Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
A recent story posted at Breitbart describes the latest anti-agriculture scheme concocted by the European Commission to reduce nitrogen pollution and land impacts of farming, by buying out thousands of farmers and forcing them to stop raising livestock.
A recent story posted at Breitbart describes the latest anti-agriculture scheme concocted by the European Commission to reduce nitrogen pollution and land impacts of farming, by buying out thousands of farmers and forcing them to stop raising livestock. This is a dangerous proposal for the Netherlands, and the rest of Europe, especially as food prices are already elevated. The proposal is likely to do far more harm than good.
On Tuesday, the governing arm of the European Union officially threw its support behind plans by the Dutch government to buy out thousands of farmers from their lands in order to meet the EU’s Natura 2000 scheme to protect certain environments. The plan, which would offer farmers 120 per cent of the value of their farm, could see some 3,000 so-called “peak” emitters of nitrogen shut down.
It was unclear before this week whether the EU would permit such a scheme, as it could have potentially fallen afoul of regulations surrounding state aid or subsidies. However, Brussels said that the plans were “necessary and appropriate” as they met the broader goals of the European Green Deal.
Despite calling it “necessary and appropriate,” and dismissing economic concerns, the reality is that the Netherlands provide the majority of the meat to the European market. The green-obsessed European Commission and The Netherlands’ government have been targeting their agricultural sector for years. As Climate Realism reported in “True, Daily Signal, Climate Change Policy Harms Farmers and Food Prices,” the Dutch government already got farmers to reduce nitrogen runoff by 70 percent through a voluntary program. Then, they demanded another 50 percent reduction that will be “voluntary or else.” That is, take the buyout, or the government will seize the farm anyway.
One of the more puzzling conditions of the scheme, according to Breitbart, is that “Dutch farmers would be prohibited from moving to other countries and starting up farms abroad, meaning that their knowledge and expertise would be squandered.”
Likewise in Britain, the government is also trying to buy off farmers in order to make them stop farming via grants given for setting aside land for wilderness.
Alarmists claim that agriculture is one of the worst offenders when it comes to climate change, especially types of livestock raising, like cattle ranching. In reality, these industries have far less impact than claimed. One study, referenced by Climate Realismhere and here, found that in the United States, livestock raising was responsible for just 4 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions. Plant crops were responsible for 10 percent. In Europe, where far fewer cattle are raised to begin with, it’s almost certainly lower.
Another significant point that the governments of The Netherlands and Europe at large seem not to grasp is, if they are so interested in going all-organic, meaning they will not use fossil-fuel derived fertilizers, they will need animal manure fertilizers. If they get rid of all the livestock which produce that, they will be left with no way to grow very many crops at all.
As Climate Realism has covered here, here, and here, organic farming and anti-agriculture climate policies don’t help the environment and also have a terrible impact on food prices which can lead to civil unrest and starvation.
If organic farming, using animal manure fertilizers, was to replace high-input agriculture worldwide, it would lead to an increase in land use needed to produce the same yields, increasing deforestation by 8-15 percent, according to one study by the Alliance for Science. Another study conducted by Swedish researchers found that, contrary to climate alarmists’ claims, organically farmed crops actually have a larger emissions impact than conventionally farmed produce.
These anti-food policies already led to a massive upset in recent elections, where the pro-farmer party BoerBurgerBeweging (BBB) won 17 of 75 seats. While popular, it appears the government of the Netherlands chose not to listen.
Farms are not a threat to the environment, or the climate. Getting rid of farms, on the other hand, is a clear and immediate threat to food security. Climate alarmists are wrong about the emissions impact of modern agriculture, and their proposed organic replacement policies have a greater impact on the environment than they understand. The only clear end of these proposals is a significant reduction of food produced. Bravo to Breitbart for keeping their eye on these developments in Europe.
Linnea Lueken is a Research Fellow with the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy.
While she was an intern with The Heartland Institute in 2018, she co-authored a Heartland Institute Policy Brief “Debunking Four Persistent Myths About Hydraulic Fracturing.”
The U.S. grid faces major reliability challenges, according to members of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission who used the word 34 times in their prepared testimony Thursday at a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing.
