Why don't conservatives believe in global warming/ climate change?

Question

Why don't conservatives believe in global warming/ climate change?

Answer 1

It is because they see "reds under their beds" (Sagebrush, Maxx, Flossy, Phoenix Quill and others) believe it's their invisible friend's "will" (Sagebrush, Maxx), or a combination thereof. They are quite entitled to their believes, no matter how misguided they might be and let me state that I don't have a problem with them having an opinion.



To my knowledge none of the names I mentioned have ever denied that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, nor do they deny the fact that if there was no CO2 in the atmosphere the earth would freeze, they just deny that doubling the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has any effect on the average global temperature. Again they are entitled to their opinion even when it is so obviously misguided.



Now some people will thumb down answers that shows how even kids can test at home whether CO2 is a greenhouse gas or not, this just goes to show that those who do thumb those answers down, do so to impose their personal believes onto others and with that I do have a problem.



Now my personal believe is that global warming is happening, CO2 the most likely cause (as there are no other valid theories) and mankind burning fossil fuels is the most likely cause for the increase in CO2.

Answer 2

Because Big Oil and other large CO2 emission Corporations are sponsors on conservative talk shows.

They don't want people to know the truth because then They won't be making multi-billion dollar profits annually .

Answer 3

1. Because they are misled into thinking (as apparently you are too) that it is a matter of belief. Do you "believe" that 2+2=4? Do you "believe" that science has shown that species evolve over millions of years and were not all created 6000 years ago? Do you "believe" that men landed on the moon in 1969? If these things are framed as a matter of "belief," then any nutcase "belief" is in some sense as legitimate as any other "belief." Look at http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php for the long list of laughably inconsistent anti-science "beliefs" about human-caused global climate alteration.



2. Because many such deniers of climate science are NOT conservative in any real sense of the word, except "fake conservative." They are hypocrites and liars with few principles. THAT (not some obsolete "right" vs "left" dichotomy of dubious relevance) is why they find it easy to lie or BS about science they don't understand.



3. Because Michael Crichton wrote a widely selling sci-fi novel (heavily featuring what answerer Rolando on this page calls "reds under the beds") which Denier-in-chief Senator James Inhofe pretends to think is based on science rather than deceptions about science and smears against it.



4. Because the fossil fuel industry poured money into slick anti-science disinformation campaigns in the 1990s, and -on a more discrete and limited basis- is still doing so today.



5. Because nearly the entire leadership of the majority party in the U.S. House of Representatives has found it expedient to pander to anti-science denial, and convenient for fund-raising purposes too.



6. Because most deniers are poorly educated and not very intelligent, and climate science is complicated, and it feels better if the whole thing is hoax rather than being too hard to understand.



Here is the science and history that they deny:



U.S. National Academy of Sciences, 2010:

http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=12782&page=1

“Climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for a broad range of human and natural systems.”

http://nationalacademies.org/morenews/20100716.html

“Choices made now about carbon dioxide emissions reductions will affect climate change impacts experienced not just over the next few decades but also in coming centuries and millennia…Because CO2 in the atmosphere is long lived, it can effectively lock the Earth and future generations into a range of impacts, some of which could become very severe.”

http://www.physics.fsu.edu/awards/NAS/

“The Academy membership is composed of approximately 2,100 members and 380 foreign associates, of whom nearly 200 have won Nobel Prizes. Members and foreign associates of the Academy are elected in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research; election to the Academy is considered one of the highest honors that can be accorded a scientist or engineer.”



http://www.aip.org/history/climate/timeline.htm

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/index.htm

http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200602/backpage.cfm



http://www.newscientist.com/topic/climate-change

http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/12-02-08/#feature

.......... ...........

Answer 4

its the brain pinky ,its how it works that decides how we think our nuerones fire in certain order and places which then after time learn these paths and thus the thinking is the same or alike,eg drug dependence or habits such as any habits ,the neurones look to follow the old path or the path most travelled

Answer 5

OH THEY PROBABLY DO BELIEVE

but they don't want to pay extra taxes or have their big companies installing more environmentally efficient technology

Answer 6

1. Confirmation bias, and similar brain tricks. Our minds tend to reject "unfriendly" information, however valid; http://m.motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/denial-science-chris-mooney discusses the matter at length. And since the environment is a "liberal" issue, some conservatives reject (or at least downplay) environmental issues pretty much without thinking about it.



