to the American conservative movement—have achieved a level of visibility in national newspaper coverage that
outpaces their scientific contributions. By publicly challenging the claims of the mainstream scientific community,
climate change contrarians create a sustained drama that journalists have been socialized to consider newsworthy
and integral to a “good story.” In recent years, most news articles in major newspapers cite at least one well-
known climate change contrarian. This journalistic practice produces a contrived storyline that breeds public
confusion between what is widely accepted knowledge and what is a highly speculative claim and between what
is a scientific judgment and what is a value judgment.
Overall, the political dynamics of climate change in the United States mirror the dynamics of technical
controversies, as documented by Mazur (1981) and Nelkin (1984). Briefly, the environmental community and
the conservative movement both utilize technical expertise as a crucial political resource; they both employ
professional scientists to give their positions scientific legitimacy. As observers have seen, considerably more
scientific evidence of climate change in the last decade has not significantly affected the position of the American
conservative movement. In other words, the public climate change controversy—similar to earlier technical
controversies—is less about the veracity of scientific evidence and mostly a conflict over competing values.
Members of the American conservative movement promote economic growth, deregulation, and business
dominance above most other values, and members of the environmental community prioritize values of ecological
sustainability and social justice. In other words, the contemporary public controversy over climate change is
not one that more science or more education will necessarily “solve” in the near future (see Nisbet and Mooney
2007).
We can illustrate this at the individual level with a brief analysis utilizing public opinion data from
a representative sample of 1009 American adults in March 2007. Analysis of this Gallup Poll data reveals
that we should be less sanguine about the likelihood that more education will necessarily correlate to greater
understanding of scientific positions of climate change. Overall, 58.77% of respondents (593 of 1009) believe
that the effects of global warming “have already begun to happen.” Yet, a closer look at self-reported political
ideology by education level reveals a different picture, as shown in the following table. We commonly believe that
a college degree gives its recipient greater scientific literacy, greater reading comprehension, and stronger critical
thinking and analytical reasoning skills than those individuals without such a degree. While a college degree does
seem to affect moderates’ and liberals’ beliefs that global warming has already begun, it has no such effect on
conservatives’ beliefs.