Percent of Respondents Who Believe the Effects of Global Warming Have Already Begun to Happen by
Education Level and Self-Identified Political IdeologyNo College Degree College Degree
Self-identified conservatives with a college degree perceive the timing of global warming the same way
as do those without a college degree. One reasonable interpretation of this is that conservatives’ ideological
position filters the science (data and scientists) to which they are exposed. Conservatives long past college
may be less likely to weigh scientific evidence and international assessments as heavily as do their moderate or
liberal counterparts. This could be due to their possible animosity to environmentalism, their greater support for
laissez-faire economics, and their stronger desire to weaken the federal government. Younger conservatives who
recently attended college during which they would have heard about climate change likely had a slightly different
experience. These young adults might have attended private colleges (possibly fundamentalist Christian ones)
where climate science was either ignored or disparaged. Others might have attended public schools, but they
could have avoided such classes on environmental topics or they might have filtered the messages in these classes
as just more propaganda from their liberal professors. At any rate, more research is needed to investigate this.
To sum, the American conservative movement has employed two-dimensional power to neutralize (if
not remove) climate change from the national agenda. It has done so largely by attacking the science providing
evidence of climate change. This has produced a situation of policy gridlock, where the federal government is just
as close to implementing a feasible climate policy in 2008 as it was in 1993. In addition, while public awareness
of global warming and public support for a climate change policy is relatively high, such public opinion is not
immune from ideology. Self-identified conservatives and Republicans report much weaker support than do their
liberal and Democrat counterparts.
What do we need to know: What are the major sociological research questions?
What Do We Need to Know About the Political Dynamics of Climate Change? Climate change ultimately is
a social problem—one created by human activities, one perceived by human activities, and one possibly solved
by human activities. As argued in the climate change manifesto in the box on page one, this global environmental
problem is the quintessential problem of the modern era—the domain of sociological scholarship. We need
further integration of environmental sociology, political sociology, social movement scholarship, and sociology
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