2. Lack of scientific understanding. Climate science is kind of complex, and some aspects of it aren't very intuitive ("How can it be snowing, if there's global warming?" and so on). Some people disbelieve what they don't understand. (there's something of the same problem with evolution)



3. Flat-out lying, or at least trusting a lying source. I suspect at least some people who deny global warming are skewing (or even blatantly faking) information because reality does not match their political biases, and/or because they are trying to protect some income source or the like that could be threatened by action to stop AGW.

Answer 7

Actually, the main debate is what the role man is doing. The average conservative like me who is considered a non-believe believes that we are warming up from a known cool period known as the Little Ice Age and are heading back to the temperatures last seen during the Medieval Warming period. There is a lot of historical evidence that roughly a thousand years ago we were warmer then we are today. The current crop of climate scientists are more worried about their next pay check instead of facts.



Hate to say this, but if the recorded temperatures start at the very end of a known cool period and increase then it is more natural then man made and we should see more record highs then lows.

Answer 8

Noodles has it.

Climatologists, Geologists and other scientists know we are already experiencing Global warming.



The dire warnings of 20 years ago were ignored and the evidence is still being ignored.





edit: I'll continue to trust the objective evidence and theories arrived at by employment of scientific method over emotive ad hominem and projections of those who have some kind of emotional investment in only being capable of "seeing" what fits their preconceived notions.



If you want to promote as part of your denial that all this evidence around the world is some kind of concoction of a global conspiracy theory on the part of thousands of scientists around the world..knock yourself out.



Scientific method can be your friend. Use it.



I think the denial by those who think that insulting and making up conspiracy theories is going to somehow alter what the rest of us clearly see has more than one source and motive. Some of these people have a vested interest in their jobs and it really can be a scary thing to think that your industry or income is derived from a way of life that has to be changed for future generations.



Some people are incapable of understanding that they are contributing to harm life on earth. They can't deal with this logically and rationally. it isn't a scare tactic, it's acceptance of reality. Is it a fairy tale scare tactic to tell people that scientific inquiry over decades revealed that cigarettes, once even touted by the medical profession as having medicinal value causes premature death?

no, it is providing information vital to the health and well being of humans.



Likewise it is not a scare tactic to provide the massive amount of evidence from so many different scientific studies of more than one area of scientific study that all agree that climate scientists and other earth sciences experts have been saying for a very long time, that DESPITE the natural forces of cosmology and the geology at work right now that SHOULD be in favor of a cooling trend, the observed and objectively recorded warming trend proves that the observed warming that has been ongoing for a hundred years now, and has escalated in the past 50 years, is clearly not from natural forces.



That millions still ignore the evidence that smoking cigarettes is the cause of a lot of suffering doesn't change the fact that it is.



That millions still ignore the evidence that global warming is here and is altering life on planet earth doesn't change the fact of that, either.



edit: I am politically conservative on many issues, but for the religious right wing conservatives who have an issue with scientific method or who want to call people names if they don't accept dogmatic claims not supported by scientific method, I part company completely.

Chem Flunky has an astute assessment of the psychology at work and I believe fits a few examples on display under this very question!

Answer 9

Remember when FDR and Churchill aligned with Stalin to defeat the Nazis and Japan? The Global Warming crowd has clearly aligned itself with the far left of the democrat party, and anything they are for, you can bet conservatives will be against. The science is not clear at all. It is a soft fuzzy kind of science. Anytime science is decided by a vote, you know it is not real science. If the proposals that have been out there on the left were put in place, the rich will do just fine and the poor will be crushed. Does that sound like the democrats are for the little guy?

Answer 10

It is not so much that conservatives do not believe in global warming as it is the extreme right wing that doesn't. Many conservatives, including myself, believe in global warming.

Answer 11

Simply put, because it's a theory dreamed up by the liberal mind which is incapable of logical thought.



Yes the planet is getting warmer, yes some of it is being caused by CO2 and yes some of that CO2 is ours, not most of it and not unprecedented.



I don't like people who play games with important scientific research that is being paid for by the public. Selectively discarding flawed proxie data, attempting to destroy publishers who publish alternative theories, loosing data, and hiding data, all explained away with a very scientific comment, You just don't understand the way science works.



On top of all that I do not find the evidence supports the ambiguous and intentionally vague predictions of bad things happening in the future. These buffoons have the general public believing floods, droughts, heat waves, cold snaps, tornadoes, hurricanes....are all a result of AGW and warmons seem to think it's a media conspiracy or big oil at work trying to discredit what warmonologist actually say is happening or by falling back on the sound scientific comment of, You just don't understand the way science works.

Answer 12

Conservatives DO believe the Globe has warmed (well from 1970 to 1998 anyway) & they DO believe in Climate Change.....



......they just don't think that human CO2 has much to do with it.