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission commissioners speak at a May 4, 2023, Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing. Retrieved from Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
The U.S. grid faces major reliability challenges, according to members of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission who used the word 34 times in their prepared testimony Thursday at a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing.
There is a “looming reliability crisis in our electricity markets,” FERC Commissioner James Danly said.
“The United States is heading for a very catastrophic situation in terms of reliability,” FERC Commissioner Mark Christie said.
FERC Acting Chairman Willie Phillips said, “We face unprecedented challenges to the reliability of our nation’s electric system.”
Christie said the main problem is that power plants are being retired at a faster pace than they’re being replaced, pointing to estimates from the PJM Interconnection.
About 40 GW, or 21% of PJM’s installed capacity, is at risk of retiring by 2030, the largest U.S. grid operator said in a Feb. 24 report. PJM expects only 15.1 GW to 30.6 GW of accredited capacity to come online by 2030.
“The arithmetic doesn’t work,” Christie said. “This problem is coming. It’s coming quickly. The red lights are flashing.”
Increasing transmission capability was discussed.
Also, new transmission could help ease reliability problems, according to Phillips.
“Transmission plays a critical role in facilitating the interconnection of new resources, while ensuring that the electric system remains reliable,” he said.
The points made during the commisioners’ testimony was disputed by Environmental Organizations.
Danly’s criticism of subsidies for renewable energy was off base, according to Devin Hartman, director of Energy and Environmental Policy at the R Street Institute, a free market-oriented public policy research group.
“Capacity markets secure sufficient levels of capacity irrespective of subsidy levels, but they cannot procure resources that governments prevent from being built or retained,” he said.
Also, utility integrated resource planning in RTOs can cause reliability problems, according to Hartman.
Germany April 2023 was the wettest in 15 years, 1.5°C cooler than mean
Symbol photo by P. Gosselin
According to the preliminary data gathered from the German DWD National Weather Service’s 2000 surface stations, April ,2023, was the first to be wetter than normal in 15 years. Over the past decade and a half before 2023, April had been always too dry.
According to DWD spokesman Uwe Kirsche, “For the first time in 15 years, an April in Germany was too wet again.” The rainy April helps to further relieve a drought situation that had plagued the country over the recent years.
1.5°C cooler than normal
The mean temperature in April, 2023, in Germany was 7.5 degrees Celsius. Compared to the current internationally valid 1991 to 2020 reference period, April thus ended up being 1.5 degrees Celsius too cool.
Cool phases dominated the first and last week of April at times – with icy nights at the beginning of the month. Carlsfeld in the Erzgebirge Mountains recorded the lowest temperature in Germany on the 5th with -8.8 °C. The temperature dropped to -4.8 °C from the 21st to the 23rd.
The temperature peaks were reported by Nienburg in Lower Saxony and Jena in Thuringia on the 22nd with 24.6 °C each. Thus, for the first time since 2008, there was not a single summer-like day with a reading of over 25 °C in Germany in April.
Wetter than normal
According to preliminary calculations by the DWD, 64 liters per square meter (l/m²) fell in April, thus making the month 40 percent wetter than the 1991 – 2020 reference period (45 l/m²). The highest monthly amounts (200 l/m²) were recorded in the Bavarian Alps, while the Baltic Sea region remained very dry with less than 20 l/m² in some areas.
Drought conditions subside
On the balance, the DWD noted a further recovery of soil moisture nationwide. Up to the 24th of April, it was within the range of the seasonal average values compared to the average of the period 1991-2020 in parts of the mountains and from the Baltic Sea to the northern center, otherwise it was widely above. See the current DWD report of May 2,, 2023.
With about 150 hours, sunshine in April was well below its mean value of 183 hours seen for the 1991 – 2020 reference period.
Like the 1960s
In terms of temperature and precipitation, April 2023 in Germany was similar to the Aprils of the older and colder 1961-1990 reference period, which saw a mean temperature of only 7.4°C and mean precipitation of 58 liters per square meter.
