Serious question: What the hell is up with people who don't believe in global warming? Do they just enjoy being contrarian and not know much about anything, or are they genuinely stupid and not just ignorant?
EDIT: they are possibly insane or morally compromised.
7 comments:
Well, people tend to give extra credence toward claims that they want to be true. And there are no shortage of reputable-sounding dudes (many PhD's) willing to make the claim that global warming is a fiction for this reason or that. So if you're inclined to take their word over the scientific consensus, that's what you get.
Why would they want global warming not to be true?
(1) Don't underestimate the head-in-the-sand impulse w/r/t a possible disaster. Deny it, don't have to worry about it.
(2) Let's face it, many of the environmentalists are sort of distasteful to red-state folks, for reasons of culture and political ideals. Don't want them to be right on anything so important.
(3) Halting carbon emissions would almost certainly destabilize the U.S.' economic place in the world. That's (secretly or openly) unthinkable to a lot of people.
Dagnabbit, why am I not finishing my math?
It's a question of some relevance to me lately. Patrick, I think, hits the major points. Most sophisticated contrarianism stems from isolationist libertarianism in which anything that requires global cooperation looks like a conspiracy to restrain national sovereignty or else from some other type of libertarianism that fears that global warming is a conspiracy to restrict individual initiative. A senior researcher I know once attributed Richard Lindzen's skepticism to the belief that there shouldn't be any problems which only government is able to solve.
Here's my favorite recent story.
Oh, quite a bit. I don't mind people who don't agree with Kyoto, and there are a large number of reasons for thinking it, but I run into a lot of people who don't believe in anthropogenic causes of global warming.
speaking of abortion double-think, i just had a horrible email exchange with this woman i used to know. i basically said, "look, i think we can both agree that abortion is a horrible thing which ought to be minimized." and she was like, "look, i don't think of an embryo as in any way equivalent to a human being, so i don't think of abortion as morally different from any other type of surgery and can't agree with your use of the term 'horrible' because of its moralistic tone." and i was like, "..."
Perhaps some people don't live on the planet, but in a hermetically sealed capsule, so they are iso9lated from all sensations from the ouotside world.
Steve: Tell me more about these hermit pods. I have certain problems that I want to flee.
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