Why is it easy not to believe in global warming?

But first, an important question:

What is the real southern border of Canada?

Answer: There are two Tim Horton's shoppes in Ashland, Kentucky.

Now for today's real feature:

Despite overWHELMING amounts of scientific evidence, there is still a strong core of people that don't believe that global warming is happening, that it's caused by humans, and that it's going to be a significant problem in the near future. (I'm working on an essay about that.) I've even made some suggestions 'round the blogosphere about how those people could be addressed. Arguing from the certitudinal base of fact and reason does not sway those with an emotional and socio-political bond to the alternative viewpoint, particularly those for whom cognition has been diverted into this particular sidetrack.

Which causes me to wonder: why, why, WHY?

The following article addresses this in part:

Psycho Analysis of a Climate Skeptic

Quoting:

It’s truly amazing how far people will go to continue to believe that climate science is all wrong. I regularly hear from people who have convinced themselves that a giant conspiracy exists to prevent anyone who disagrees with the mainstream opinion, from being published in the front line science journals. They will readily believe two or three outlier science papers over the hundreds that clearly show the opposite is true. They will ignore the fact that nearly every major scientific body on the planet has endorsed the IPCC reports. (NASA, NOAA, The Royal Society, The Nat. Academies of Science in America, the AAAS, AGU, AMS, GSA, and dozens of others)

Instead they will choose to believe one or two cherry picked papers in a journal, or avidly follow web sites of those who peddle nothing but political propaganda and junk science like, Watts or Morano. Neither of whom have even a modest background in climate physics.

That is SO true. But he does not address the importance of political adherence to climate skepticism. The central core of conservatism today still believes that Ronnie Reagan was the best President EVER (omg!). They believe that cutting taxes is the answer to everything, which is why the Obama administration is pointing fingers repeatedly in the Bush direction indicating that they cut taxes when the economy was good, cut taxes when the economy was bad, cut taxes to finance a massive prescription drug benefit plan, cut taxes to finance the recovery from 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and even cut taxes to underwrite all the necessary infrastructure maintenance needs that have been piling up for the last 40 years, as illustrated by interstate bridges occasionally collapsing: I hope it's fairly obvious that just as you can say "a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money", you can also say "cut taxes here, cut taxes there, cut taxes each and everywhere, and eventually you're going to find out you don't have freaking dime to pay for anything".

Those who believe that Ronnie was the BEST and Rush Limbaugh is his divinely begotten son and the vocal saviour of the Republican Party (with Sean Hannity playing the part of John the Baptist) thus must reject ANYthing that smacks of liberal doctrine. Therefore it was unfortunate that Nobel prize-winning and rightful POTUS Al Gore was the guiding light of "An Incovenient Truth". This made it immediately politically rejectable on the basis of the man being the message, and the message therefore being inconsequential. Oh, it had been building up before; the acolytes Spencer and Christy kept showing there was no global warming until there was, and now they're showing global cooling when there isn't -- and Doc Spencer is even disputing sea surface temperature data when there's an El Nino in the Pacific! (And the Southern Ocean is warming up as well.) So if the socio-political mindthink indicates that something will infringe upon the right of free market rampantism, and Rush Limbaugh said it so I believe it (or is it God said it, Rush repeated it, therefore I believe it?), there is no possibility of driving a wedge of reason between the eyes of someone who puts his hand on the Bible and then quotes the divine utterances of Senator Inhofe.

What would it take to change the minds of such people?

Some of them will never, could never, shall never change their minds. But if there is a capability to create an acknowledgeable cognitive dissonance, it should be exploited. There are great examples from the literature of the War on Creationism that show when someone who was nearly utterly convinced of the total validity of Scientific Creationism was confronted with a irrefutable counter-evidential example (like the lava dams in the Grand Canyon, or fish with fingers), they reversed on their previous set of beliefs with a level of vengeance known only to those who realize with fury how totally they had been duped, and how totally they had ALLOWED themselves to be duped -- and how powerless they were to resist it until they were liberated. It has all the characteristics of cult indoctrination and the inability to think outside the allowable "box" that is the core of the cult's beliefs.

Thus, it should be clear that it's really, really difficult to change the minds of politically-affiliated climate skeptics. If they retreated one inch; if they allowed a single chink in their logical armor to be penetrated; their set of life beliefs would begin to collapse. Rather than risk the psychological trauma that such a realization would entail, they don't allow it. They will defend, deflect, and divert any direct assault upon their cognitive fortress.

Therefore, the way to change their minds is not from without, it is from within. Skeptics must be allowed to formulate a question to which they think the answer is foreordained, and then to follow a logical pathway that leads them to an unexpected conclusion at odds with their own belief structure. Only if they follow that path themselves; only if it is under their own power that they allow the refuting argument to enter into their logic and to then let it virally infect itself, slowly altering their total structural cognition, will they be able to admit to actuality.

So the way to do it, as I've said, is not to let them ask the question and then tell them the answer that they will not hear. The way to do it is to let them ask the question and then guide them to the formulation of the answer themselves, such that they cannot deny the result which they determine on their own.

There's a simple name for this type of strategy.

Trojan Horse.

Who shall be the climate Odysseus?