Why do some people reject science? Here’s why …

[DJ Droood]

It would require a complete redistribution of farms, food transport and more to even begin to deal with what we face now.

I'm glad to see you coming over to our side, Comrade.

[Merlyn]

Divide and conquer...
First the problem is to create a divide.
To do that, a simplification of all factors needs to be boiled down into an "us & them" mentality. Such is the global warming science. We then saw it all morph into climate change.
Either way it is all aimed at cap & spend. Now, cap & spend seems like a good idea, it however ends up allowing business to either pay to pollute or simply cry foul and move to a place overseas where there are no pollution standards at all and lots of cheap labor, thus killing jobs here and making other countries suffer our poor business policies.

Then.. all they have to do is make it impossible to be us. We are left with typical political socialism, Nanny-state "we will do it all for you...for a fee". Problem is those fees end up in political pockets and pathetic red tape stalling and never see the light of day. So "we" are screwed and out of money to do what we need to do and should do. Example: tax business for polluting and thus remove the needed money to make better methods, act on pollution problems and abate the global warming trend.

So far the political business machine is winning...
They all have it down to a political science. It is no accident that our economy is always hanging by a thread. Predatory lending is based on typical human faults and known results. Thus any small business that falls into the credit trap is "most likely" to barely make it, never flourish and potentially fail. It is all compounded by tax when credit burns one end of the candle and tax, the other.

Earth ecology is far from simple. "Global Warming" is an over simplification of the problem designd to deliberately divide us and by mandate, ignore all the factors that we are already facing. With the many fronts facing government they make excuse to tax as solution to all problems. With so many taxes we are nickel and dimed into the inability to fight back. They know just how many dimes it takes to keep people from getting even one inch ahead. Just ask a farmer... Any effort to redistribute farming and end our need for foods that are unregulated from countries where there is no regulation, is oddly abated by over regulation and tax here. Go figure eh?

I have always been on your side DJ, I just see this entire issue a bit differently from a business standpoint and a political scam standpoint.
Here is how: Any effort by government to play the ecology game by giving grants to scientists is a thinly veiled effort to push their tax and scam agenda. It is like a wolf putting on a sheep skin. I simply do not buy into it and never will.

Climate change is by far a more natural thing than anything we could contribute to, over-all. Our .01% contribution is like a drop in the bucket. Granted that drop could be like the "last straw". We however are facing MUCH more important issues, all glazed over with this over-simple reason for socialistic answers. How better to defeat the enemy but by getting them to think they are on our side?? They are clearly NOT. If they were, this issue of global warming and climate change would have been long ago history and solved in the 60s and 70s. Unknown to most, we have plenty of oil & gas right here in the us. Rather than responsibly manage our own resource, we plunder oil from other places, drill in the ocean and cause all kinds of ecological havoc, wars and glaze it all over by omissions. Rather than clearly invest and assist our own businesses to achieve the goals needed not to pollute, create non-polluting cars, non-polluting industry, we have taxed and plundered those financial resources and instead make it much more economical for business to move out of our country and pollute by shipping everything back here. Rather than support our own farmers and provide this vast country with plenty of food, we instead make it almost impossible to farm by imposing taxes and regulations that strangle anyone who does not agree to ship our own produce in mass quantity for very low pay to other countries.
The list can go on & on. My distrust of our government motives runs very deep, so when I see a wolf in sheep’s clothing, like Al Gore, preaching ecology in the name of socialism and pretend like he cares while his own way of life is enough to strangle the ecology, lavish and self serving, I tend to be very skeptical.

Merlyn /|\

[Merlyn]

Where from here?
First we need to get a grip on what our government did.
Early on in the late night sessions after WW2 and the world was a different place our government faced a sobering reality a new direction was chosen for us all. In the years that followed a large amount of the west was bought up by our government, lands that hold a great deal of resource and an unknown amount of oil. Plundering the resources of other countries became the "deal" before using up our own. The rest of the story has played out before our eyes, and the idea has caused more destruction then we can even imagine yet. The consequence of this new world order has disrupted the East, reshaped its borders and left the splintered culture we see fighting for its life and reforming as we can only watch today.

