9 March, 2012

Scrambling to explain away who the climate skeptics are

That well-informed conservative white males are the most reliable climate skeptics is bothersome to Warmists so the academic writers below have just completed a study of the phenomenon. They confirm the finding.

So WHY do people in an especially good position to find out the truth of the matter reject global warming? It's obviously because of bad motivations, of course. It could not be because warming stopped 15 years ago, for instance.

So what we see here is essentially a scientific paper making an "ad hominem" argument, an argument of a sort that has no intellectual respectability at all. And even if we take their "ad hominem" argument seriously, it is based on a critique of conservatism that is deeply flawed.

As I have pointed out on a number of occasions (e.g. here and here), Left-leaning psychologists don't even know what conservatism is. In their simple-minded way, they think it is just opposition to change. But I have yet to meet a conservative who didn't have a whole list of things that he would like to change in the world about him. Leftist psychologists obviously don't talk to actual conservatives.

Just think about it: If Leftist psychologists were right, no conservative-dominated legislature would ever sit. Legislation is about changing things and conservatives allegedly don't want to change things. In actual fact, however, conservative-dominated legislatures are just as keen on legislating as are Left-dominated legislatures. How can anybody not be aware of that?

I once challenged the hard-working but utterly conventional Robert Altemeyer over his definition of conservatism (or lack of it). He replied that conservatism means opposition to change because that's what it says in the dictionary -- thus demonstrating that he knows as little about lexicography as he does about conservsatism. Lexicographers collect instances of usage and if a usage is widespread (such as the leftist usage of "conservative"), they will record it, ill-informed or not. Dictionaries are no substitute for research or in-depth understanding. I haven't checked recently but dictionaries probably now record the absurdity of "mitigate against" -- a common mistake for "militate against".

So Leftist psychologists seem very nearly brain-dead. Their claims about conservative motivations fall at the first hurdle. They literally don't know what they are talking about. They are so confused that some of them even list Stalin, Khrushchev and Castro as conservatives! With definitions like that you could prove that the moon is made of green cheese! So anything Leftist psychologists say about conservative motivations is completely worthless. For a history-based coverage of what conservatism actually is see here

Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States

By Aaron M. McCright & Riley E. Dunlap

Abstract

We examine whether conservative white males are more likely than are other adults in the U.S. general public to endorse climate change denial. We draw theoretical and analytical guidance from the identity- protective cognition thesis explaining the white male effect and from recent political psychology scholarship documenting the heightened system-justification tendencies of political conservatives.

We utilize public opinion data from ten Gallup surveys from 2001 to 2010, focusing specifically on five indicators of climate change denial. We find that conservative white males are significantly more likely than are other Americans to endorse denialist views on all five items, and that these differences are even greater for those conservative white males who self-report understanding global warming very well.

Furthermore, the results of our multivariate logistic regression models reveal that the conservative white male effect remains significant when controlling for the direct effects of political ideology, race, and gender as well as the effects of nine control variables. We thus conclude that the unique views of conservative white males contribute significantly to the high level of climate change denial in the United States.

SOURCE

Go to John Ray's Main academic menu
Go to Menu of longer writings
Go to John Ray's basic home page
Go to John Ray's pictorial Home Page
Go to Selected pictures from John Ray's blogs