From Clare Foran at Atlantic:
The entrenchment of climate-science denial is one of the ways the United States appears to be exceptional relative to the rest of the world. A comparative 2015 study of nine conservative political parties in countries such as Canada, Germany, and Spain concluded that “the U.S. Republican Party is an anomaly in denying anthropogenic climate change.” Meanwhile, Americans were least likely to agree that climate change is largely the result of human activity in a 2014 survey of 20 countries, including China, India, Australia, and Great Britain.
Scientific reality does not seem to have escaped the distorting influence of political polarization in the United States. A paper published in Environment earlier this year suggests that as the Tea Party pushed the Republican Party further to the political right, it helped solidify skepticism of man-made climate change within the GOP. That happened as the Tea Party incorporated “anti-environmentalism and climate-change denial into its agenda,” the authors write, and subsequently became part of a broader “denial countermovement” made up of fossil-fuel companies as well as conservative think tanks and media outlets.More.
Clare Foran, meet Julie Shaw: A scientist on the benefits of a post-truth society
I’m a factual relativist. I abandoned the idea of facts and “the truth” some time last year. I wrote a whole science book, The Memory Illusion, almost never mentioning the terms fact and truth.
It’s probably old-fashioned of us to think that only one of you can be right…
Unless, of course, human-caused global warming happens to be the one bee allowed to buzz around in an empty bonnet…
If so, don’t get out of breath running around looking for others to blame when your concerns tend to get written off.
See also: Evolution bred a sense of reality out of us
Follow UD News at Twitter!