Now: technology has begun to unlock our North American resources. Knowing that we have already reached peak oil in all ways in all other countries, and the resulting wars, ecological destruction and resentment must change, we are moving ahead with new eyes to the future. As example: we have an oil field the size of West Virginia already opening up. This in a country which has depended on foreign oil for decades. http://www.npr.org/2011/12/02/142695152 ... kota-towns

"Every one of those rigs has brought 120 jobs to western North Dakota," Helms says. "When you do the math, that's about 25,000 people, and there's another 10,000 people whose jobs are to lay the pipes to the producing wells, build the natural gas processing plants and all of that."

The taste of life lorded by oil is bitter-sweet. Like the East, the rich culture formed by how people live will be totally changed, and life will be very different.
There is good and bad, and Fracking is something that the long term results have yet to be known. It has a high risk of disrupting a much more valuable resource: fresh water.

Business as usual:
As we see with the pipeline project from Canada to our refineries in the south, dependence on oil is shifting, but no real progress is being made to change our ways. We will be facing a new reality, that oil will be forever more expensive, and that may be the only thing that makes alternative fuels, energy and methods gain financing and popularity.
Farms rely on oil. Without the large equipment, the vast amounts of food produced would never happen. Again we see the two sided reality of overpopulation.

What has to change:
Trouble with politicians today is we seem to have voted in lawyers. Ever see a lawyer that can really do accounting? Nothing is worse for our country than to have rich lawyers run our government. The rich legal minds have made laws to keep them in power and make it near impossible for any other kind of politician. Frankly, politicians make poor leaders often, possibly better then military leaders, but most often not by much. Military leaders and lawyers are often hand in hand when it comes to poor business policy for the rest of us.

They say what they think we want to hear.
In the mean time we are causing future problems that may well make global warming seem like a non-issue. In the name of economy, any effort to change our direction is being abated daily. Fracking (hydraulically fracturing) an area the size of West Virginia is a dangerous idea. Contamination of farm land and it's water resource will put many things into deep trouble. Meanwhile we will be adding more CO2 into the atmosphere and every bit of that CO2 requires O2 to burn. Depletion of O2 isn't even being looked at, not even a concern yet. No grants are being given out to scientists to discover just how badly we are destroying out delicate balance and how close our earth is to reacting to it. Climate change is already on the move toward a much colder reality.

How many bad winters will it take before global warming becomes ice age? That is hard to say, however the redistribution of ocean currents and the melting of the ice is a good distraction for the moment.

Water and farms:

"They're consuming all of our resources," he says. "They're consuming all of our people looking for jobs. All the employee base is used up. Our roads system is being used up. All our water is being used up. All our sewage systems are being used up. [They're] overwhelmed. All of our leadership time as local public officials is consumed with this."

With the use of Ethanol as a supplement for gasoline, farming will be a direct competition with oil drilling and gas fracking. We have a future of ecological disasters all waiting to happen and few options thanks to “cap and spend” politics and the divide skillfully crafted by science grants to make “business as usual” the way of today.

Merlyn /|\

[Merlyn]

So much for the obvious abatement by government, capitalism and the military of global warming progress.
To move ahead from the grass roots up we need more than disgruntled people occupying wall street.

We see the signs of collapse of the capitalist system all around us.
Any project meets its end. Industrialism has fueled dictators to power and as we watch China use this same method, we already know how it will play out. How many more will follow? We very obviously cannot endure the stress of our ecology to see India, Africa and so on use industrialism to conquer the needs of hunger and famine, rightly things that must change. Desperation is what is forcing many to disregard global warming science, climate change and all the signs we see showing us our present methods spell ecological disaster and over population driven end of times for our earth and thus us. I will also say we have deliberately destroyed, in the name of religion and other things, much knowledge from long past eras.

Knowing that governments repeatedly fail often and the lazy human factor causes our ambition to fall silent after revolution, how do we as Drui make this leap of faith a way for all others? Do we sit knowing our fate and do nothing? Is a leap of faith a call to action? Questions which run large.....

