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Framing climate change

Mar 1st 2011, 22:15 by W.W. | IOWA CITY

OUR readers are evidently fascinated by American attitudes toward global warming and/or climate change. I say "and/or" because it turns out that opinion on the subject is sensitive to the language one uses to refer to the putative meteorological phenomenon. A new paper (ungated) in the scholarly journal Public Opinion Quarterly by Jonathon P. Schuldt, Sara H. Konrath, and Norbert Schwarz examined the websites of conservative and liberal think tanks and found that conservatives are more likely to speak of "global warming" whilst liberals are inclined to speak instead of "climate change". The elite conservative usage seems to be a cause or effect (probably both) of conservative public opinion.

Republicans were less likely to endorse that the phenomenon is real when it was referred to as “global warming” (44.0%) rather than “climate change” (60.2%), whereas Democrats were unaffected by question wording (86.9% vs. 86.4%). As a result, the partisan divide on the issue dropped from 42.9 percentage points under a “global warming” frame to 26.2 percentage points under a “climate change” frame.

What explains this? "Global warming", the authors note, directly elicits thought of rising temperatures, which encourages the anecdotal use of unusually cold or snowy weather as disconfirming evidence, whereas "climate change" puts the emphasis on the systemic transformation of weather patterns, which offers a broader context for the odd cold snap or snowmageddon. Additionally, the authors surmise, "global warming" connotes human causation and culpability somewhat more than "climate change".

But why isn't liberal opinion affected by the choice of semantic "frame"? Shuldt, Konrath, and Schwarz write:

First, Democrats tended to endorse high belief (Ms = 5.94 on a 7-point scale), raising the possibility of a ceiling effect. Second, Democrats’ beliefs about global climate change might be more crystallized and thus more protected from subtle manipulations, consistent with research showing that stronger attitudes are more resistant to change.

I take the upshot of the study to be that Americans are less polarised about climate change/global warming than they may appear. Disagreement under the "climate change" frame is really fairly mild. And the fact that conservative opinion is so susceptible to framing effects suggests a relatively low level of confidence about the issue.

I expect ideological disagreement over climate change will decline further as the debate over climate policy takes shape in the public imagination. In my experience, many libertarians and conservatives are motivated to deny global warming because they think admitting a problem amounts to handing government a blank check and a mandate to do whatever it wants to "fix" it. Once it becomes clearer that the best policy response to climate change is a tax on carbon, which can be entirely offset by cutting taxes elsewhere, those Americans wary of opening the door to enviro-fascism will begin to relax.

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Meme Mine wrote:
Mar 1st 2011 10:32 GMT

Preserve, Protect and Respect our planet without Climate Control.
Can we put our political agendas aside and work together on pollution and population control, not climate control? It’s happening anyways as the voters of the world walk away from the CO2 issue but certainly not the pollution issue itself. Climate Control was not about pollution, it was specifically about a CO2 death threat. Meanwhile, the UN had allowed carbon trading to trump 3rd world fresh water relief, starvation rescue and 3rd world education for just over a quarter of a century of climate control instead of needed population control.
Former climate control believers and remaining climate control believers all want the same thing, a sustainable and "civilized" planet, not a planet sustained on fear motivation, just to get people to turn the lights out more often.
It’s a beautiful planet and if we spent as much time loving and experiencing it as we do declaring it dead, we will be real planet lovers then.
SYSTEM CHANGE, not CLIMATE CHANGE If you still think voters will now say YES to making the weather nicer with taxes, YOU are the new denier. The world has walked away from the CO2 mistake. Continued defense of it isn’t helping anyone or the planet and even Obama didn’t mention climate in his state of the union speech. Let’s all get ahead of the curve as history watches us.

g cross wrote:
Mar 1st 2011 10:38 GMT

@ W.W.: "Once it becomes clearer that the best policy response to climate change is a tax on carbon, which can be entirely offset by cutting taxes elsewhere, those Americans wary of opening the door to enviro-fascism will begin to relax."

That is certainly a nice thought, at least.

OneAegis wrote:
Mar 1st 2011 10:40 GMT

So what you're telling me is that Republicans can't tell sh*t from shinola unless you clearly label them?

forsize wrote:
Mar 1st 2011 10:52 GMT

or it could be that "climate change" w/o the relevant hyper-politicized context means almost nothing as an actual statement, so more people are willing to agree with some vague near meaningless drivel of a statement assuming they are unaware or don't give a crap about what it is being used to symbolize.

pun.gent wrote:
Mar 1st 2011 11:03 GMT

One thing I would love would be to see the climate change science and denial square off in court, where there are rules of evidence. Ideally, we would see an outcome similar to the Dover School Board case, in which the creationists were comprehensively trounced, or the Tobacco health claim cases.

Of course, the science around climate change is merely strong, as opposed to totally overwhelming for evolution & smoking. But I still wish I could sue Rush Limbaugh and Fox News for fraud.

Now, this is not actually a good idea, as it would open massive scope for legal harassment by other stiflers of free speech. But I can dream.

whaleyboy wrote:
Mar 1st 2011 11:04 GMT

"or it could be that "climate change" w/o the relevant hyper-politicized context means almost nothing as an actual statement, so more people are willing to agree with some vague near meaningless drivel of a statement assuming they are unaware or don't give a crap about what it is being used to symbolize."

This.

Or possibly that the most visible proponents of "doing something" stand to benefit financially from the "something" that they propose (see the grossly wealthy Al Gore as an example). Once you start mixing my money with your ideology I get suspicious.

CJ Lives wrote:
Mar 1st 2011 11:05 GMT

"...those Americans wary of opening the door to enviro-fascism will begin to relax."

This statement seems to assume that knee-jerk outrage over phantom threats has some sort of relationship with facts and reasoned analysis.

