abnormally cold temperatures.
I'm a tolerably well-educated conservative, and here's my view:
(1) The climate has changed many times, without any human involvement at all. There's a reason that we don't see all of North America covered in glaciers, and it didn't start with industrialization in the mid-19th c. There was the Medieval Warm Period; there was the Little Ice Age. For that matter, there was the Big Ice Age. Remember that one? How did prehistoric humans manage to carbon-dioxide themselves out of that?
(2) As Bjorn Lomborg has argued, we could expend incredible amounts of money to delay the rise in temperature by one degree C by six years, or, on the other hand, we could supply clean drinking water to every person on the planet for the same money. I know which I'd rather see.
So those are my takeaways. There's far too much evidence of non-anthropogenic climate change, and anyway there are much better uses we could make of the money even if the theory were true.
You mean my doctorate in pre-Columbian lesbian interpretive dance doesn't trump a masters in quantitative physics?
I will be blunt: climate change is a complete scam. My short analysis is that it is a prediction about events in the distance future. It is based upon flawed models that have been wrong for 30 years. It is all about getting money to the “right” people. fields and industries. Think Al Gore, Elon Musk and Michael Mann at Penn State. It isn’t science at all. Follow the money. Solar and wind is twice as expensive as oil and gas. Tesla would never have been able to raise money without the federal tax credit.
I can pick apart this scam because of my undergrad Logic class. Basic critical thinking points out what a scam this is.
Below is from SCOTUSblog and it from a cert petition. The premise is that the government must do certain things to protect animals in the distant future because their habitat will be destroyed. Pure speculation.
“issue: Whether, when the government determines that a species that is not presently endangered will lose its habitat due to climate change by the end of the century, the National Marine Fisheries Services may list that species as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.”
The sun has a lot to do with it, who wooda thunk?
Republican education deals with facts and truth. Democratic education deals with emotions and feelings.
Man in PA:
I have both (undergrad in mechanical engineering, grad in musicology). Which side am I supposed to be on? And, Gospace, I was on my high school math team at the same time that I was a violinist at Juilliard. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
It helps that the more skeptical posts about global warming / climate change are found on sites Democrats won't hear about or go near.
Once you read books like "The Whole Story of Climate Change" by Kirsten Peters, or "Cool It" by Bjorn Lomborg, you start seeing climate change was a money grab and moral panic.
When you see Gore's mansions and DiCaprio & Co. jetting off to Java to tell us to stop flying, you wonder who's zooming whom.
You read the emails from the East Anglia climate group, particularly the ones from the programmer charged with compiling a clean set of temperature records complaining that the data is too messed up to be trusted. You see climate scientists refusing to release the raw data or explain their adjustments, you naturally wonder if they're doing real science.
Put it another way: Whenever I see the loons try to argue that the moon landings never happened, their opponents treat them with respect. They take apart their arguments and discuss the science behind it. The 9/11 Truthers get their arguments debated and facts raised and discussed.
But climate change skeptics? They're told to shut up or risk being jailed. For reasons.
"Angry Studies degrees."
Not that many of these, in truth.
But check out the data -
http://www.economicmodeling.com/2012/01/11/humanities-or-stem-majors-looking-at-the-most-popular-degrees-for-us-students/
Of all Bachelors degrees (2010) -
Business, Management, Marketing, And Related Support Services 19.70%
Health Professions And Related Programs 12.70%
Liberal Arts And Sciences, General Studies And Humanities 9.60%
Education 9.20%
Social Sciences 5.20%
Psychology 4.00%
Visual And Performing Arts 3.80%
Engineering 3.50%
Biological And Biomedical Sciences 3.20%
Communication, Journalism, And Related Programs 2.70%
Computer And Information Sciences And Support Services 2.70%
Homeland Security, Law Enforcement, Firefighting And Related Protective Services 2.60%
English Language And Literature/Letters 2.00%
Public Administration And Social Service Professions 1.90%
Legal Professions And Studies 1.90%
Multi/Interdisciplinary Studies 1.80%
Engineering Technologies And Engineering-Related Fields 1.60%
History 1.30%
Parks, Recreation, Leisure, And Fitness Studies 1.20%
Physical Sciences 1.10%
Foreign Languages, Literatures, And Linguistics 1.00%
…
Area, Ethnic, Cultural, Gender, And Group Studies 0.40%
I suspect that more years education correlates positively with confidence in making such judgments, so whatever your leanings, more education will tend (statistically) to strengthen them.