Face it:
We are headed into a time which "things are not going to return to business as usual". In fact they simply cannot. Too much has changed with our times to ever go back to how things were. Building new homes is fuel for economy, however we have more homes then we need. Food supply is a factor which relies on oil, and as we face rising fuel prices we obviously face rising food prices. Eventually the capitalist system of supply and demand will meet the other end of the stick: shipping becomes too expensive.

Helpless?
Are we all really helpless? Have we allowed our socialist capitalism to make is impossible to bring change in any kind of time? Or are we going to see change as a natural progression of fuel expense overturning huge business due to their lack of ability to adapt?

Is it?
that we have a divide due to belief or not in science? Has science become the dark age of our time? Is this why people disbelieve global warming?
It freed us from the grips of religion in a lot of ways long ago, can it overcome the skeptical agression of politics.

I would say that most of us "believe" our earth is in trouble because of our ways, not just our abuse of oil, (the burning of the earth) and deforestation, but even more so due to our lack of concern at a personal level. Here is where I see the lack of commitment. It is hard to commit our goals in the face of a time where drones wander the skis, our cell phones have spyware and everything is linked to a credit system that screws us out of our family wealth and future.

For all of the reasons above, I say no, the article is far to over simple in its view. I see factors that range in many directions to say that people ignore global warming just because they do not believe science. In a way the article is right in "people choose to ignore science". That IMO would be more accurate. And in a lot of ways they have every right to feel that way. It is self defeating however, on a grand scale to allow ourselves to be defeated in such ways as we are now.

Can America change for the better?
http://www.npr.org/2011/12/06/142942778 ... gas-limits

The biggest reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, however, will have to come from refineries and power plants. Each company will get allowances to emit a certain amount. If they can't live within the cap, they can pay someone else to reduce gases somewhere else

Can America move from industrialism into a new age of ecological responsibility and make it pay off?
Will we as a people change from our disbelief of global warming science into a model for other countries? The test ground here is often California.
And as we watch this state work from a position of bad debt into a new way of life, perhaps the rest of the states may follow this lead. That is of course... if the politicians keep their greedy hands off!
http://www.npr.org/2011/12/06/143156586 ... for-change
In light.
Merlyn /|\

[Dragonwyst]

I bought a book today, "Wilful Blindness" by Margaret Heffernan. It may well provide some answers to this question.

There are several reasons why people reject science in my opinion.

Science - or at least the understanding thereof (and I think this is touched on elsewhere in the thread) created a societal divide - a "them and us". Such divides are not well tolerated in this day and age of chopping down tall poppies. Consequently, anything that the media/popular voices provide that brings down those lofty scientists spreads like wildfire. Thus, the conspiracy is born.

Sadly there is just enough truth to make at least some of those conspiracies true. Mostly they involve money. Sometimes they involve hard evidence like Thalidomide babies. Suddenly scientific motives no longer fulfil those lofty, true and pure ideals by which such endeavers were sold to the public in the past. The image got tarnished. Scientists can't be trusted anymore because they are reliant on grants that are funded by people who are asking for proof of a previously determined position instead of a theory.

The need to explain scientific things to people results in simplification. This leads to a break down in communication. Sadly, not all scientists are good communicators, and media people are often past master at passing on distorted information or biased information.

People forget. I think one of the reasons why there is so much anti-vaccination sentiment out there is that people don't remember what it was like to have family crippled by Polio and dying from Small pox - what it was like losing one person after another to TB.

And then, mostly, big business and politics. Between them, and their use of the media and their pocket-paid scientists or idiots who aren't scientists but like to pretend 9 and pretend to other titles) no-one knows what to believe anymore. When communication boils down to telling people that if they believe one side they will lose their jobs and if they believe the other the end of the world will come, losing jobs is far more immediate and real.

Wilful blindness is prosecutable. I've no idea what forcing wilful blindness on a gullible general population constitutes, but it looks something like mass murder to me.