Global warming skeptics don’t lack science education but have different ‘culture’
Czech President Vaclav Klaus speaks to the media while presenting his climate change skeptic book ‘Blue, Not Green Planet’. A new study at Yale found that climate change deniers are not ignorant about science but rather just use science to fit their cultural values.
Global warming skeptics are not less educated about science but rather use their knowledge to affirm their predetermined beliefs.
The new research says that deniers hold their skeptical views due to “opposing sets of cultural values" that help them make a decision on the hot-button environmental issue.
“The aim of the study was to test two hypotheses,” researchers said in a statement, according to Death and Taxes.
“The first attributes political controversy over climate change to the public’s limited ability to comprehend science, and the second, to opposing sets of cultural values."
"The findings supported the second hypothesis and not the first.”
Researchers at Yale Law School‘s Cultural Cognition Project studied a sampling of 1500 Americans in order to determine whether it was their scientific education which determined their views on climate change, reported Red Orbit.
The quiz contained 22 questions, reported Fox News, including things like: “Lasers work by focusing sound waves — true or false?”
Another question asked: "How long does it take the Earth to go around the Sun? One day, one month, or one year?"
The tests found that deniers were no less ignorant than their climate change-believing peers.
“More information can help solve the climate change conflict,” researchers at Yale said in a statement, “but that information has to do more than communicate the scientific evidence. It also has to create a climate of deliberations in which no group perceives that accepting any piece of evidence is akin to betrayal of their cultural group.”
The study was published in the journal Nature Climate Change.
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