But since the number of people whose education is directly relevant to climate data, physics, and modelling, and who then devote their careers to doing exactly that is vanishingly small, it's really mostly a matter of psychology. The finding that more education tends to make Republicans more skeptical is no more odd than that it makes Democrats more gullible (hah!, my leanings revealed).
Scott Adams has offered valuable insights in this.
It's easier to spot the errors as a conservative because the global warming fantasy was designed to appeal to anti-industrial socialists. We are not the intended audience: this narrative was written for someone else.
What's amazing is that it persists despite no meaningful predictive accuracy and no meaningful improvement and evidence of direct data manipulation (ie fraud). It's persistence is a marker for the corruption of science.
"The sun has a lot to do with it, who wooda thunk?"
Wrong.
The sun is cold. Obviously space is cold, so it's impossible for the sun, on the other side of space, to be hot. The heat of the earth comes from teh core and it's extracted because of magnetism re direct positioning re the sun, i.e. during the day.
Also, the earth is flat.
That's how little baby Jesus' pops made it, just ask any well educated, church-y R about this flim flam that's called science. Then you'll know where this polling comes from.
Duh.
Jonathan Haidt has published papers on this kind of thing. People tend to answer these sorts of questions as a way of belief signaling. They're showing which tribe they're in. The details of the particular question isn't the point.
STEM vs B.S.Ed
I am an over educated right winger. I have engineered hundreds of deals through the decades and many of them were done with some reliance on financial models. The real estate models attempted to forecast the behavior of a single asset in a single industry in a specific town in a specific location having a specific size and a specific customer base. The variables had to do with new competition and the health of the local economy and the demand characteristics for the product being offered whether it was office, industrial or hospitality space. The models were never ever correct beyond the first year or two. We could run models showing IRRs of 15% or 28% with one or two excel cells being tweaked with a single number. Vacancy down a few points and up goes the IRR. Rents grow slightly better and up goes the IRR. The trick of the professional is not to succumb to the temptation to make decisions based on models or emotional attachment to the prospective transaction. The complexity of the deal models is dwarfed a trillion times over by the complexity of climate models which are reliant on millions of data entries by hundreds of human hands. It is preposterous to think they can be correct to any degree requiring urgent action.
By the way, I don't understand how an article can discuss the topic without mentioning Haidt's work. There have been plenty of polls on this topic before, always with the same result. Conservatives are not unconcerned about climate change because they are ignorant. Liberals are not concerned because they are knowledgeable.
Michael makes a great point: model outcomes are sensitive to parameters that have to be estimated rather than measured. CO2 forcing is the critical global warming parameter and a slight adjustment erases all the predicted climate change.
Gospace and Bill Peschel have it nailed.
I can't add more.
"Seems to me that liberals as well as conservatives are failing to take the cue from mainstream media to see the problem as overwhelming."
The denizens of the mainstream media can't differentiate y = x, yet we're supposed to take our cue from them?
One the R side, more education means critical thinking skills and an ability to detect BS when we see it.
On the D side, more education means they know its BS but they're hoping to sling it at the walls and make it stick for all the simpletons.
The fact that the dim bulb that wrote the article, and presumably considers itself 'educated' is surprised that well educated conservatives aren't willing to believe in 'consensus' is really all you need to know about the differences in types of education.
Of course the headline is fake news. Believe in and worry about are not synonymous.
It all depends on what the meaning of "a great deal" is. A great deal compared to what? On what grounds?
What is the ideal climate, oh alarmists, change from which should worry me "a great deal"?
Most Conservative men spend a lot of time outdoors usually working, and we've all noticed that nothing is changing with the climate. Some days it's warmer, and some other days it's colder, like it's been since the beginning of recorded time.
For Dems, this chart shows to them that they are obviously correct. They are the smart ones.
As the world gets richer and as technology advances we will be more able to adapt to climate change. Once you realize this you worry less.
The coolest of the questions was a particular question when the highest ed libs and highest ed cons moved together re their POVs. I.e., they both understood that poor people don't pay too much in taxes.
IMHO, the sorta folks that would make the best decisions re governance are the so-called libs who understand that poor folks are moochers v the job creators, and these libs should also know that unrestrained job creators are moochers too, in their own ways.
There's a lot of facile causes we can throw out, but it's probably the effect found on motivated reasoning by the Cultural Cognition folks at Yale.
Basically, all people discount evidence against their beliefs or biases. But smart/educated people are capable of more elaborate justifications for this, and so are more resistant to the appeal to authority that is encased in the term "science". Smart and educated people are harder to convince of things counter to their worldview. Only dummies cave when evidence is presented, and then only to the degree that they trust the presenter.
