URL: http://www.abqjournal.com/opinion/guest_columns/02912405-02-08.htm

Friday, May 02, 2008
Poll Data Trumps Science on Global Warming
By John Fleck/
Of the Journal
   
   Heather Wilson and Steve Pearce aren't particularly hot on global warming.
   
    The two New Mexico members of Congress, both of whom hope to replace Pete Domenici in the U.S. Senate, made their views clear during a recent campaign debate.
   
    The planet is warming, Wilson told a modest crowd at an April 25 debate in Los Alamos, but it's not clear why.
   
    Pearce would not even go that far. A particularly cold winter suggests Earth may not really be warming after all, Pearce said. “Scientists are not fully convinced and in full agreement” about the nature of global warming or its causes, Pearce said.
   
    In taking those positions, Wilson and Pearce are out of step with the vast majority of climate scientists, who agree that Earth is warming and that humans are very likely to blame. The stability of the majority of climate scientists on the issue is about as solid as scientific views on a public policy question ever get. But climate scientists won't be selecting the Republican party's candidate for U.S. Senate come June 3 — New Mexico Republican voters will. And in staking out the positions they have, Pearce and Wilson appear to be in sync with Republican voters.
   
    The issue illustrates a thorny dimension of the politics surrounding the issue of climate change in particular, and the more general intersection of science and politics.
   
    In contemporary American society, science carries with it an aura — the idea that it can help us settle disputes and come to rational solutions to our problems. But political scientists who study how we actually behave suggest that the reality is quite different. We all, they say, have a natural tendency to seek out science that tends to support our pre-existing political viewpoint. Rather than turning to science to shape our views to a problem, we search out science that supports the views we already have.
   
    “On the climate issue,” University of Colorado political scientist Roger Pielke Jr. famously told the New York Times a number of years ago, “we appear to be on the brink of having Republican science and Democrat science.”
   
    On climate science, every major arbiter that has reviewed the question — the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Geophysical Union — has come to the same conclusion: that Earth has been warming for more than a century, and that emissions from burning petroleum and coal are the only reasonable explanation.
   
    But polling data supports Pielke's contention, suggesting that different audiences with different political viewpoints react in different ways to the science.
   
    A survey published last year by the Pew Research Center found that 20 percent of conservative Republicans in the United States believe humans are causing global warming, compared to 71 percent of liberal Democrats.
   
    Over time, according to American University political scientist Matthew Nisbet, overall public beliefs and attitudes toward climate change have remained largely unchanged. But Nisbet, a savvy analyst of climate change politics, notes that if you drill down in the data, you find a hardening of partisan positions over time.
   
    This is why some advocates of action on climate change have grown uncomfortable with the role of Al Gore as the movement's most visible spokesman, Nobel prize notwithstanding. In addition to being an articulate advocate for the view of mainstream climate scientists, Gore's Democratic party heritage makes him a politically polarizing figure.
   
    The Pew data suggests that Wilson and Pearce have staked out a position on climate change that is not likely to hurt them in the fall election, when they will have to appeal to Democrats and independents as well as the Republican base. That is because climate change consistently ranks near the bottom when voters are asked which issues are most important.
   
    The same partisan split is evident in the “most important issues” polls, but even Democrats who favor action on climate change rank it well down on their list of priorities.
   
    For those who favor action on climate change, however, the polling data does suggest a winning strategy, Nisbet and others point out. While even Democrats don't rank climate change very high, Democrats and Republicans are in strong agreement about the importance of dealing with the nation's energy problems. And dealing with climate change is nothing if not an energy policy problem.
   
    Read science writer John Fleck's blog at ABQjournal.com. E-mail to jfleck@abqjournal.com
   
   

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