The underlying reason people dismiss climate science, it turns out, has more to do with political identity than logic. In fact, the more intelligent people are, the more polarized they tend to be on climate change. When they’re challenged, Democrats and Republicans alike simply use their smarts to justify their beliefs. Confirmation bias is a powerful thing.
It’s not just that Democrats and Republicans in Congress have different priorities when it comes to the climate crisis — they also use different styles of persuasion. A study published in the journal Environmental Politics earlier this month breaks down the differences along partisan lines. With the help of machine learning, Guber and her colleagues analyzed millions upon millions of words from Congressional floor speeches from 1996 until 2015.
They found that Democrats tend to make arguments about climate change backed up by facts and evidence, while Republicans tend to tell stories, using imagery, emotional appeals, and humor to sway people to their side. According to Guber, Republicans are “communicating in ways that may ultimately be more effective.”
One chilly day in February 2015, Senator James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, unwrapped a snowball on the Senate floor. After noting that he kept hearing the previous year was the hottest on record, he held it up, asking “You know what this is? It’s a snowball, just from outside here. So it’s very, very, cold out. Very unseasonable.” Then he threw it at the Senate president. “Catch this!”
Inhofe’s speech was widely ridiculed. The Daily Show’s host Jon Stewart mocked Inhofe by saying, “Clearly if global warming was a problem, I would only be able to grab lava balls.”
Sure, Inhofe was conflating weather with climate. But it’s hard to contradict the existence of a snowball, Guber said. It was ridiculous, but it got a lot of attention.
“That’s a prime example of using that vivid imagery to communicate something about climate change that certainly isn’t true,” she said, “but the truth of it doesn’t really matter to the audience.”
https://grist.org/climate/the-surprising-reasons-why-people-ignore-the-facts-about-climate-change