I think that anti-de Sitter space has caught a head cold.
I know people who are hypnotized by the cult of climate panic.
Yeah sure the climate is changing, stuff melts, stuff re-freezes, ice ages, warming periods....
The man-made stuff comes down to population. At some point the earth will take care of that.
Michelle Dulak Thomson said...
Man in PA:
I have both (undergrad in mechanical engineering, grad in musicology). Which side am I supposed to be on? And, Gospace, I was on my high school math team at the same time that I was a violinist at Juilliard. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
And you have bad feelz? So you believe in catastrophic global warming cause by man and we have to take drastic action? Your degree combination is, shall we say, extremely rare.
Living in the loon land of California, I find quite amazing the pervasive liberal group think, reflected in every major newspaper and electronic media outlet, in which nothing outside of "progressive" shibboleths is ever seen, must less questioned. This capacity for mass self-hypnosis is worth studying because we all have it, and at least I live in a huge laboratory where this particular hallucination can be examined on a large scale. (It shocks and impresses me that there are "Republican clubs" on campuses like Berkeley and UCLA.)
Victor Davis Hanson's "Frenzy" article today addresses this phenomenon; a persistent player in keeping this stirred up is our own green religious fanatic (trained by the Jesuits, no less) governor Jerry Brown. How this fever will break is anybody's guess.
"IMHO, the sorta folks that would make the best decisions re governance are the so-called libs ..."
Surprise, ADSS is that sorta folk who thinks s/he would govern best.
Parameters in models don't necessarily replace data, they replace complex physics.
The global temperature data has been independently verified and shows an increase.
The models run too hot.
The IPCC and NOAA do not predict catastrophe.
Being very worried about climate change is not in line with the 97% consensus.
The whole climate change hysteria, where the left fears environmental collapse while the right fears economic collapse, is a great tool to keep the plebs occupied and fighting amongst themselves while the one tenth of one percent continues to rob us all blind.
buwaya nailed it on the first comment. Also, Democrats are more likely to ask, "What do you feel about this?" while Republicans are more likely to ask, "What do you think about this?" Climate change belief is feeling-based.
It may be the next thought that is important. Ok, what next? For a Democrat, become an activist, get paid well to research the subject, prime regulator potential. For a republican, ok, make ac and refrigeration cost prohibitive, take cars away as a transportation option, make everything more expensive, subsidize obviously losing propositions (where is the power supposed to come from for election card? Coal).
One side relies much more on the Argument from Authority than the other...and likes it that way.
Althouse said ...
By the way, how come none of the groups have more than 50% worrying a great deal about climate change?
Because they will be dead before the worst kicks in and no body cares what happens to everyone else once they are dead. Many may even prefer for things to go to hell after they've gone.
Perhaps Republicans are older. I'm older, and I've lived through any number of Armageddons and Apocalypses. This new Armageddon doesn't seem that scary. At least I can wear shorts and a t shirt for the end of days. The crisis of capitalism, nuclear winter, ozone hole, population bomb, exhaustion of our natural resources,.....Fortunately, Trump will trigger a widespread nuclear war that will kill most of us so the global warming issue is moot.
This article is supposed to be an opinion piece?
It's a mental health issue, worrying about something that has no effect on your life and and over which you have no control.
Republicans are just better at recognizing propaganda when they see it.
To summarize a very complex topic - the satellite data shows no warming, but the oceans ARE warming.
My theory, having gone down this rabbit hole, is that the oceans have a natural cycle that has very little to do with CO2.
STEM versus not.
What is really disturbing is the unwillingness of the Left to be happy about the success of humanity. We've had numerous predictions from the Left about how awful things were going to be going to be in the future since at least the first go around of the Progressives.
In fact, there are more humans than ever before. The levels of worldwide poverty and hunger are at all time lows. The standard of living of humanity as a whole is rising...often to a great degree in the developing world.
The left simply cannot celebrate these facts. They require looming disaster to justify larger and more powerful government.
Michelle Dulak Thomson,
For that matter, there was the Big Ice Age.
Pay attention Michelle, that "Big Ice Age" is not the Big Ice Age, but merely the last glaciation peak within the current Ice Age. There have been twenty some of them occurring on a regular cycle over the last 2¾ million years.
For that matter, the cycle is constant, though perhaps not so dramatically noticeable when the earth's climate is at its normal, warmer non-ice age level.