Not sure where you're getting that one, WW.

Mar 1st 2011 11:05 GMT

Cap-and-dividend was once possible. Advocates let it slip from their hands by moralizing instead of solving. I do think carbon pricing will be possible again in the future. Hopefully, advocates will play their cards right next time. Here's a tip: If you want to convince libertarians, talk about dollars and cents, not Mother Earth. And I don't mean disingenuous economic arguments about green jobs. Less Thomas Friedman, more Milton Friedman.

g cross wrote:
Mar 1st 2011 11:14 GMT

@ RR: "Here's a tip: If you want to convince libertarians, talk about dollars and cents, not Mother Earth."

Plenty of people do, but they are generally ignored because they are harder to caricaturize.

g cross wrote:
Mar 1st 2011 11:17 GMT

@ whaleyboy: "Or possibly that the most visible proponents of "doing something" stand to benefit financially from the "something" that they propose (see the grossly wealthy Al Gore as an example)."

Then why don't you simply ignore him and base your opinion on what scientists/experts have to say on the matter?

k.a.gardner wrote:
Mar 1st 2011 11:21 GMT

It's called "Climate Change." I believe the term was officially agreed upon in a document entitled "Copenhagen Accord" on 18 December 2009.

g cross wrote:
Mar 1st 2011 11:21 GMT

Incidentally, RR, whaleyboy provides an excellent example of my point: it doesn't matter how many reasoned opinions there are on the pro-AGW side since many will simply ignore everything that they have to say and instead invoke Al Gore as the reason why AGW has been completely discredited in their mind.

g cross wrote:
Mar 1st 2011 11:26 GMT

k.a.gardner, as I understand it the term "climate change" had been preferred by scientists for many years and possibly decades before that agreement, since although the global average temperature *is* rising the response will not be a uniform increase in temperature everywhere but rather it will vary across localities and will in many cases result in increase variability which means that colds will be colder in addition to warms being warmer.

It's not like this term had suddenly been invented a couple of years ago and injected into the public discourse to cover up weaknesses in the theory of AGW, though many anti-AGW people have been working hard to rewrite history to make it seem this is what happened.

KSStein wrote:
Mar 1st 2011 11:32 GMT

"Once it becomes clearer that the best policy response to climate change is a tax on carbon, which can be entirely offset by cutting taxes elsewhere, those Americans wary of opening the door to enviro-fascism will begin to relax."

Wait, what? A massive tax on economic activity is going to reassure conservatives and libertarians? I think the fact that a massive tax is the best solution is precisely what makes them so wary, no? (Especially because they know that your presupposed offsetting tax cuts will not happen except over the dead bodies of the CA, IL, NY and MA congressional delegations).

Dubby 09050 wrote:
Mar 1st 2011 11:43 GMT

I worked as a media relations specialist for a leading environmental group located on the left side of the political spectrum in the early aughts. When speaking about global warming/climate change, my superiors were adamant that we refer to the phenomenon as global climate change, not global warming. There was an emphasis on message discipline. I suspected that my superiors were emphatic about the use "climate change" because they realized that they were losing the fight by using "warming." The left reframed this debate years ago, not the right. I surmise that the left learned before the right that "warming" is a term that was not always supported by the evidence, particularly the anecdotal evidence, but evidence could always be manipulated to support "climate change." I left this organization after being disillusioned that the left never considered evidence that there might be a non-human cause for climate change and that skeptics were always considered tools of industry and should be ridiculed rather than engaged in meaningful conversations.

g cross wrote:
Mar 1st 2011 11:59 GMT

Yes, Dubby, I completely agree that when people heard "global warming" they heard "temperatures will go up everywhere" rather than "the average temperature will go up for the globe", and so this term was bad messaging because people heard it for something other than it meant. Thus, the left switched to the term "climate change" because people hear its meaning as something closer to what the scientists actually mean when they use this term and what they forsee happening as a result of a rise in the global average temperature.

Again, there is no conspiracy here. Those claiming that global warming was disproven by record colds and so the left had to change to the more nebulous "climate change" in response are either ignorant or lying.

k.a.gardner wrote:
Mar 2nd 2011 12:01 GMT

g cross, my point being the "scholarly journal Public Opinion Quarterly by Jonathon P. Schuldt, Sara H. Konrath, and Norbert Schwarz examined the websites of conservative and liberal think tanks..." is a paper available today ungated on this post.

Here is the official ungated link to the "United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change" website. It explains what happened last year in Cancun. The next conference is Bangkok, Thailand 3-8 April 2011.

http://unfccc.int/2860.php

bampbs wrote:
Mar 2nd 2011 12:01 GMT

Deciding the truth or falsity of a scientific hypothesis by majority vote of the ignorant masses is about as ridiculous as it gets.

g cross wrote:
Mar 2nd 2011 12:04 GMT

@ g cross: "and so this term was bad messaging because people heard it for something other than it meant."

Sorry, to clarify what I should have said was that the picture people got when they heard the term was different from the picture in the minds of those using the term. It would of course be unreasonable to expect someone who was completely ignorant about climatology to hear the term "global warming" for the first time and immediately think that it meant something *other* than temperatures increasing everywhere. This is a strong reason why it makes sense to use the term "climate change" in place of "global warming": the picture in the minds of the speaker and the listener are far more likely to correspond.

g cross wrote:
Mar 2nd 2011 12:08 GMT

k.a.gardner, fine, I agree that many on the left made the wise decision to change their language to more accurately convey what was happening in the last few years when they realized that people were getting the wrong impression. However, I will continue to maintain my original point (which is not necessarily in contradiction to your follow-up) that this change caused the language to become closer to what the scientists themselves had already been using and was not something merely invented ad-hoc for the purpose.

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