Earlier this week, yesterday's Republican primary champ Rick Santorum called global warming a "hoax." Yes, a hoax. In other words, apparently scientists are in a global cabal to needlessly alarm us about what's happening with the climate -- and why would they do such a thing?
Well, presumably to help advance an economy-choking agenda of global governance -- or perhaps, to line their own pockets with government research grants. Seriously.
Santorum's absurd global warming conspiracy theory is the kind of thing that absolutely outrages liberals -- but to my mind, they really ought to be getting used to it by now. From global warming denial to claims about "death panels" to baseless fears about inflation, it often seems there are so many factually wrong claims on the political right that those who make them live in a different reality.
So here's an idea: Maybe they actually do. And maybe we can look to science itself -- albeit, ironically, a body of science whose fundamental premise (the theory of evolution) most Republicans deny -- to help understand why it is that they view the world so differently.
In my last piece here, I commented on the growing body of research suggesting that the difference between liberals and conservatives is not merely ideological in nature. Rather, it seems more deeply rooted in psychology and the brain -- with ideology itself emerging as a kind of by-product of fundamentally different patterns of perceiving and responding to the world that spill over into many aspects of life, not just the political.
To back this up, I listed seven published studies showing a consistent set of physiological, brain, and "attentional" differences between liberals and conservatives. Later on my blog, I listed no less than eleven studies showing genetic differences as well.
Last month, yet another scientific paper on this subject came out -- from the National Science Foundation-supported political physiology laboratory at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The work, published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (free version here), goes further still in helping us understand how biological and physiological differences between liberals and conservatives may lead to very different patterns of political behavior.
As the new research suggests, conservatism is largely a defensive ideology -- and therefore, much more appealing to people who go through life sensitive and highly attuned to aversive or threatening aspects of their environments. By contrast, liberalism can be thought of as an exploratory ideology -- much more appealing to people who go through life trying things out and seeking the new.
All of this is reflected, in a measurable way, in the physiological responses that liberals and conservatives show to emotionally evocative but otherwise entirely apolitical images -- and also to images of politicians, either on their own side or from across the aisle.
To show as much, the Nebraska-Lincoln researchers had liberals and conservatives look at varying combinations of images that were meant to excite different emotions. There were images that caused fear and disgust -- a spider crawling on a person's face, maggots in an open wound -- but also images that made you feel happy: a smiling child, a bunny rabbit. The researchers also mixed in images of liberal and conservative politicians -- Bill and Hillary Clinton, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.
While they did all of this, the scientists measured the subjects' "skin conductance" -- the moistening of their sweat glands, an indication of sympathetic nervous system arousal -- as well as where their eyes went first and how long they stayed there.
The difference was striking: Conservatives showed much stronger skin responses to negative images, compared with the positive ones. Liberals showed the opposite. And when the scientists turned to studying eye gaze or "attentional" patterns, they found that conservatives looked much more quickly at negative or threatening images, and spent more time fixating on them. Liberals, in contrast, were less quickly drawn to negative images -- and spent more time looking at positive ones.
Similar things have been found before -- but the big breakthrough in the new study was showing that these tendencies carried over perfectly to the different sides' responses to images of politicians. Conservatives had stronger rapid fire physiological responses to images of Bill and Hillary Clinton -- apparently perceiving them much as they perceive a threat. By contrast, liberals showed stronger responses to the same two politicians, apparently perceiving them much as they perceive an appetitive or positive stimulus.
As the authors concluded, "The aversive in life is more physiologically and cognitively tangible to some people and they tend to gravitate to the political right."
What does this mean?
To my mind, it means it is high time to grapple with a fact that we like to conveniently ignore: the left and the right are deeply asymmetrical actors in our politics. If we could acknowledge this, it might explain an awful lot.
For instance, consider a few observations that seem to take on new resonance in light of the latest research:
The Tea Party hates President Obama much more intensely than liberals love him. Or to state things less judgmentally, there is an "intensity gap," as the Pew Research Center puts it, between the right's political base and that of the left.
As of last May, for instance, 84 percent of staunch conservatives strongly disapproved of Obama's job performance, but only 64 percent of solid liberals approved of it. Meanwhile, 70 percent of staunch conservatives viewed Obama very unfavorably, but only 45 percent of solid liberals had very favorable views of him.
What's going on here? To conservatives, the new research implies, President Obama may literally be an aversive and threatening stimuli (or, perhaps, a disgust-evoking one). They fixate on him, and respond to him, physiologically, in a defensive fashion.
For liberals, in contrast, Obama was surely once very appealing, perhaps circa 2008, and excited positive and appetitive emotions. But they've since grown bored or disillusioned with him and gone on to sample many other things in the environment -- like Occupy Wall Street -- always exploring and searching for the new. (All of which, incidentally, may translate into a very serious electoral disadvantage this fall.)