Well, Montana climate is changing. We used to have entire months when the temps didn't go above zero. It was great for keeping away the riffraff.
That's not to say I think we can do anything about it.
Because they will be dead before the worst kicks in and no body cares what happens to everyone else once they are dead. Many may even prefer for things to go to hell after they've gone.
après moi le déluge, eh?
"the so-called libs who understand that poor folks are moochers" Very few of those in the US, which makes the American left fundamentally dishonest. Not so the Europeans: they make the poor pay too.
In some ways, it's the biggest difference in political cultures. Here, the left just games the system to achieve prog power. There, solidarity means everybody gets but everybody also pays, albeit at different levels--which means the left has to take responsibility. (Not that they always use it wisely, of course.)
Because they will be dead before the worst kicks in and no body cares what happens to everyone else once they are dead. Many may even prefer for things to go to hell after they've gone.
11/14/17, 5:23 PM
That must be it. None of those people have children or grandchildren or nieces or nephews or if they do, they want their descendants to suffer after they're gone.
That seems logical.
Gospace,
And you have bad feelz? So you believe in catastrophic global warming cause[d] by man and we have to take drastic action? Your degree combination is, shall we say, extremely rare.
You must not have read my longer comment above, wherein I say that (1) we don't know what causes climate change, except that we do know it's not solely us; and (2) whatever money it would take to make even a small difference in climate change (Bjorn Lomborg's estimate is delaying the rise in global temperature by one degree C by six years) could be put to much better use. His example is giving clean drinking water to every person on the planet.
Sorry, all the rest of you, for repeating that, but Gospace needed to read it.
As for my degree combination, yes, it's unusual, but the general confluence of music and math isn't. At UC/Berkeley, the UCB Symphony consisted by and large of science and engineering students. Our principal second violinist at the time graduated and went to work for Bell Labs -- while also taking lessons at the Manhattan School of Music. Another close friend dropped out abruptly from his course of study in biochemistry, and also went to Manhattan, and thence to Lisbon, where I think he's still principal violist in a chamber orchestra.
There are exceptions -- I can think of a now-famous historian who used to be in my section, for one -- but mostly musicians are geeks. Classical musicians, I mean. Can't speak to people in other genres.
Anyway, part of my dual-degree story is that I got a fellowship to study for a year abroad from the Music Dept., and the other part is that I got a boost from Richard Taruskin, from whom I'd taken an undergraduate class and to whom I would run excitedly with new discoveries, as that a moment from Shostakovich's 14th Quartet is briefly recalled in his 15th. My now-husband was horrified when I told him of such things. I mean, Richard Taruskin! I can honestly say that I didn't know enough to be scared shitless, and a good thing too.
I disagree that it is STEM vs liberal art majors. I work in technology and I rarely meet anyone who is a conservative.
BTW - Only 73% of democrats agree that preventing terrorism is very important? WTF?
Bill Peschel,
"When you see Gore's mansions and DiCaprio & Co. jetting off to Java to tell us to stop flying, you wonder who's zooming whom."
It's like this: If they cut their carbon footprints to zero tomorrow, it wouldn't make a particle of difference as long as everyone else refuses to listen to them. So why should they accept massive restrictions on their way of life, which incidentally will hinder their efforts to help the world, when the people creating the problem won't?
Interestingly, they and their allies consider this logic a criminally negligent cop-out when used to defend the US pulling out of the Paris Accords.
ARM, 5:23:
So you're saying we're all Keynesians now?
BTW - Only 73% of democrats agree that preventing terrorism is very important? WTF?
Well for some of them it's a profession.
This is confusing cause and effect. Democrats are Democrats because they have been indoctrinated to follow authority; more "education" = more indoctrination. Republicans think for themselves; more "education" = more education.
Pay attention Michelle, that "Big Ice Age" is not the Big Ice Age, but merely the last glaciation peak within the current Ice Age
The current ice age is called the Quaternary. Our current interglacial is called the Holocene. All of human history and civilization has occurred within it. In fact it is my belief that the Holocene caused civilization to come about.
Agriculture was developed a couple of thousand years within the Holocene, as the warming began to take effect. Agriculture allowed the production of surplus and required being stationary. The surplus led to specialization. This led to trade. The stationary part led to cities. (civilization) Then came writing and history.
JPS said...
So you're saying we're all Keynesians now?
We are all going to be dead in the long run. I have been looking to buy a plot up in the mountains of Vermont, that shouldn't flood.
Fabi said...
"You're not supposed to believe in science. Science is demonstrated, not felt."
