It's like Christoper Joyce of National Public Radio is completely unaware of ClimateGate. Phil Jones? Never heard of him. Oh, he is the former head of Britain's Climatic Research Unit who now admits manipulating data? No matter. You see, we have our minds made up and the reason people are becoming increasingly skeptical about "climate change" aka global warming is that they have a narrow worldview. Such is the laughable premise put out there by NPR's Joyce:
Over the past few months, polls show that fewer Americans say they believe humans are making the planet dangerously warmer, despite a raft of scientific reports that say otherwise.
This puzzles many climate scientists — but not some social scientists, whose research suggests that facts may not be as important as one's beliefs.
Joyce then contrasts the "narrow" beliefs of a coal company executive with that of "open-minded" Robert Kennedy, Jr:
"It's a hoax," said coal company CEO Don Blankenship, "because clearly anyone that says that they know what the temperature of the Earth is going to be in 2020 or 2030 needs to be put in an asylum because they don't."
On the other side of the debate was environmentalist Robert Kennedy, Jr.
"Ninety-eight percent of the research climatologists in the world say that global warming is real, that its impacts are going to be catastrophic," he argued. "There are 2 percent who disagree with that. I have a choice of believing the 98 percent or the 2 percent."
One problem for Kennedy is that the skeptical scientists number quite a bit more than just 2 percent. And of course, he also completely ignores the ClimateGate revelations.
NPR then reinforces its theory that people can only be skeptical of the global warming dogma due to sociological reasons:
To social scientist and lawyer Don Braman, it's not surprising that two people can disagree so strongly over science. Braman is on the faculty at George Washington University and part of The Cultural Cognition Project, a group of scholars who study how cultural values shape public perceptions and policy beliefs.
"People tend to conform their factual beliefs to ones that are consistent with their cultural outlook, their world view," Braman says.
Yes, forget the facts about global warming. You can only be skeptical about it because of your "cultural outlook."
Yet more psychobabble about why the skeptics are so "close-minded."
"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.
Yup. No facts, no data cited in this rationale for why people have become increasingly skeptical of the global warming beliefs. Just a sociological study that suggests skeptics are somehow "narrow-minded."
So please don't read up on the facts of ClimateGate, Mr. Joyce. It could shatter your comfy narrow world view about the "absolute certainity" of global warming."
