Eric Zuesse<\/p>\n
100% agreement among scientists does not exist on anything, not even on basic laws of physics; but there are some scientific topics where the degree of expert consensus is near 100%, and human-caused (or \u201canthropogenic\u201d) global warming is one of them, with more than 97% of the scientific experts in the field agreeing that this phenomenon is real. (See\u00a0this paper,<\/span><\/a>\u00a0which is the most-rigorous study to-date, of expert opinion on the subject, quantifying the extent of this consensus; this is a study of\u00a011,944 papers that have been published on the matter, and it finds that more than 97% of the peer-reviewed papers that have expressed an opinion on whether \u201canthropogenic global warming\u201d exists, have said that it does. A contrarian tried to debunk that paper and reduce the consensus down to 91%, which is still high, but\u00a0there were errors in his paper, and he even admitted<\/span><\/a>: \u201cThere is no doubt in my mind that the literature on climate change overwhelmingly supports the hypothesis.”)<\/span><\/p>\n Consequently, a poll which was published by Gallup on 26 March 2015 is especially fascinating, because it correlates political ideology plus education-level, with acceptance of this particular scientific consensus;<\/i> the poll-report\u2019s title is:\u00a0\u201cCollege-Educated\u00a0Republicans Most Skeptical\u00a0of Global Warming.\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0It says that: \u201cRepublicans with higher levels of education are more likely\u00a0than those in their parties [it should be the singular noun here, \u2018party\u2019] with less education to say that\u00a0the seriousness of global warming is ‘generally exaggerated.’\u00a0By contrast, Democrats with some college or more are less\u00a0likely than those with less education to believe the seriousness\u00a0of global warming is exaggerated.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n In the United States, there happens to be extraordinary ideological polarization by political party, with almost all conservatives preferring the Republican Party, and almost all progressives preferring the Democratic Party, whenever an electoral choice between those two parties is offered and the time has come for citizens to register a vote at their ballot box. Consequently, the Republican-Democratic distinction is a fair and very practical measure of conservative-progressive orientations among the U.S. population. (This isn\u2019t to say that the Democratic Party is progressive, just that it\u2019s not nearly as consistently conservative as is the Republican Party \u2013 and this Gallup poll provides yet further confirmation to that.)<\/span><\/p>\n Here, then, are the exact findings, by Gallup, in this poll: 74% of Republicans with a college degree say that human-caused global warming is exaggerated, compared to 57% of Republicans with only a high-school\u00a0education or less.<\/span><\/p>\n By contrast, among Democrats: only 15% of Democrats with a college degree say that human-caused global warming is exaggerated, compared to 27% of Democrats with merely a high-school\u00a0education or less.<\/span><\/p>\n So: more education moves Republicans further into fantasyland, where they already are, and moves Democrats further into reality, where they aready are.<\/span><\/p>\n So: not only are a vastly higher percentage of Democrats than of Republicans accepting the overwhelming (97+%) scientific consensus; but, when the findings are further broken down by education-level, the resultant finding is that whereas among Democrats, education increases truthful<\/i> beliefs, the opposite is the case among Republicans: education increases false<\/i> beliefs, among Republicans.<\/span><\/p>\n This finding adds further weight to the finding that was reported in a classic study in empirical psychology,\u00a0\u201cPolitical Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition,\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0published in 2003, by four famous researchers. They found that conservatives absorb information that supports their particular opinions, but filter out and ignore information that contradicts their opinions. They called this phenomenon \u201cmotivated social cognition\u201d; and, whereas this phenomenon exists to some extent among all people, they found that it exists far more among conservatives than among non-conservatives. Among non-conservatives, there exists enough open-mindedness to enable education to improve the accuracy of the given individual\u2019s beliefs. That is also what this new Gallup poll is finding: whereas conservatives just become more dead-set in their false beliefs the more information they encounter; non-conservatives actually tend even in the exact opposite direction \u2013 to change their minds, when they encounter evidence that contradicts what they had formerly believed.<\/span><\/p>\n (To explain this: For conservatives, the confirmatory \u2018information\u2019 that they pay attention to is usually not actual data that confirm the given belief, but is instead another person\u2019s opinion that \u2018confims\u2019 his or her own opinion \u2013 it\u2019s merely opinion that\u2019s built on opinions instead of on actual data. That\u2019s how myths are passed around and \u2018supported.\u2019 And myths are especially important to conservatives.)<\/span><\/p>\n Actually, there are lots of empirical studies that lend further weight to this view: There is an overwhelming body of empirical literature<\/span><\/a> that shows that the more conservative a person is, the more bigoted he or she is likely to be. Again: conservatives, far more than non-conservatives, just filter out what doesn\u2019t fit their existing beliefs. Also, see this<\/span><\/a>, and this<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n All of the evidence supports the view that conservatism is basically a falsehood-sustaining belief-methodology. That\u2019s what it\u2019s really all about: sustaining<\/i> false beliefs.<\/span><\/p>\n And that\u2019s why the opposite of conservatism is progressivism: change toward a truer<\/i> view of the world. That\u2019s what progress is<\/i>. That\u2019s what it consists of.<\/span><\/p>\n And that\u2019s why progressives tend to have truer beliefs than conservatives do.<\/span><\/p>\n ———-<\/span><\/p>\n Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i> and of\u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a>, and\u00a0of\u00a0Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics<\/i><\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Eric Zuesse 100% agreement among scientists does not exist on anything, not even on basic laws of physics; but there are some scientific topics where the degree of expert consensus is near 100%, and human-caused (or \u201canthropogenic\u201d) global warming is one of them, with more than 97% of the scientific experts in the field agreeing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":145228,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[461,1622],"tags":[74,857,96,29,535,539,856,77,858,526,540,49],"class_list":{"0":"post-145227","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-editorials","8":"category-featured","9":"tag-climate-change","10":"tag-conservatives","11":"tag-cover-up","12":"tag-democrats","13":"tag-global-news","14":"tag-ideology","15":"tag-liberals","16":"tag-oil","17":"tag-progressives","18":"tag-propaganda","19":"tag-republicans","20":"tag-usa-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145227"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145227\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/145228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}