Nonsense. There is no possible way to demonstrate that the past and present will always predict the future. They may have done in the past, but so what? Every second is a miracle. To think otherwise is superstition, a superstition that appears to have been inculcated in us by evolution.
The question raised big our hostess was the subject of a research paper by Dan Kahan. See Kahan, D.M., Peters, E., Wittlin, M., Slovic, P., Ouellette, L.L., Braman, D. & Mandel, G. "The polarizing impact of science literacy and numeracy on perceived climate change risks." Nature Climate Change 2, 732-735 (2012).
JPS,
"Massive restrictions on their way of life" would be zero restrictions on my way of life. Gore has a MegaMansion and DiCaprio can private-jet his way all over the planet, because, they're against climate change. Meanwhile, I live in a house a lot smaller than Gore's, have never flown in a private jet, and haven't, incidentally, gone to climate conferences in Bali. Or anywhere else. Also, I don't drive; I walk. When I don't take the bus. (Correction: Even when I do take the bus, it takes me 25 minutes on foot to get to it.)
There is one and only one way to be against climate change, which is to stop buying things that contribute to climate change. Unfortunately for Gore and DiCaprio, those things include jet fuel and power for your house.
Education vs. indoctrination??
Anybody with an undergraduate degree that
included serious math could see that the hockey stick was bullshit. Climategate just put the cherry on top.
"
We are all going to be dead in the long run. I have been looking to buy a plot up in the mountains of Vermont, that shouldn't flood"
I will sell you some, but there will be an impending flood premium.
Vermont strikes me as a great place to be dead.
Because Republicans study engineering, surgery and law while dems , literature, psychiatry and modern dance
As a legal matter, a cause of action for fraud cannot be based upon a future event. That’s a key part in understanding the nature of this scam.
Early on in the con game Al Gore, James Hanson, Bill McKibben and others set a date certain for a disaster event. Prince Charles famously made this mistake. So when the date passed and the world didn’t end, they were exposed for the con men they are. All of this is of record.
The Greens have gotten smarter about the con game and so now they put Doomsday out to the middle of this century or 2100.
Please contact me in Heaven in 2100 and let me know if Nebraska burned up and NYC is underwater.
Maybe Conservatives get an education to learn how to think and advance in the world by the power of their efforts, talent, intellect, and sweat.
Maybe Others attend universities to get 'woke' and learn the code - for the easy path to entitlement.
Members of the collective, cults, etc. defer to the judgment of the minority leaders, mortal gods, etc.
Because educated Republicans understand what evidence is as opposed to group think.
Too many other things to worry about a great deal.
"Stephen Hawking says Donald Trump could turn Earth into planet like Venus with 250C and sulphuric acid rain."
The solution: Send Trump on a spaceship to Venus to check to see if Venus would make a good place for a Trump casino and golf course. The taxpayers should gladly fund the one-way trip. The good news is that the mean surface temperature on Venus is 462 °C, so Hawking's vision of earth in the future is still a lot cooler than Venus.
Vermont strikes me as a great place to be dead.
It's as good as anyplace.
tim in vermont said...
It's as good as anyplace.
I think you are being too modest on behalf of your home state.
Have a client with a PhD from CalTech in some really difficult (for most of us) scientific field doing research. For him all the global warming stuff is just so much noise.
So there.
I know that during previous interglacials, my property would have been undersea. I can't imagine that eventually, it won't happen again when this series of ice ages comes to an end, and the planet heats back up to its norm over billions of years.
AReasonableMan said...
Vermont strikes me as a great place to be dead.
Why don't you give it a try?
I agree with the majority: STEM graduate degree holders are more skeptical/analytic than social studies/grievance studies/humanities majors when it comes to that "sciency stuff."
I suspect the differences between the two groups would be perfectly replicated by a graph comparing "passed undergraduate college calculus, molecular biology, physics, and organic chemistry" versus "never took those courses."
AllenS wrote: I think that anti-de Sitter space has caught a head cold.
Logically impossible.
