Results of an Associated Press – GfK poll about climate change was reported last Thursday (AP-GfK Poll: Science doubters say world is warming):
WASHINGTON (AP) — A growing majority of Americans think global warming is occurring, that it will become a serious problem and that the U.S. government should do something about it, a new Associated Press-GfK poll finds. …
… The poll found 4 out of every 5 Americans said climate change will be a serious problem for the United States if nothing is done about it. That's up from 73 percent when the same question was asked in 2009. …
"Good news! People are finally coming around to believing what scientists have been telling us all along!" I can just hear some folks declaring. Hold that thought for a moment. The article goes on to say:
… The biggest change in the polling is among people who trust scientists only a little or not at all. About 1 in 3 of the people surveyed fell into that category. …
… [John] Krosnick [Stanford social psychologist], who consulted with The Associated Press on the poll questions, said the changes the poll shows aren't in the hard-core "anti-warming" deniers, but in the next group, who had serious doubts.
"They don't believe what the scientists say, they believe what the thermometers say," Krosnick said. "Events are helping these people see what scientists thought they had been seeing all along."…
The rise in belief in global warming does not stem from science but inductive reasoning based on heuristics … relying on personal experience as evidence of a broader reality. It is possible this will be the warmest year on record in the United States but more moderate globally. People in the United States look at their thermometers and see warmer temperatures. The news shows super-storm Sandy. Therefore, from experience in our particular context, it is reasoned that there is a global trend.
The irony is that average global temperatures haven't changed much for over a decade. Global hurricanes and cyclones that make landfall are not as prevalent as predicted. In fact, the last four years have been relatively mild. I'm not making the case that climate change isn't happening. Climate models don't necessarily preclude plateaus in change. Rather, I'm saying that if you are a skeptic, then recent trends should bolster skeptical interpretations. Yet, because of personal experience, some science skeptics are extrapolating from their narrow context to global realities. Furthermore, another survey finds that One in three Americans see extreme weather as a sign of biblical end times. This is not good news for science.
But I want to suggest that there is more to the story than this. Many true believers in climate change insist that science is settled on this matter, and no further dissent may be tolerated. Yet, as I have written about earlier, some of these folks are staunch skeptics about the safety of genetically modified crops and nuclear power, despite what the scientific community says. (see Why Are Environmentalists Taking Anti-Science Positions? and The Anti-Science Left) The issue is not so much that they are persuaded by science as it is that claiming scientific authority for conclusions reached by other means (heuristics? ideology?) is rhetorically useful. This is not good news for science either.
Any number of futurists have written about this challenge. For our entire human history, individual lives have been consumed with challenges immediately present to us … like shelter from the elements and not becoming prey for some animal. But with the recent explosion in knowledge, technology, and economics, many of the imminent threats we face have been tamed, and our new challenges are vastly more complex. Over-reliance on heuristic models and rigid ideological sense-making strategies, once essential, can become obstacles to good decisions. The challenge for the next several generations will be learning how to develop social institutions that effectively reflect on and address complex challenges.
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