The spectre of power failure is haunting Europe as Britain and Germany demonstrate that modern societies can’t run on wind and solar power. Wind droughts are the fatal flaw in the system and one can envisage a future book titled How Wind Droughts Destroyed Western Civilisation.
The spectre of power failure is haunting Europe as Britain and Germany demonstrate that modern societies can’t run on wind and solar power. Wind droughts are the fatal flaw in the system and one can envisage a future book titled How Wind Droughts Destroyed Western Civilisation. Think about the consequences of a system blackout if Net Zero policies are pursued to the bitter end in Western Europe and Australia…
Texas in 2021 gave us a glimpse of the abyss during a spell of low wind and a serious cold snap. Hundreds died and it would have been thousands if the state had gone completely black, instead of hanging on by a thread. Now, Texas is planning to subsidise gas producers to maintain capacity in the face of competition from subsidised wind and solar power.
Wind droughts were not properly considered in the rush to decarbonise the power supply, but they can’t be ignored any longer. The burning question is: How did the meteorologists fail to issue wind drought warnings? They monitor every other kind of extreme weather to feed the inexhaustible appetite of the media for bad news about ‘climate change’.
In Australia the answer is easy. According to a CSIRO report in 2002, the Bureau of Meteorology used the average velocity of the wind for weeks and months to measure wind resources with information collected at hundreds of sites established by the BOM during the 1990s. Tom Quirk and Paul Miskelly first reported wind droughts using the AEMO data which reports the output from the registered wind farms at five-minute intervals.
Our wind droughts mostly last less than a day and they max out around three days, based on the AEMO records. In the BOM records, a wind drought lasting three days would simply lower the number for the week or the month without signalling that there was a serious restriction in the supply.
The neglect of wind droughts in Europe is harder to explain because the Dunkelflaute or ‘dark doldrums’ (the still, dark periods), can persist for weeks. They must have been well-known to sailors for centuries, also to the millers who pumped water in Holland and those who milled grain across the continent. And what about the experience of recreational sailors in modern times? In the absence of readily available historical records, it was helpful to read this comment by ‘Michael’ on a recent post by my colleague Peter Smith. It is an extract from a 1901 book by H.G. Wells.
‘Wind was extremely inconvenient for the purpose of pumping [water from mines] because in these latitudes it is inconstant: it was costly, too, because “at any time the labourers might be obliged to sit at the pit’s mouth for weeks together whistling for a gale”.H.G. Wells, in Anticipations of the Reactions of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought, 1901.’
Yes Virginia, they did have wind droughts in England before 2020!
Official recognition in the wind industry was slow in coming, although the German policy of energiewende was clearly in trouble in 2018 when a government report admitted that it was failing on three vital metrics: cost, reliability, and emission reduction. Recently, there has been more coverage of wind issues, but officially the green transition is still happening. More research is required, with hard questions directed to the responsible authorities.
On the home front, in 2001 I put some hard questions to the energy ministers in each state. The objective was to present a paper at a seminar organised by the Clean Energy Authority. The paper would describe the due diligence performed in each state to take account of wind droughts
The abstract was submitted in good time, but it was not accepted for the program. Still, the investigation went on. All the states had ambitious green energy plans and I asked how they would deal with a month like June 2020 with multiple wind droughts. The bottom line was: ‘Please specify the quantity and the estimated cost of the various kinds of storage and any other resources that would be provided to cover a period like that.’ The relevant departments sent their plans but in my opinion, did not provide the detailed information that was requested.
Then followed persistent requests to the NSW Department of Planning, Industry, and Environment, for a conversation with a planner to discuss the matter of wind droughts. Eventually, they referred me to an officer in AEMO. He invoked the Holy Trinity of transmission lines, pumped hydro, and batteries. This is clutching at straws as energy realists have repeatedly explained.
We are left with serious concerns about the diligence and competence of our energy planners. Let’s see how it goes in NSW after Liddell Power Station closes at the end of the month. If you are worried, think about a home generator, or a move to Tasmania.
Now that Charles is King, it seems the new euphemisms for WEF-style totalitarian climate change activism is a defence of “environmental issues,” “protecting the natural world,” and “backing conservation.”