If one is interested in global warming, but not sure where to start, try this hypothetical. In the year 1900 a volcano opened up on the equator, and spewed forth, all by its lonesome, slowly but surely, all the exhaust from every vehicle that was manufactured from 1900 on. If you were not interested before, think of it as a game. If such a volcano were to exist, how many people would even know this volcano exists? Just the professors, or almost everybody, or something in between? Well, what if the volcano waited and every 10 years spewed forth, in four or five days, all the - to be crude - particulate and vapor matter that all the vehicles of the world had spewed forth for the last 10 years? Those old enough to remember the Pinatubo sunsets should have an idea how many Pinatubos a decade of world-wide fossil fuel consumption equals. Do similar hypotheticals for biodiversity, desertification, runaway GMO effects, and general stupidification of not only land mammals but also of the general replacement of smart sea creatures by relatively moronic sea creatures (the jellyfish of the formerly jellyfishfree fjords is a good place to start). If any of these scenarios seem potentially problematic, perhaps you might want to sponsor an intelligent young student who may be the mitigation engineer who, 200 hundred years from now, will have his picture on postage stamps and currency.
College has become a conflict between education and leftist indoctrination. If you come out of college with a degree and are a Republican despite that, it is very likely that you have good reasoning skills and a distaste for leftist causes. Given how shady the global warming/climate change gang are as far as science goes, it's a glorious nexus of "I don't like those people" and "this objectively does not make sense."
As for the Democrats, the difference looks like noise to me. 45% vs. 50% is probably in the margin of error.
I know as much about climate science as the average "liberal" knows about economics. (Yup, that little.) But if you caught someone with his hand in your pocket, trying to lift your wallet, and he told you the world was about to end, would you be inclined to believe him? Exactly. That's my reaction to "liberals" and other statists lecturing me about ecology. Even if they're sincere and well-intentioned, they're still The Gang That's Wrong About Everything.
William Chadwick - I am extremely liberal on GMO and biodiversity issues, and on almost all other issues (not all, of course) as much, or much more conservative than anyone who posts here -( even N.N., who has never said anything fundamentally sound on the issue of contraception (Griswold, my young friend N.N., was wrongly decided)) - on almost every other topic. In fact, I am almost the platonic ideal of a conservative. And yes, "Global warming" as C student Gore and jetsetting actresses describe it is of course "this stupid war and that bastard Nixon" level rhetoric. Still, that being said, there are many many clever people out there building cleverly built machines the side effects of which (tragedy of the commons) are potentially Pinatuboesque and exponentially worse for this world, or, if you are classically inclined, there are lots of agricultural slash and burn shortcuts that have side effects which are just as powerful as the Roman Empire-era devastation (including salting) of the fertile fields of Libya and much of the rest of North Africa, which are still to this day tenuous lands with little productive agriculture. It is not, to me, a conservative/liberal issue. That being said, Why do we still use dimes (Mimi Alford)? Billions and billions of dimes, and millions of us with issues with unprosecuted but prolific sexual predators, and the simple solution of changing the unpleasant face on the dimes has almost never been broached! We need to be informed, and serious, if we are capable of being informed and serious.
Progressives are expected to appreciate art, especially abstract and dada post-peri modern conceptual art. Of course, they don't understand it, but know they must like it and dream up some wine-snob cliches to receive a knowing nod from another clueless twat.
Conservatives tend to actually like representative art of which Norman Rockwell is their type locality. Unlike progressives, conservatives are expected to hate abstract and other forms of modern art. Of course, they don't understand it, but know they must be disgusted it and dream up some down-home set of commentary to receive a knowing nod from another clueless twat.
The fact is that art has a very complex and somewhat contradictory set of rules that must be honored to create a pleasing piece. The rules are based on natural mathematics, odd numbers and human psychology. It is also a fact that to create great abstract art, it requires a significantly higher skill set than representational art.
The best representational art is often quite abstract to create the allusion of 4 dimensions and bright sunlight. It's essentially a mapping problem.
The problem with global warming is that the consensus scientists are Thomas Kinkade and Jeff Koons types who can mass produce simplistic schlock for punters while the highly abstract problem requires scientists that can solve problems like Velasquez, Van Gogh, and Klimt.
John Smith Smith: if you are really interested in educating yourself about global warming and climate, check out:
https://scienceofdoom.com/roadmap/
I recommend starting at the beginning
https://scienceofdoom.com/2009/11/22/temperature-history/
https://scienceofdoom.com/roadmap/ghosts-of-climates-past/
Howard: thanks. That is a great resource ( I wish the web site was a little bit less on the stamp collector side, though. Just saying. I am actually sort of amused that you condescended to me - that happens all too infrequently - well, since you don't know me, I don't know how I can accurately describe why. Can you point out for me a site that describes the difference between how Kolmogorov, for example, saw the numbered world and the actual numbered world? If you can do that, feel free to consider that you understand.