When Warming took a ~12 year (and counting) vacation while CO2 continued to rise, Cons felt AGW theory & it's expensive Big Government 'solutions' needed to be reassessed.



Liberals however started calling it Settled Science, referred to Skeptics as Deniers & proposed ever more costly Wealth transfer schemes. In fact their only acknowledgment of the lack ongoing Global Warming was to switch to the term Climate Change.



Nor was it apparent that the leadership actually believes in AGW. Al Gore has a giant carbon footprint. Obama flew a fossil fueled Jumbo Jet across the Atlantic to deliver a Climate Conference speech he could have emailed. Later his wife took the jet on a shopping trip to Spain.



In 1993 when the MGT was still rising, it was still possible for a rational person to believe AGW. Now there were some problematic stats like CO2 lagging MGT in ice core data, but at least there was actual Warming.



Now it just looks like a Socialists scam. CO2 is how modern society makes most of it's energy. Declare CO2 a POLUTANT and you have Socialist control over all Energy production. How convenient.



The AGW modelers can't even predict if next years Hurricane season will be heavy or light, yet SOMEHOW we MUST believe theirs is a hard clearly understood science.



Well it isn't & you guys are full of $hit.

Your are a bunch of weak willed sheep begging Big Government to be your Master. It disgusts me that you call yourselves Americans. Our Economy sinks under the weight of your collective stupidity.

You are free men begging for shackles.



Repeating something moronic doesn't make it less moronic. Nor does a consensus of fools imply anything besides their abundance.



Half the people on this planet are below average Intelligence & many of them are educated well beyond their intellect. One of them is our President.

A man so blazingly stupid he thinks taking more profits from jobs creators will create more jobs.



And LIBERALS are going to vote to re-elect him.

Which pretty much explains why they believe in AGW & why Conservatives do not.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ-4gnNz0vc

Answer 13

It's not that they don't believe it-it's just that it is inconvenient and counterproductive to their primary focus in life: making money. They don't want to acknowledge man-made global warming because that would require industry to reduce their CO2 output. In the case of the highly profitable energy industry (i.e. oil, coal), it would require finding alternate clean sources of energy, thereby eating into their vast profits. The lesser of the species (i.e. the uneducated conservative), simply does not believe it because they are told it doesn't exist, by those who have a vested interest in making sure we do nothing to stop it.

Answer 14

If the scientific evidence is there then we would believe it.



Fact is during the last decade the temperature has gone down. Fact is the last decade is CO2 level has gone up. Are you that daft that you don't see your theory has gone up in the same smoke your professor smokes?



Just because you scream GLOBAL WARMING at the top of your lungs does not mean it is true. You have had your chance to prove it. We have pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into your scheme and all we got back is bogus data and cooked books.

Answer 15

Many do believe it. Unfortunately the Republican Party is now controlled by special interests that label any one who believes in global warming as "RINOS" (Republicans in Name Only), and they have money to defeat them in elections. That's why many Republicans (Romney and Gingrich, to name a couple) have backed off on their stance with regard to climate change.



The present Republican Party does not value scientific literacy.

Answer 16

I don't fit into any of the boxes you have presented here. My box-climate change has always been a part of the Earth's complex systems. Global warming is an invention of people who want to govern new areas of human activity. The scientific evidence as you call it is not science. In science it does not matter if everyone believes something is true.

Answer 17

Coralyn and noodles are liberal drones who believe everything they see and hear on the likes of msnbc and other left wing media.

I've explained this so many times to so many people it amazes me that some actually still beating that dead horse.

Google "Scientists retrieve core samples from Antarctica..." You will see for yourself that our planet has been through MANY warming and cooling cycles, some were actually warmer than this cycle.

It's a natural event taking place, nothing to do with the lies told by Al Gore and those dishonest scientists who were caught red handed falsifying records to give credence to the "Global warming is caused by human activity" proponents.



Don't believe it?

Google "Global warming scientists emails intercepted, showing manipulation of facts."



Hope this helps you discover the truth, that unscrupulous bureaucrats are trying to use this issue to invent a new tax, a new way to screw the taxpayer .



BTW you and your science professor are dim wits.

Answer 18

its not like they don't believe.i am conservative and i do believe in all these things.

Answer 19

But conservatives do believe in it, much to the disgust of those of us trying to make a living.

The Climate Change Act only had three votes against it, so obviously conservatives voted for it, costing the UK billions of pounds every year for an unproven theory.

Answer 20

I think I heard that it's due to a brain disorder or something psychological. A unicorn told me. Chris Mooney is rumored to be a unicorn.

Answer 21

what evidence,cause there is none