Now that Charles is King, it seems the new euphemisms for WEF-style totalitarian climate change activism is a defence of “environmental issues,” “protecting the natural world,” and “backing conservation.”
In a pre-coronation interview with the BBC, Sir David Attenborough said on Friday he believes that Charles will continue his activism while he is King, despite the constitutional demand that a British monarch remains apolitical. Today is Attenborough’s 97th birthday and it seems fitting to say I believe him. Why wouldn’t he tell the truth?
Money quote from Attenborough: “…now everybody realises that the future of humanity is dependent upon a healthy natural world.The way ahead demands that leaders of the state should actually give their full backing and I’m quite sure that as King he will lead this country in a very important way.”
In true 1984 style, it seems the ruling elite are redefining terms to fit their ideology: recasting the King’s former activism and promotion of World Economic Forum agendas as entirely a defence of the environment and conservation issues. No doubt this tactic is meant to convince the naive public that there was never any politics involved in what Charles did before and so it cannot be considered political now that Charles is King.
But those who have been paying attention know better.
It also suggests that what those wealty powerbrokers have planned for us cannot work without the King’s considerable power and influence. This may sound awfully cynical but my eyes have been opened by Attenborough’s behaviour over the falling walrus issue and the alliances he’s made with the WWF and Netflix over the last few years. You may agree when you read what has been circulating in the news over the weekend, summarized below.
Here is what actually happened during the Attenborough BBC interview the day before the corontion (Friday, 5 May 2023), from the Youtube video provided by the broadcaster, at the 3:36 mark:
The interviewer comments that being a “campaigning prince was one thing” but that “the constitutional parametres change when you are the monarch,” and goes on to ask if Attenborough feels Charles will “be able to say less about the environment, to be less active on that front.” [my emphasis]
Attenborough seems to answer the opposite question, with enthusiasm: “Yes, I sincerely hope so. And I believe he will.”
After a bit of historical narrative about Charles’ life-long commitment to “a healthy natural world,” Attenborough states:
“The way ahead demands that leaders of the state should actually give their full backing and I’m quite sure that as King he will lead this country in a very important way.”
That doesn’t sound like being less active on addressing climate change: it sounds like more.
The BBC has not provided a print version of the interview. Other outlets repeated Sir David’s answer but not the question he was asked. Their headlines also did not say “environment” but “conservation,” further pushing the public to believe this is all about protecting endangered species and biological diversity.
The online news outlet France24 (5 May 2023) even found someone willing to insist that Charles was not a radical environmentalist but a “mainstream ecologist” and that he has not called for an end to capitalism (my emphasis):
However, “Charles III’s positions are not radical,” says Thibaud Harrois, lecturer in contemporary British civilisation at Paris’ Sorbonne-Nouvelle University. “He has not called for the end of capitalism. He is doing what could be described as ‘mainstream’ ecology, accepted by all at a time when there is scientific consensus on the issue of global warming,” adds Harrois.
And in a EuroNews article (6 May 2023), the Australian Prime Minister insisted that Charles’ radical environmentalism is not political (my emphasis):
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese encouraged His Majesty to continue his environmental work saying that it didn’t break political neutrality.
“I think dealing with the challenge of climate change shouldn’t be seen as a political issue, it should be seen as an issue that is about humanity and about our very quality of life and survival as a world,” he told Australian news outlet ABC. “I think engagement in issues is very different from engagement in party political matters. That would be entirely inappropriate.
The Queen of Tonga’s happy mien contrasted strongly with the lowering weather, and this particular image has proved to be one of the most enduring memories of our own Queen’s coronation day – 56 years ago this month.
Reposted from the late Philip Eden’s website, originally published in 2009:
Coronation Weather, 1953
Worst June weather of the century? by Philip Eden
A very large woman wreathed in smiles and a rather small austere-looking man rode down the Mall in an open carriage. The Queen of Tonga’s happy mien contrasted strongly with the lowering weather, and this particular image has proved to be one of the most enduring memories of our own Queen’s coronation day – 56 years ago this month.
