Wow, I guess you are serious. This would make this one of the stupidest, most knee-jerk, us-vs.-them posts I have ever read in Great Debates, and you’ve got some stiff competition. Stick with daytime talk radio, where asinine drivel like this gets lapped up by hydrocephalic subhumans.
I’m gonna work under the assumption that this isn’t a joke. If it is, your wit is awesome dry. Like Mother Teresa’s vagina dry.
What freedoms are Liberals against please? It seems like conservatives are the ones trying to legislate their religion into law and deciding what is alright to put into your body.
You don’t want liberals to raise your taxes, yet you want to increase the number of cars on the road? Who is going to pay for that? [EDIT: the road improvements]
…which is worse than the Neocon alternative? Going farther into debt to pay for their programs?
Do you think you should have health inspections if you sell hot dogs out of a cart? What regulations are the libs trying to saddle you with specifically?
Cite?
Why is the vast majority of the Earth’s climate scientists going along with the American Liberal agenda? Isn’t it just possible that you’re gripping onto a paranoid delusion?
Conservatives are pro condom now? Whoopee! I can boink hot conservatives with reckless abandon!
Mainly because effective responses to AGW might require vigorous government action and heavy regulation of industry, to which conservatives are ideologically opposed and liberals are not. Also, because business interests give a lot of money to political conservatives’ causes – their interests are perfectly aligned here.
21 posts, and no actual data yet. This poll is almost a year old, but I think it’ll do.
% of those who believe the earth is getting warmer/ due to human activity:
Conservative Republicans: 54/20
Moderate/Liberal Republicans: 78/46
Independents: 78/47
Moderate/Conservative Democrats: 83/54
Liberal Democrats: 92/71
All groups think Global Warming is happening, but not all think it’s because of human activity. Interestingly, almost 30% of “liberal Democrats” don’t think humans are causing global warming.
To chime in, I think a lot of conservatives hear echos of all the past supposed environmental disasters we were headed for with our decadent life styles…and go meh.
Most of the rational conservatives that I know actually DO believe that global climate change is happening. Where I think the divergence comes in is…what does it mean? What, if anything, can we actually do about it? Is it solely or mostly human caused or are humans just another factor in the equation? That is actually where I think the great divide is.
I think conservatives are more sensitive (and I think more realistic) as to the economic impacts that fighting GW will have…as well as being more sensitive to the bottom line in what we stand to gain by incuring that impact. Where as liberals (broadly) I think don’t actually care or dwell on those impacts…and also don’t think about what metrics we would use to see if our sacrific will actually help in tangible, real world terms.
For my part (probably unsurprisingly) I remain unconvinced of all the gloom and doom…though I do actually think GW is happening and that humans are having a major impact on it. I also remain unconvinced that the economic impacts are worth the gain…or that the folks advocating things like Kyoto are being either realistic OR honest with the general public. Myself, I think a market based solution is ALREADY starting to shape up in the US, with companies discovering that going green is of economic benifit to them…and consummers seeing gas prices rising and thinking that, hey, maybe they should get more efficient cars. Personally I don’t think ASKING people to sacrific for the cause will ever be effective, especially globally. However, finding ways to make it attractive for people from an economic perspective…well, to me this will always trump asking folks to be noble and suffer for the good of the planet. And I think this is a key difference between ‘conservatives’ and ‘liberal’ types on this issue.
-XT
My sense is that the AGW issue was first brought to our attention by liberals who never seem to have a problem suggesting that lifestyle changes need to be made and that government should be the agent of that change. Liberals like you, (forgive me if I err in assuming your position on the political spectrum) can’t seem to accept that conservatives have come to accept that AGW is happening just because they don’t buy into the exagerated liberal doomsday scenario or the solutions like buying flourescent bulbs.
By the way I bought a whole whack of flourescent bulbs about seven years or so ago. Long before Gore told me to. Never detected any change in my hydro bill, but damn those things never fail.
Silent spring? No oil by 2000? Imminent nuclear holocaust? Y2k? Killer asteroid? AGW?