Conservatives opt for Fox News much more strongly than liberals opt for any single outlet. In a 2007 "selective exposure" study by Stanford researcher Shanto Iyengar, it was found Republicans overwhelmingly chose to read fake articles labeled with the "Fox News" logo, but chose a story running under a CNN or NPR logo just 10 percent of the time. By contrast, Democrats in the study didn't like Fox, but also didn't show a strong affinity for a particular alternative news source -- they seemed to sample information sources more widely.
What's going on here? One possibility is that in a political environment filled with perceived threats, Fox helps conservatives feel secure by giving them ideologically consistent and reassuring information. Alternatively, perhaps Fox's constant negative framing of liberals, and of other news sources, appeals to or even excites conservatives, whipping them up for political battle.
Either way, liberals just don't seem to need an outlet like Fox. Again, they're busy chasing after the new and different -- out exploring, rather than hunkering down.
The big question lying behind all this, of course, is why some people would have stronger and quicker responses than others to that which is perceived as negative and threatening (and disgusting). Or alternatively, why some people -- liberals -- would be less threat aversive than others. For as the University of Nebraska-Lincoln researchers note: "given the compelling evolutionary logic for organisms to be overly sensitive to aversive stimuli, it may be that those on the political left are more out of step with adaptive behaviors."
And thus are we drawn to the only context in which we can make any sense of any of this -- the understanding that we human primates evolved. As such, these rapid-fire responses to aversive stimuli are something we share with other animals -- a core part of our life-saving biological wiring.
And apparently, they differ in strength and intensity from person to person -- in turn triggering political differences in modern democracies. Who knew?
For now, I'll leave it to others to speculate on the root causes of these differences. But whatever those may be, the perceptual gap between left and right certainly seems less than "adaptive" at the present moment. It may be the fault of biology that we're now misfiring so very badly -- clashing in ways that, as with the debt ceiling fiasco, could have gravely harmed everybody in America, regardless of their particular ideology.
The Nebraska-Lincoln scientists interpret their results as a powerful argument in favor of greater political tolerance and understanding -- and I agree with them. Politics isn't war, and it isn't zero sum. It requires negotiation and compromise. Surely our public debates should be guided by something more than threat responses and fight-or-flight.
So how do we get beyond our political biology? Well, the implication for liberals seems obvious: If they want to fare better politically, they need to learn to go against their instincts and stay focused and committed.
And the lesson for conservatives? Well, here it is tougher. You see, first we'd have to get them to accept something they often view as aversive and threatening: The theory of evolution.
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Rick Santorum: I've Never Believed In The 'Hoax Of Global Warming'
Santorum: I never believed global warming 'hoax' - POLITICO.com
Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney are both bad news for climate ...
Still....
Conservatives are consumed with their fears. They fully expect bad and terrible things to happen and are often secretly satisfied when bad things do indeed happen.
The other day a gentlemen was telling me stories about how God often punished the people for disobeying him, and how God will do so again. That I was basically one of those wicked who would bring destruction onto the world. Without even asking I already know he supports the death penalty, wants open gun laws, denies global warming, thinks Obama is Muslim, and thinks people of different races shouldn't marry, much less two members of the same sex. Oh yeah, and he is against a woman's right to choose...I'd almost bet my life on it.
Funny thing is, I too support the death penalty, but I want stricter gun laws and will defend a woman's right to choose. I'm wasting less water and energy and I think Obama is a Christian, not that I actually give a darn!
All I could hear as he spoke was fear and more fear. He feels qualified to judge, and to punish. He thinks his fear has protected him and brought him to the place where he is now. He will not easily depart from the solace of his fear. So I leave him to it.
In the south pole, in winter, the temperature is minus 58 degrees F - absurdly cold. In the (very short) summer it goes up to a balmy minus 22 degrees F - still in the negatives!
For all that ice to melt and stay melted - which is what it would take for, say, oceans to rise around the world, the temperature would have to increase to over 32 degrees (positive) - that is, in summer, it would have to INCREASE around 50 degrees - to still be pretty cold but just above freezing.
The temperature is not going up 50 degrees! If it DID do that at the south pole, it would have to go up at least that much at the equator which would create so much cloud cover from the steaming water that the sunlight would not even penetrate it and... we're back to cooling.
Sure, we've done some polluting and chopped down some forests... but this planet is WAY ahead of us. There's only so much we can do to screw it up.
We couldn't melt the poles if we tried.
So you need to go beyond you simplistic thinking and look at the data where hypothesis have been tested. That's found in the peer-reviewed literature. What you are doing is just a thought experiment and won't lead you to the truth.
Why not take a few minutes to write an argument in your own words?