Weatherwise, 2 June 1953 was an atrocious day in the middle of a lengthy spell of atrocious weather. May that year had been a superb month with weeks of warm sunshine interspersed with occasional thundery downpours. Eight days before Coronation Day, on the Whit Monday holiday, the temperature soared to 31.7°C in London and Surrey but there was a sudden and complete change in the weather the following day.
A cold front brought thunder-showers and a sharp drop in temperature on May 26, and from then until the middle of June the British Isles lay between high pressure over the Atlantic, usually located somewhere between Ireland and Iceland, and low pressure over the near-continent. As a result the country lay under a very cool and moist northerly airflow throughout this period. June 2 itself was a miserable, November-like day in London as far as the weather was concerned, with dull skies, a chill wind and sporadic outbreaks of rain during the morning, although it dried out gradually later on. The afternoon temperature climbed no higher than 12°C – several degrees lower than the Queen’s wedding day in November six years before.
It could have been worse – other parts of England had torrential downpours that day and there were floods in Northumberland after 70mm of rain fell in short order. And the following day was even colder; the maximum on 3rd June in London was 11°C, in Birmingham it was just 8°C, and at Aberdeen only 7°C.
None of the 20th century’s coronation days had been blessed with really good weather. George VI’s, on May 12, 1937, was similarly cool and cloudy with rain during the first part of the morning and again in the evening; George V’s, on June 22, 1911, was a disappointingly cloudy day with a chilly breeze although the rain held off; and Edward VII’s, on August 9, 1902, was similarly cool and cloudy but dry with just a few fleeting flickers of sunlight.
Recalling the pictures of that procession down the Mall, I am also reminded of Noël Coward’s response when asked who Queen Sarote of Tonga’s companion was. “Her lunch”, he said.
From the camp of “let’s scare airline travelers without checking the data first” are a number of news reports that hit the press about a month ago claiming that climate change is making aircraft turbulence worse.
From the camp of “let’s scare airline travelers without checking the data first” are a number of news reports that hit the press about a month ago claiming that climate change is making aircraft turbulence worse. Below is one such article from NPR, but many more can be found at the usual climate crisis web sites (CNN, Washington Post, Newsweek, etc..): https://www.npr.org/2023/04/06/1166993992/turbulence-climate-change
Of course the news articles are laced with anecdotal observations and the usual reference to a climate model study featuring predictions 60 years into the future. What is odd, however, is that none of the news reports contained any actual turbulence data to see if this is actually becoming a problem in a warming world.
The graph below is from a 2021 National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) safety research report on preventing turbulence-related injuries in air carrier operations. It indicates the total number of accidents (light blue) and the number of accidents due to turbulence (dark blue) per 100,000 flight hours over the past 30 years. Accidents are defined as an incident where at least one passenger suffers a serious injury or the aircraft receives substantial damage. The NTSB concluded “there was no obvious trend in turbulence-related accidents during this period.” Once again, the real data is counter to the scare reports from the climate change community.
CFACT’s president and co-founder, Craig Rucker, was invited to testify to a hearing hosted by the New Jersey state Senate Republicans investigating the reasons behind the increase in whale and dolphin deaths along the Jersey Shore.
CFACT’s president and co-founder, Craig Rucker, was invited to testify to a hearing hosted by the New Jersey state Senate Republicans investigating the reasons behind the increase in whale and dolphin deaths along the Jersey Shore. This comes after CFACT’s coalition efforts to bring awareness to whale deaths via a plane banner and billboard near Atlantic City brought significant media and government attention.
Many New Jersey residents are very concerned about the deaths of the whales and dolphins. Various experts were called upon to give their piece of advice regarding the issue, including CFACT’s president. Rucker focused on the faulty scientific arguments Biden’s wind power plan is based on regarding climate change, which Rucker explained haven’t changed much since the global warming narrative first appeared decades ago, then explained the very obvious impact the loud acoustic testing for setting the bases of the turbines has on the mammals.
“It’s our contention that the reckless net zero energy policies that are currently being pursued by the Biden Administration as well as certain governors and agencies at both the national and state level are doing irreparable harm to our natural world, and they should be halted until further research be undertaken to assess their impacts,” Rucker said.
