The market research company Umbria recently released a study of the attitudes people express online about global warming. The good news: Public opinion is generally with us. The bad news: There is a substantial minority of vocal holdouts who will be all but impossible to convince. If you follow social research as closely as I do, that’s fresh confirmation of an old story.
A variety of studies have reached this conclusion and have generally put the naysayers into two camps — people who really have a grudge against nature protection and pollution control efforts, and people who just don’t want to be inconvenienced for the greater good. Umbria calls them “rejectors” and “negators,” and describes them thus:
A key thing to understand about “rejectors,” “negators,” and everybody else for that matter, is that they don’t just feel this way about global warming – they feel this way about everything. These are personality types, not rationally thought-through positions.
When you run into these personality types, and you will, it’s better not to get drawn into an argument with them. You won’t change their mind, so why waste your breath? Focus your energy instead on the much larger number of people who are willing to be persuaded but have some inhibition they need you to overcome.
Comments
Interesting; I would like to add that there are folks who are willing to believe anything and everything about climate change, including the infamous ‘hockey stick’ graph, and they refuse to listen to alternative points of view or to facts that challenge their fervent beliefs. To me, that is also a personality type, not a rationally thought-through position. They ‘feel’ that global warming is caused by humans, they want it to be true, and they won’t look at anything that contradicts that belief system.
To paraphrase Ben Franklin, when a position on one side of an issue becomes impassioned to the point of inflexible certitude, the other side must become as staunch, rigid and closed-minded.
For instance, I keep reading that many aspects of climatology are still in their infancy, and we humans are only scratching the surface of understanding the interactions between clouds, the ocean, solar radiation and other types of space radiation, and how they all impact each other and our planet’s atmosphere. I’m willing to listen and learn, to refrain from knee-jerk reactions. Once science is “settled,” there is no room for advancement, no room for discovery or intellectual progress. That would be tragic.
And at what point is a scientific issue “settled”?
I am a practitioner and advocate of the Precautionary Principle and believe we should undertake prudent, cost-effective approaches sooner rather than later BECAUSE science _so_ rarely gives definitive answers.
I did desktop publishing for an environmental health science journal for three years and never ONCE did a journal article cross my desk that did not conclude with a call for more research so more definitive data could be developed. Science is an iterative process, and concerns itself with seeking answers to very narrow, well-defined problems. Climate change is not such a problem.
For me, if the science backs up what I see, hear, feel, and observe from news sources I trust, then that’s enough for me. If it runs counter to my experience, then I question it. This is probably why I am not a scientist, but then again neither is the vast majority of the public.
I should clarify:
Scientific inquiry is not limited to well-defined problems. But definitive answers are.