For the record, Rockwell is not an artist, he is (was, I guess) an ambitious autistic mirror with no genuine affection for us (his fellow human beings)- (as an artist) (but who knows how much fun he was around the breakfast table, or at Thanksgiving) - as I said, with no real observable affection for us, for real people. Sure, Rockwell, once or twice, for the record, reminds the observer of what it might be like to care about other people, but that was an accident (perhaps he had an extra glass of shoplifted champagne - who knows, the America of his day is another country).
Also for the record, I would say the same of Tolstoy and Hemingway and Fitzgerald. And, most of the time, even about by beloved Dickens and the inimitable Shakespeare. Life, as you said, is complicated. The natural world is set at something like a 500 IQ rating - at a minimum - and most of us - including the young men and women who write and comment at the website you condescendingly referred me to - are working at something like, even helping each other out, a 200 rating. Sad, but true.
All that being said, I was, in fact, very impressed with the website you referenced, and hope nothing I said here would be taken as an inference that I was not deeply impressed. A little too stamp collectorish, I stand by that, but I would say the same of most verses of Homer and most drawings of Michelangelo. Maybe I have no idea what I am talking about (but I Remember, perfectly, at least one Mount Pinatubo sunset, so there's that). Hey, why didn't you notice that I mentioned Mimi Alford? Have you never paid for anything with a dime?
Just trying to make you laugh. Hope it did not come off as obnoxious (dread word!). I am not even good at long division. One hopes for the best.
Seriously, a real scientist would see a 4 number number - lets say 7235, and than another 4 number number - lets say 3557 - and think - I could do long division with those two numbers in my sleep! I look at them and think nothing like that. Well, I recognize that one number is bigger than the other, but even back in fourth grade I did not know why anyone would be able, without a hint, to know which one you divide from the other, if one is told that one should be doing long division. (I am a big fan of prime number statistics, though, we all like what we like and disregard the rest - wake me up in the middle of the night and I can tell you in the first couple of seconds whether the first prime triple after 1,000 is more or less interesting than the first prime triplet after 10, 000, or 100,000. Who knows why people choose to make friends the way they do? Hamlet was a good play but says nothing about that question, so from that point of view it is a lousy play.)
Democrats know it is bunk as well, but the edjumicated ones know that it gets them in with the cool kids. The edjumicated republicans know they can never get in with the cool kids so they can speak the truth.
"For him all the global warming stuff is just so much noise."
That is, of course, another unremarked problem with AGW/AGCC theology - they are out in the statistical noise. For the terrestrial (non-satellite) temperature records, they are essentially taking maybe several thousand daily high and low temperature readings from around the world, averaged together (which is typically statistically invalid here - because their distribution isn't statistically normal) to reflect average temperatures throughout 24 hour periods, then interpolated to cover the entire surface of the planet, despite the readings being far from uniformly distributed. Throughout much of the relevant time frame, measurements were, at best, within maybe a degree or so. And after a lot of massaging, you get fractions of a degree accuracy? Most anyone with serious engineering or hard science training would (or at least should) see that there is an unresolvable numerical significance or error problem. They are trying to identify fractions of a degree differences when the data is probably cumulatively accurate (after multiplying through the error terms) to worse than +/- 10 degrees. Probably shouldn't be that surprised that a lot of the early "climate scientists" pushing AGW (and so prominent in Climategate) were tree ring counters, who weren't constrained in their work with worrying about significant digits.
The whole climate change nonsense is brought about by very narrow-minded people who for some reason or other think climate is supposed to be rather unchanging and the ideal climate just happens to be what recently was - sort of reminiscent of the medieval attitude that the earth was the center of the universe, or perhaps a variant of the Tale of Two Cities attitude of "what is is right, and therefore any change must be bad."
Something has to explain not only why global temperatures plunged far enough at points in the past to cover large areas of land with glaciers and drop the sea level far enough to create a land bridge to Russia, but also what caused temperatures to rise far enough to melt all that ice and raise the sea level many feet. We know it wasn't people, and these effects dwarf anything AGW alarmism is claiming.
Meanwhile, this was one of the coolest summers in recent memory, lacking a lot of the typical humidity and high temperatures (it never once broke 90 all summer). So cool in fact that the highest temperature of the year actually came early in autumn.
AReasonableMan said...
We are all going to be dead in the long run. I have been looking to buy a plot up in the mountains of Vermont, that shouldn't flood.
Why don't you get yourself cremated, and have the ashes spread on the ocean. That way, you wouldn't have to worry about drowning in your casket. Your fears would be over.
Great graph! LOL!