CFACT’s Craig Rucker speaks during the virtual hearing (top right) while Senator Testa takes notes (top left), fellow panelist Bob Stern (bottom left) listens in, and Senate GOP official Brad Schnure (bottom right) moderates.
“President Biden, like his predecessor Barack Obama, has made clear he believes a climate crisis is an ‘existential threat’ to the planet. He’s undertaken what he calls a ‘whole of government approach’ to tackling it. Now, my organization CFACT has participated as a recognized NGO at virtually every major United Nations climate gathering since the 1990s. And full disclosure, we would dispute the President’s assertions of doom and gloom and the urgency to act with reckless abandon, in pursuing so-called ‘green energy,’ such as offshore wind.”
Rucker went on to explain that the sound level of the acoustic testing and drilling needed to install the offshore wind turbines is very similar to that used by the Navy, which has already been determined to cause damage and harm to marine mammals that depend on sound and sonar to communicate.
“The decibel level of the sonar testing for the offshore wind, where you are at [New Jersey], is not far removed from that which the Navy used, often reaching near 200 decibels. The monopile driving to place the wind turbines into the ground can also reach that level or higher as well as the operational sound of giant wind turbines once they’re up and running according to our research. This presents a clear and present danger to all whale species, especially the Right Whale, of which there are only about 350 or so that remain in the wild.”
Senator Michael Testa had a question for both Rucker and other panelists regarding the greenhouse gas impact of the projects.
“Have you seen…any studies of how much of a positive impact this project would have in the elimination of greenhouse gases,” Senator Testa asked. “I’ve been given a lot of information from constituents and from other concerned citizens that are not within my legislative district that they’ve seen studies that say the ultimate positive impact that this project would have if fully built out is actually zero.”
‘We are looking into that issue, we have a project called the ‘Net Zero Reality Coalition’ which is actually formed for that purpose to look at what projects like this are doing,” Rucker said. “We have’t derived an answer for this specific project as of yet, however, it is a contention of the scientists and researchers we have on that, that actually it might increase green house gases…”
It is CFACT’s hope that this is the first of several hearings covering this important issue to bring media and government attention to the plight of not just the whales, but of ratepayers and fishermen as well.
Why is disbelief in anthropogenic climate change common despite broad scientific consensus to the contrary? A widely held explanation involves politically motivated (system 2) reasoning: Rather than helping uncover the truth, people use their reasoning abilities to protect their partisan identities and reject beliefs that threaten those identities. Despite the popularity of this account, the evidence supporting it (i) does not account for the fact that partisanship is confounded with prior beliefs about the world and (ii) is entirely correlational with respect to the effect of reasoning. Here, we address these shortcomings by (i) measuring prior beliefs and (ii) experimentally manipulating participants’ extent of reasoning using cognitive load and time pressure while they evaluate arguments for or against anthropogenic global warming. The results provide no support for the politically motivated system 2 reasoning account over other accounts: Engaging in more reasoning led people to have greater coherence between judgments and their prior beliefs about climate change—a process that can be consistent with rational (unbiased) Bayesian reasoning—and did not exacerbate the impact of partisanship once prior beliefs are accounted for.
It is commonly argued that reasoning exacerbates political bias via identity-protective cognition. This theoretical account has had a particular influence on the explanation of partisan differences in the context of global warming. According to this account, people exert mental effort to defend their political identities by disputing identity-inconsistent information. However, our results provide no support for this account over other accounts. Beyond raising theoretical questions about how people reason about climate change, our findings suggest a potential alternative pathway for addressing it. Instead of focusing on interventions that try to decrease partisanship saliency when communicating about science, interventions aimed at providing accurate information about climate change may be effective in the long run.
Introduction
Skepticism about climate change and its human origins represents a major impediment to the adoption of climate change mitigation policies (1–3). One of the most commonly cited reasons for climate change denial is political partisanship or ideologies (4). In the United States, for example, people on the political right are more likely to believe that climate change is a hoax or that it is not caused by human activities (2, 5–8). What is more, people with greater numerical ability and cognitive sophistication show more pronounced partisan differences in climate change beliefs, rather than greater agreement with the scientific consensus (9–13). That is, having stronger cognitive ability appears to not protect against climate misperceptions but instead bolster views that align with one’s political identity.
