Who Rejects Evidence of Global Climate Change

Climate Change, Anthropocene, & Associated Issues

Date posted: 05/25/13

These researchers suggest that people typically engage in motivated reasoning. So, those people who have a reason to want to believe that there is no human created climate change will find reasons not to believe in it. For example, those who believe strongly in unregulated free market economies would be opposed to regulations that would limit CO2 emissions, and so they might have reason to want to be skeptical of evidence for global warming. In addition, those people who are prone to see the operation of conspiracies in large-scale events might also be prone to be skeptical of evidence for climate change.This research is important is because it has implications for how to deal with the use of science in public settings. There are many settings in which data should be used to help public policy. For example, vaccines have helped virtually eliminate a number of deadly childhood diseases. There is good scientific evidence for why vaccines work and why they should be mandatory. Of course, for any public policy, there are some people who reject the policy and the underlying science that led to it. If people are engaging in motivated reasoning, however, then just describing the science again in more careful detail is unlikely to change opinions. Instead, it is important to understand the cluster of beliefs that are leading to the motivated reasoning and to address those instead. For those people who oppose climate change on the basis of beliefs about the free-market, it would be better to engage in a discussion about the economic costs of rising temperatures.