I would hazard that more Republicans (conservatives) take STEM in order to get real jobs and as such are more "completely" (if I could use that word) educated and are better able to reason into a topic whereas Democrats (liberals) completely buy into SJW, intersectionality, "ology"ish soft sciences and journalism types of classes and so may have a "degree" but are not necessarily educated and as a result often accept "appeal to authority" arguments, as well as "darn it, man made global warming just FEELZ right!" and all the "right" people say it is so, so it must be!.
Not to say conservatives don't also have confirmation bias but most conservatives spend their entire "conservative" careers having to defend their ideas and as a result seem much better prepared to evaluate a position and defend it than the average liberal.
@cyrus83:
You're a little confused. This is not about a matter of taste, or about "narrow-minded people" who "think climate is supposed to be rather unchanging...."
No one believes climate should or does stay stable forever. Climate change is a part of the earth's history, and it has warmed and cooled many times over its history and will warm and cool many times over in the future. From a cosmic perspective, there is no "ideal" global climate for the earth. The earth will one day be swallowed up by the expanding sun as it dies, and the universe won't notice or care.
However, from the perspective of the living flora and fauna on earth at any given time, the climate is important. As climate cools, extant life forms may die off, while others emerge; as climate heats up, again, extant life forms may die off, while others emerge. Just as the earth has cooled and warmed many times, mass extinctions have occurred numerous times. (Humans would probably not be here today if the dinosaurs had not died off.)
This is why those who assert global warming is occurring are alarmed. They may be wrong. On the other hand, those who insist it is not happening may simply be unwilling to face the catastrophe that is at hand. Humans have a way of doing this, always. Time will tell, as the saying goes: Time will tell.
"The best representational art is often quite abstract to create the allusion of 4 dimensions and bright sunlight. It's essentially a mapping problem."
All art is abstract.
Always a good question to ask climate change alarmists: What is the ideal world temperature and when was the world at that temperature and for how long?
Well, 3 questions in one...
This is why those who assert global warming is occurring are alarmed. They may be wrong. On the other hand, those who insist it is not happening may simply be unwilling to face the catastrophe that is at hand.
Here is an exercise for you Robert. Look at a an image of the hockey stick, pretend that the warming "caused by the industrial revolution" never happened, and extend the line of the "handle" out. What do you see? An ice age? Isn't that handle trending down and down and down for centuries? What would a new ice age mean?
None of this is simple, and pretending that we can anticipate what is coming and plan accordingly, without wasting huge resources that might be better used feeding people, housing people, building and powering hospitals, etc, etc, etc, is folly.
Look what happened in Florida with the recent hurricane. All of the people on the east coast fled to the west coast, because of the models, and the storm actually hit the west coast.
If you take the hockey stick at face value, we just dodged a catastrophe.
I'm sure the type of degrees matters to some extent, but my experience is that the difference comes down to sources. My most educated liberal friends listen to NPR, read the NYT and the local rag and watch Sunday news shows. They don't trust independent online sources and so the media gatekeepers control the facts which end up being used to form opinions. The opposite is true for my conservative or libertarian friends. They become aware of contrary info through sources such as WattsUpWithThat and even blogs like Althouse.
This new Armageddon doesn't seem that scary. At least I can wear shorts ... for the end of days.
Now you've done it. If this doesn't convince our hostess of the danger of climate change, nothing will.
"My most educated liberal friends listen to NPR, read the NYT and the local rag and watch Sunday news shows."
Yeecccchh!!
t's kinda easy to smoke out the ignorance of warmistas.
Just ask them, "What's the largest component of the Earth's atmosphere"?
In my experience almost all answer, "Oxygen".
BZZZZTTT!!!
And if they get all hoity-toity about conservatives rejecting science, ask:
"Why do you Lefties believe in all sorts of faddish unscientific nonsense, such as homeopathy, acupuncture, osteopathy, chiropractic, naturopathy, Pyramid Power, Gaia, ESP, auras, spoon-bending psychics, Freudianism, feng shui, rolfing, harmonic convergence, "organic" foods, multiple sexes and genders, re-incarnation, herbalism, telekinesis, astral projection, aromatherapy, ouija boards, seances, chakras, channeling, GMO's as Frankenfood, wymyn's way of knowing, megavitamins, colonics, and----most of all and especially----the Nostrum of all Nostrums: Scientific Socialism?
(Funny how progs can jeer at some Fundies for not believing Darwinism and random mutations as the mechanism of evolution, while promoting a society that's rigidly organized, IOW through Intelligent Design".)
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