The most popular explanation of this result is provided by the motivated system 2 reasoning (MS2R) framework (11, 14–16). Motivated reasoning has been used in connection with a number of processes and motivations, but in this research, we specifically focus on political motivations, as they have been argued to be the primary drivers of climate change disbelief (11). This MS2R framework can be interpreted from the point of view of the dual-process perspective (17–19), which distinguishes between two types of reasoning processes: intuition (system 1) and deliberation (system 2). While intuition is considered a low-effort, quick, automatic response to stimuli, deliberation is a more effortful, time-consuming process. The MS2R framework asserts that cognitive abilities are linked to greater polarization because deliberation facilitates politically motivated reasoning: When faced with new evidence, engaging in deliberation better allows one to discredit the evidence if it is not congenial to one’s identity and partisan commitments (and vice versa when it is congenial). As a result, there are large partisan differences in what evidence is deemed credible, eventually leading to substantial polarization in beliefs. In the language of dual-process theory, deliberative reasoning processes are triggered to rationalize or justify identity-consistent intuitive impulses. In the context of climate change, this would mean that deliberation leads Republicans to reject evidence in favor of climate change (to protect their partisan identity), while deliberation leads Democrats to reject evidence questioning climate change (10, 11, 20–23). If more cognitively sophisticated people engage in more deliberation, they will be better at aligning their judgments of evidence about climate change with their respective political identities.
This theory has enormous practical importance because, if it is true, common strategies such as educating people or making them more reflective will not be effective against climate change denial. In fact, such strategies will only serve to increase partisan differences (10, 23, 24) (although there is evidence questioning this assumption (25–27)). Furthermore, from a theoretical perspective, this “MS2R” account stands in stark contrast to a common dual-process perspective—the “classical reasoning” view—whereby system 2 reasoning is thought to typically facilitate accuracy in a variety of decision-making tasks (18, 28, 29). Put differently, the classical reasoning account posits that when people engage in deliberation, they tend to form more accurate beliefs, regardless of the partisan or identity alignment of the propositions that they are deliberating about (29, 30).
However, there are two serious limitations of the prior empirical research in this area. First, political identity is correlated with—but meaningfully separable from—people’s prior beliefs about climate change (31). In particular, Democrats are much more likely to believe that climate change is caused by human activity than Republicans. Yet, many Republicans do believe in anthropogenic climate change, and some Democrats do not, meaning that partisanship and priors are meaningfully distinct constructs. For example, a recent Pew survey found that 53% of conservative Republicans believe that human activity contributes to global warming to at least some degree, while 8% of moderate Democrats think that it does not (5). Yet most studies claiming to provide evidence of politically motivated reasoning have not measured these prior beliefs, which is highly problematic for making strong claims about politically motivated reasoning (31–33). Although partisanship might influence prior beliefs, many other factors also contribute to beliefs, such as who people judge trustworthy as well as family environment or life experiences (12), and prior beliefs may also influence partisanship. Thus, effects driven by prior beliefs do not provide positive evidence in support of politically motivated reasoning.
Indeed, recent correlational work finds that controlling for prior beliefs related to climate change nullifies the correlation between cognitive sophistication and partisan bias; instead, higher cognitive reflection was associated with placing greater emphasis on prior beliefs when evaluating new information (31). While evaluating new evidence in light of prior beliefs is sometimes called “confirmation bias” and can be a vehicle for politically motivated reasoning in so much as political identities influence prior beliefs, it is also possible that such evaluation can be entirely rational and unbiased from a Bayesian perspective1 when there is uncertainty about the reliability of sources (34–38). When considering evidence that is inconsistent with your prior beliefs, it can be rational to conclude that it is more likely that the information source is unreliable than it would be to take the stance that everything that (or much of what) you know about a topic is wrong. It is therefore essential to account for prior beliefs when attempting to test for politically motivated reasoning. Any relationships with identity that are not robust to controlling for prior beliefs do not provide positive evidence for politically motivated reasoning because they can be consistent with either political or accuracy motivations. Indeed, distinguishing the effects of prior beliefs and partisanship is important and common in the literature, even among proponents of the MS2R account, best described by Kahan (39): “Under [motivated system 2 reasoning], the signature feature of this form of information processing is the opportunistic adjustment of the weight-assigned evidence conditional on its conformity to positions associated with membership in identity-defining affinity groups. In Bayesian terms, there is an endogenous relationship between the likelihood ratio and a person’s political predispositions. It is this entanglement that distinguishes politically motivated reasoning from a normative conception of Bayesian information processing, in which the weight (likelihood ratio assigned) evidence is determined on the basis of valid, truth-seeking criteria independent of an individual’s cultural identity. [Motivated system 2 reasoning] also distinguishes politically motivated reasoning from cognitively biased forms of information processing in which the likelihood ratio is endogenous to some non-truth-seeking influence other than identity protection, such as an individuals’ priors in the case of confirmation bias,” although the effects of prior beliefs and partisanship have not been sufficiently empirically investigated in the context of investigating the apparent role of deliberation (39, 40).
Second, past research on MS2R has relied upon correlating individual differences in cognitive sophistication (e.g. cognitive reflection, numeracy, and education) with the extent of partisan differences on politicized issues (9, 11, 41). Although it is generally thought that people scoring higher on cognitive sophistication scales are better at deliberation than people scoring lower on these scales, they also tend to differ in many other aspects. For example, they tend to generate different intuitions on many reasoning tasks (i.e. people who are more cognitively sophisticated also have different prior beliefs and knowledge than those who score lower (42, 43)). Thus, because this approach is correlational, it does not allow for the direct identification of causal effects of deliberation.
Current research
In the current research, we address both of these limitations. First, we provide a causal test of the role of intuition and deliberation on how people evaluate pro climate change and contra climate change arguments by forcing some participants to make judgments under cognitive load and time pressure. Second, we measure prior beliefs about climate change by asking how serious risk participants believe climate change to be and how much they agree that human activity causes climate change.
This paradigm allows us to shed new light on competing accounts of the role of deliberation in argument evaluation surrounding climate change: Does deliberation magnify partisan bias, consistent with the MS2R framework (11)? Or does it facilitate accurate assessments, consistent with a more classical perspective on reasoning (30, 31, 37)?
Furthermore, we specify a third alternative. Previous research (e.g. studying blatantly false political news posts (30)) has argued that the classical reasoning approach simply predicts that more deliberation will lead to increased objective accuracy, defined here as holding a position more consistent with the scientific consensus on climate change. However, most people do not actually have direct access to the information needed to know the objectively accurate answer, particularly in the context of complicated technical issues like climate change. Thus, the classical reasoning account would not necessarily predict that deliberation leads to more objectively accurate views. Instead, accuracy-motivated deliberation may lead to improved coherence between one’s existing directly relevant beliefs and the stimuli being presented. That is, deliberation may increase the extent to which one evaluates whether new information makes sense in light of the relevant beliefs/knowledge that one has developed based on previous information that one has encountered (a process that, as discussed above, can be consistent with unbiased, rational Bayesian updating (34–37)). In this case, deliberation should magnify differences based on prior beliefs. As a result, finding that deliberation increases coherence with prior beliefs could be consistent with either a motivated or rational account.
In our experiments, we asked participants to indicate how much they agreed with politically neutral arguments about climate change (meaning that there were no references in them to specific policies or to politics in any way). These arguments were taken from “procon.org,” a website that collects arguments that were made in real life about several different topics. Arguments were content counter-balanced, such that for each statement, we created a pro and contra version, one of which was randomly assigned to a given participant; participants never saw both the pro and contra versions of the same argument. Altogether, they were presented with six arguments (half contra and half pro). Table 1 shows the pro and contra versions of an example item from our experiment (for a complete set of statements, see Table S1).
You can read the rest of the article explaining why and how your reasoning is deficient and that you are an emotionally manipulated troglodyte here.
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