True, ice does not melt INLAND due to the extreme cold. But the ice sheet moves slowly towards the coast, where it forms ice sheets that extend hundreds of kilometers out onto the sea. And temperatures at the coast [further north, along the Antarctic Peninsula and in West Antarctic] do hover around the freezing point during the summer months, leading to ice calving and to the complete disappearance of some of those ice shelves, which further accelerates the flow of ice from inland, while increased sea temperatures (a fact, whether you believe in global warming or not) further aggravate the problem. So you see that the Antarctic ice cover does shrink. And that it has indeed been shrinking has been shown by tens of thousands of satellite pics taken over the last 15 years or so.
Caterpiller accepted millions of dollars in tax breaks from local, provincial and federal governments, then demanded that their employees in London accept a cut from $35 to 16.50 /hr plus a 50% reduction in pension and other benefits, or they would close the plant.
The employees were then locked out.
A few weeks later, Caterpiller announced that they were closing the plant in London and moving production to Muncie Ind., where workers accepted wages of $12 / hr and the governor had just signed a new bill making Indiana a "right to work (for less)" state, which will make it difficult, if not impossible for the workers at Caterpiller's plant in Muncie to ever form a union and win the $16.50 wage which the London workers rejected, muchless the $35 that they once earned.
The working class is under attack here in Canada and in the US. We are in a race to the bottom, but I believe we can resist by standing together in solidarity and saying NO.
Otherwise, more of us can expect to see our employers, on both sides of the border, demand that we too accept wage cuts of 50% or more in the not too distant future.
That's the thing I hate about responses to psychological studies. There's always one or two posters who say "I'm not like that!" (as if any of us can be even SLIGHTLY objective about our own mental processes-) or, "I know someone who isn't like that!" Okay, I'll bite- maybe YOU aren't like that. That doesn't invalidate it as a scientific observation. Penicillin is a wonderful antibiotic medication, but if YOU'RE allergic to it, it can kill you. Is Penicillin therefore invalidated as an antibiotic medication? No!
Robbing Peter to paypal Paul will always gain the assent of Paul. If he's a liberal.
I guess Yoda was right. "Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”
Here is the truth. Just within the last 500 years the Earth, the overall temperature, has been both warmer and cooler than it is today. (Research the little Ice Age and the Medieval warming period)
Here is a couple things to Ponder....Why is Greenland called Greenland.
Well before the little Ice Age the Norse settled on it. Plenty of land not covered by Ice, unlike today.
Everyone talk about the retreating Glaciers.
One of the most studied Glaciers is located in Galcier Bay National park in Alaska,
It is interesting to note that is sheer volume most of the retreat occured in between 1900 and 1933. In fact the majority of the retreat occred well before the advent of autos.
More importantly there isnt a single study that shows how the tiny volume of CO2 which is at 387 parts per million can generate enough heat to warm up the enitire atmosphere.
If you can find one please post.
My dad can beat up your dad.....LOL!
I am of the mind that people should be left alone in theirs lives and do what they will as long as they don't hurt others. I view government as a threat to individual liberty when it should be protecting it, and the threat comes from both sides of the eisle. They both seem willing to take freedoms, whether they be social (GOP) or economic (Dems), when if fact they are two sides of the same coin and people deserve a government that protects both, not limits both.
Government's a tool - it might not serve every purpose, but it definitely has its uses. We just need to be careful to reexamine the value of its programs from time to time. Even inflation can be useful on occasion. It certainly isn't the boogeyman it's often made out to be unless you let it run unchecked.
Quotes from "scientist" emails released from climategate II
"Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others.
I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.
Mike, The Figure you sent is very deceptive [...] there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC"
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/opinion/a-little-inflation-can-be-a-dangerous-thing.html
That is how science works.
Don't believe me? Citation to my most recent paper.
http://asmedl.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=JMDEDB000133000001014501000001&idtype=cvips&gifs=Yes&ref=no
The big problem with the global warming "scientists" is that they are getting funding from politicians who want alarmist statements they can use as political propaganda to get "emergency" legislation passed that gives them more political power, and more money under their control.
Looking at the evidence objectively, their is evidence of a gradual warming trend, but we have no smoking gun proof it is man-made, nor proof that it is a net negative effect on life on earth.
For most of the geologic history of the earth, we had much less glaciation, and higher CO2 levels. My take -- so what, adapt.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wizard_of_Oz_(1939_film)
Right, you get to decide what evidence everyone can look at? Sorry, nope.
Both of my parents are now in their 80s, watch Faux Noise and my Dad has started to believe that birther stuff about Obama.
What kills me is the people in their 70's, 80's and 90's, totally dependent on SS, subsidized housing, Medicare, Medicaid and VA benefits, but still railing about government handouts.