They've already gotten the memo! What the public (Rs & Ds) think "climate scientists believe" - Cultural Cognition of Health

I’ve explained in a couple of posts why I think experimental evidence in support of “messaging” scientific consensus is externally invalid and why real-world instances of this “messaging” strategy can be expected to reinforce polarization .

But here is some new evidence (from a new paper, which I’ll post this week) that critically examines the premise of the “message 97%” strategy: namely, that political polarization over climate change is caused by a misapprehension of the weight of opinion among climate scientists.

That’s what members of the U.S. general public, defined in terms of their political outlooks (based on their score in relation to the mean on a continuous scale running “left” to “right”), “believe” about human-caused global warming.

But here are a set of items that indicate what they think “climate scientists believe” (each statement except the first was preceded with that clause):

Overwhelming majorities of both Republicans and Democrats are convinced that “climate scientists believe” that  CO 2 emissions cause the temperature of the atmosphere to go up—probably the most basic fact scientific proposition about climate change.

In addition, overwhelming majorities of both Republicans and think that “climate scientists believe” that human-caused climate change poses all manner of danger to people and the environment.

Thus, they correctly think that “climate scientists believe” that “human-caused global warming will result in flooding of many coastal regions.”

But they also incorrectly think that “climate scientists believe” that the melting of the North Pole ice cap will cause flooding.

Healthy majorities of both Republicans and Democrats correctly think that “climate scientists believe” that global warming increased in the first decade of this century—but mistakenly think that “climate scientists believe” that human-caused climate change “will increase the risk of skin cancer” as well.

Again, these are the responses of the same nationally representative sample of respondents who were highly polarized on the question whether human-caused climate change is happening .

1.  Items measuring “belief in human caused global warming” & the equivalent do not measure perceptions of “what people know,” including what they think “climate scientists believe.”

“Belief in human-caused global  warming” items measure “who one is, what side one is on” in an ugly and highly illiberal form of cultural status competition, one being fueled by the idioms of contempt that the most conspicuous spokespeople on both sides use.

As I’ve explained, the responses that individuals give to such items in surveys are as strong an indicator of their political identity as items that solicit self-reported liberal-conservative ideology and political-party self-identification.

What individuals know—or think they know—about climate science is a different matter .  To measure it , one has to figure out how to ask a question that is not understood by survey respondents as “who are you, whose side are you on.”

Consider, in this regard, the parallel with “belief” in evolution .  When asked whether they believe in evolution, members of the US general population split 50-50, based not on understanding of evolution or science comprehension generally but on the centrality of religion to their cultural identities.

But when one frames the question as what scientists understand the evidence to be on evolution, then the division disappears.  A question worded that way enables relatively religious individuals to indicate what they know about science without having to express a position that denigrates their identities.

Same here: ask “what do climate scientists believe ,” and the parties who polarize on the identity-expressive question “do you believe in global warming? do you? do you?” and you can see that there is in fact bipartisan agreement about what climate scientists think!

2.  Different impressions of what “climate scientists believe” clearly aren’t the cause of polarization on global warming.

The differences between Republicans and Democrats on “what climate scientists believe” ‘is trivial.  It doesn’t come close to explaining the magnitude and depth of the division on “human-caused global warming.”

Otherwise, the debate between Democrats and Republicans would be only over how much to spend to develop new nanotechnology sun screens to protect Americans from the epidemic of skin cancer that all recognize is looming.