The politics dominating views on climate change is made in the USA

Enlarge (credit: Mobilus In Mobili)

In the US, partisan political lines define a debate about climate change that does not exist among climate scientists. It has been this way long enough that you could be forgiven for thinking that rejecting the human cause of climate change is somehow inherently conservative. But few countries beyond the US are actually having this debate despite-and this is true-being home to their own politically conservative citizens.

To find out what's going on, Matthew Hornsey, Emily Harris, and Kelly Fielding of the University of Queensland in Australia surveyed 5,323 people in 25 countries. And the results confirmed that the US really is the weird one.

The survey asked respondents to answer questions that allowed them to be placed on four different political scales: left vs. right, liberal vs. conservative, individualist vs. communitarian, and hierarchical vs. egalitarian. They were also asked about a handful of conspiracy theories to test a separate connection between conspiratorial thinking and the idea that climate science is a vast hoax.

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments