“The problem isn’t the public’s reasoning capacity; it’s the polluted science-communication environment that drives people apart, says Dan Kahan.“
He’s right. If climate science had always been honestly communicated there never would have been any notice taken of “global warming” and there’d be no division. (Don’t think that’s what he means though)
Understandably anxious to explain persistent controversy over climate change, the media have discovered a new culprit: the public. By piecing together bits of psychological research, many news reporters, opinion writers and bloggers have concluded that people are simply too irrational to recognize the implications of climate-change science.
This conclusion gets it half right. Studying things from a psychological angle does help to make sense of climate-change scepticism. But the true source of the problem, research suggests, is not that people are irrational. Instead, it is that their reasoning powers have become disabled by a polluted science-communication environment.
“How many fools does it take to make up a public?”
- Nicolas Chamfort