A climate-change study disguised with economic terms such as
profits and trade surplus has had analysts agreeing that statements from
climate-change deniers were "overwhelmingly" misleading.
Data
from six climate change trends such as rising sea levels
was relabelled with terms relating to trade surplus, business profits or
population trends. The study was taken up to show the facts of each climate change trend, without the politics.
Graphs were then presented to 22 economists and 30 statisticians to
review the data and determine if a statement that was related to each
graph was accurate.
The study was conducted in England in 2014 and has been published in the journal Global Environmental Change.
University
of Queensland School of Psychology researcher Timothy Ballard said each
statement was either from those who agreed with climate change or those
who didn't.
"We found that those in the survey who were exposed
to these denier statements, even when translated into another context,
people overwhelmingly rated them as misleading," he said.
"The other thing we did, half the time above the graph they were
exposed to these translated denier statements, the other half the time
they were translated into statements that accurately reflected the
scientific consensus.
"When exposed to those statements, they rated the statements as accurate."
Data
was sourced relating to the reduction in arctic ice, glacier mass,
rising sea levels and rising global temperatures and was put into
various economic contexts, Dr Ballard said.
"For example, we have a
graph that shows the arctic ice decrease over the last 30 years and we
basically just changed the labels on the graphs so that instead of the
viewer thinking it was arctic ice, they think it is profits for this
fictitious company," he said.
"The actual data and the trends they are seeing is exactly the same. The
individual glacier mass was translated into a population for
individuals or villages, sea level was translated into a daily currency
trade volume. There was nothing particularly special about these
new contexts, they just had trends that resembled the overall trends or,
in this case, sea level."
Dr Ballard said the study was taken up to show the facts of each climate change trend, without the politics.
"The
background is that climate change has gotten so politicised and
particularly those who are not believing in climate change, the deniers
or whatever you want to call them, their arguments were that you can't
take anything that climate scientists are saying because they are trying
to push their political agenda," he said.
"If you can separate
the data from the political context then it might help to get a clearer
picture of the merits of each of the arguments.
"We used
economists and statisticians in our sample, the logic was that these
people are very well trained in evaluating data and they should be well
equipped to whether these particular claims about the data are
accurate."
Dr Ballard said inaccessibility to climate science left a lot of people unaware of the facts.
"You
see a lot of climate deniers painting the picture of uncertainty and
using it is as a reason to cast out on the climate-change people," he
said.
"They don't know either way and so they are potentially susceptible to weak arguments. The
arguments that have led scientists to conclude that climate change is
existing and is going to get worse, they are very complex ... these
arguments are not easily accessible. The whole idea of
decontextualisation, of not only understanding the merits but as a way of
presenting it, is certainly an interesting idea."
A species that evolved to prioritize short-term threats is pretty much doomed to ignore a long-term threat until it is too late.
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
"...and I'm just gettin warmed up!" -- Mother Nature
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