April 04, 2019

Climate change denial is becoming explicitly racist and more sexist (?)

Male white nationalists are climate deniers as a tribal requirement says Michael Barnard below.  We have met Michael before.  He argues that only superior people can understand Warmism and that the rest of us should just bow down before them and believe.  He sounds a thoroughly unpleasant person so it is no surprise to find him trying to show that climate skeptics are thoroughly unpleasant people. He is just engaging in that good ol' Leftist projection.

Funnily enough, he is largely right in what he says.  He sets out findings about something that we all know -- that Warmism is almost entirely a Leftist delusion.  Most conservatives are either openly or covertly climate skeptics.  So showing that any particular conservative -- extreme or moderate --  is a climate skeptic is rather old hat.

And it is also no mystery that conservatives are dubious about illegal immigration and tend to regard feminists as unbalanced.  To Leftists like Michael, those two orientations make conservatives racist and sexist but that is just the usual unfounded abuse that one expects from Leftists.

"White supremacist" is also a term that Leftists enjoy using.  They fling it about with gay abandon, very rarely doing anything to substantiate it.  I have been called a white supremacist when I am in fact a Northeast Asian supremacist.  I believe that the 21st century will be the century of the N.E. Asians -- China, Japan and Korea.

And Barnard's opening salvo about "conspiracy theorists" is amusing.  He appears to include most or all of conservatives in that. Many of the examples of climate skepticism that he gives seem simply to be conservatives. There are some conservative conspiracy theorists but to equate conservatism generally with conspiracy theory is egregious. But I can return the compliment.  I think all American Leftists are Communists!  How's that for over-simplification?

And his claim that conservatives are "maladjusted" is also amusing.  He produces not a skerrrick of evidence for the claim -- except perhaps in that he again plays fast and loose with categories.  Perhaps he is claiming that all Right or Center views are maladjusted.

The claim that conservatives are maladjusted goes back at least to 1950 and has a huge literature in support of it.  I spent 1970 to 1990 looking closely at that "evidence". And in the main part of my 200+ published academic journal articles I showed that not a single one of the studies held water.  They were parodies of science -- not quite as fast and loose with the facts and categories as Barnard but close.

So Barnard below makes large psychological claims but is not a psychologist -- and it shows


Over the past few years, it’s become clear that maladjusted conspiracy theorists were very likely to be climate change deniers. Just when those who thought they were normal people but merely skeptical were beginning to think that maybe that was just a blip, strong evidence has emerged from multiple peer-reviewed and published studies that if you scratch a white, male, far-right nationalist, you’ll find a denier of climate science as well.

That conservative white males in the USA are more likely to deny anthropogenic global warming is well documented, as is the increase in that denial over the past decade. A study published in the journal Global Environmental Change found:

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.

The US study was replicated in Norway and found that in that country there was evidence that climate change denial was merging with right-wing nationalism and become a focal point of agreement in those groups.

63 per cent of conservative males in Norway do not believe in anthropogenic climate change, as opposed to 36 per cent among the rest of the population who deny climate change and global warming. […] Interpreting xenoscepticism as a rough proxy for right leaning views, climate change denial in Norway seems to merge with broader patterns of right-wing nationalism.

A German study found solid evidence of climate change skepticism being prevalent in far-right communication and that it often overrode values related to preservation of nature.

We thus contribute to the growing body of knowledge on climate-change communication and, more specifically, on the link between ideology and climate-change skepticism.

Results courtesy Pew Research

Pew Research has done extensive polling on opinions related to climate change in the USA and documented the clear split between Republicans and Democrats on the issue of global warming.

While the Republicans have not in the past been readily described as a right-wing nationalist party, the most recent administration has certainly pandered to that subset of populace and Trump’s remarks after the Charlottesville white supremacist march of 2017 and the death of Heather Heyer were widely interpreted as supporting the white nationalists.

Similarly, Pew has documented the gender split in climate change skepticism, with men in multiple countries much less likely to accept the science.

It’s also worth looking at the gender split in voting for radical right-wing parties. Research has shown time and again that most right-wing nationalists are men.

One of the most consistent findings in the research on radical right voting has been the gender-specific profile of the radical right electorate. […] women tend to be significantly underrepresented among radical right voters compared with men

So we have multiple lines of evidence which support the idea that white, right-wing, nationalist males are likely to not accept the incredibly well-supported science of anthropogenic global warming and climate change. As with conspiracy ideation, white racism’s lack of rational and empirical support is a strong indicator of other failings.

With this data and evidence of climate-change denial policies explicit in nationalist parties, Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden is establishing a research project to assess this.

in Denmark and Norway, in Britain with UKIP, and Front National in France. But also, in Sweden, with the Sweden Democrats’ suspicion towards SMHI (Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute), their dismissal of the Paris Agreement and of climate laws, and in their appraisal of climate change denier Václav Klaus as a freedom-fighting hero. […] a unique international collaborative platform for research into climate change denial,Centre for Studies of Climate Change Denialism (CEFORCED), will be established, which will connect around 40 of the world’s foremost scientific experts

There will be more and more published data on this in the coming years. For lay people, it’s sufficient to know that one of the groups where global warming denial is strongest is male white supremacists. That should give pause to others considering skepticism to be a reasonable position.

That is in some ways a positive, as a limited study found 17% of former climate change deniers had changed to acceptance of the science in part due to the credibility of the people around them. When your fellow ‘skeptics’ are tiki-torch Nazis, it’s probably hard to accept that they are rational about everything else except that.

SOURCE





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