Why Don't Americans Believe in Climate Change?

It's hard not to think of climate change denialism as an inevitable consequence of the decline of reason in the western world – or at least in the U.S. After all, whether you're a Democrat, a Republican or an Independent, you are less likely than ever to "see solid evidence of global warming" or to view it as a serious threat to your way of life, much less human civilization.

This should not surprise anyone who is aware that Americans consistently poll near the bottom in world surveys ranking the percentage of a country's population that believes in evolution.

Or perhaps, as another recent Pew poll revealed, we've tired of worrying about the greatest threat to international security since nuclear war because years of financial system deregulation and spiking oil prices have led to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. (A reality that business leaders like Richard Branson are only just waking up to.)

The simplest explanation, however, is that Americans are neither stupid nor short-sighted, but rather victims of a central deficiency of our simian brains: confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias is a tendency for people to prefer information that confirms their preconceptions or hypotheses, independently of whether they are true.

Social scientist Don Braman, member of the Cultural Cognition project at George Washington University, has tested a version of the confirmation bias in a controlled setting, and his results reveal that what informs our confirmation bias in the first place are, unsurprisingly, our political beliefs.

"Basically the reason that people react in a close-minded way to information is that the implications of it threaten their values," says Dan Kahan, a law professor at Yale University and a member of The Cultural Cognition Project.

Intriguingly, when subjects were presented with information about climate change, their tendency to either agree with it or discount it was informed primarily by the solutions with which they were presented. That is, the politically conservative / technology-loving / libertarian types thought climate change might be a real threat if the suggested solution was more nuclear power. If they were told the only solution was reduction of CO2 emissions, they tended to discount the significance of climate change.

This tells us two things: the first is that climate change is as often as not used as an excuse to move society toward whatever values a person already possesses, that is if there's a perceived solution to it that accords with your existing biases. So greens like the idea of shrinking humanity's footprint, and conservatives and cornucopians like the idea that we will keep expanding forever, a nuclear wind at our backs.

The second thing this tells us is that when it comes to climate change, the medium is the message. When Braman tested the delivery of the climate change message from a range of speakers – from a nattily-dressed businessman to a frumpy professor, test subjects were more inclined to believe whomever they resembled most.

That's one reason why Al Gore – a polarizing figure to begin with, given his history with the electoral college - is the villain for the climate change denialist movement even more than he is the de facto spokesperson for those who worry about climate change. That's because conservatives loathe Al Gore with the kind of fury usually reserved for history's greatest monsters, and as long as he is, in the minds of the willfully ignorant, the perceived standard bearer for climate change, they will continue to view the scientific consensus on this matter as suspect.

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