If you don’t trust the media to get anything right (and I think that’s a pretty safe bet) it’s pretty easy to dismiss AGW as just another threat du jour. And if you do trust shaky studies released by or for conservative publications/FOX (which are often worse than respectable media), your suspicions will only seem to be confirmed. I suspect very few people actually see the data, much less understand it.
Some people don’t want to believe it (Pit level comment about oil companies removed) so all they have to do is look around for a report that supports the position they want to believe, just as some people will tend to believe the worst case scenarios.
Then there are people that accept it, but trust in the government or Google or god to fix things.
And, I suspect, there are people who don’t particularly care. Let the Tuvalu move and who’ll miss polar bears? Besides, the Mercedes has air conditioning.
Wow, I had no idea Ann Coulter was a doper!
But are conservatives less likely to believe it than liberals? If so, why?
And then there is that data. Much of it is based on computer models…and a lot of it is frankly unintelligible to people who don’t have very specialized knowledge. Hell, some of it is unintelligible even to people who DO have specialized knowledge in related fields. I know some scientists who are geologists at Sandia (related field) who don’t get some of the finer points…and these are PHD’s for gods sake! I think on both sides of this debate there are people who are taking things pretty much on faith…because based on some of the threads I’ve seen here in GD a lot of the pro-AGW folks don’t really have a clue either. They are just trusting in the scientists to have it right and moving on. Seeing Jshore and Intention go at it I have to say that most times I’m barely able to figure out what the hell they are talking about, and I have no idea who is right or wrong much of the time.
To be sure, I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed…but I’m probably better informed than most folks either here in the US or world wide. Why would you expect people who don’t follow this stuff, who don’t find it interesting to be able to actually make an informed decision about the ‘data’?? HOW would they be able to do so? Should they simply take The Scientists™ on faith? Should they take The Evil Corporate Overlords™ on faith? Well…that’s pretty much what they DO actually…
-XT
I shouldn’t be responding to drivel, but, what the heck.
Conservatives just can’t stand the fact that Americans are so damn “Free”
Free to fuck people of their own gender
Free to have abortions
Free to take medical marijuana
Conservatives want CONTROL over our lives
And so do Liberals. I could come up with a similar list for Liberal attempts at control (guns, perhaps?). But really, this isn’t a thread about that, ehe?
-XT
It’s because People Are Fucking Stupid [sup]TM[/sup]
Political bias affects brain activity, study finds
“Democrats and Republicans both adept at ignoring facts, brain scans show”
“We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning,” said Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory University. “What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts.
…
Notably absent were any increases in activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most associated with reasoning”
Did you not notice the brilliant diatribe by Mangosteen, to which I was responding?
I don’t have any reason to be skeptical of AGW, I simply don’t see what difference it makes because we will not even be able to do so much as suspend the damage done at current levels even if we all stop driving cars or stop burning fuel for heat or cooking purposes.
For it to make any difference it would require six billion people to stop what they’re doing, and right now. That’s impossible, so we’re going to have to live with the consequences of it. It’s a little late for palliative care when you’re dying of cancer.
To be sure. What I don’t understand is…why you didn’t simply ignore him.
-XT
Why not just say “I believe AGW is happening and it will cause serious problems, but I don’t want any government regulation to prevent it. Let the free market solve the problem”?
Wouldn’t that be the honest response?
Do we see the response we are seeing because, if they agree that it is happening and it is a problem, then it would be much harder to win arguments against government regulation?
Better deny it is happening and forestall the whole government regulation discussion altogether.
If that is the case
a) Do they really believe that it is happening, but are not admitting to it for strategic reasons?
or
b) Due to subconsciously knowing that admitting to it will make arguing against government regulation harder, their brain does not allow them to believe in AGW, so they truly do not believe in it.
Based on the study I mentioned in my previous post above, (b) seems like a likely answer (with (a) for some of them)
[Although, I see from this thread that the more enlightened conservatives of the SDMB have progressed from the “AGW is not happening” of the conservative masses, to “AGW is happening, but it’s not that big a deal and/or there’s nothing we can do about it”]
To the OP: most conservatives don’t disbelieve global warming; rather most disbelievers are conservatives.
Even if you believe that, you must at least be able to see that we can reduce the rate at which we make things get worse. Every ton of CO2 not released from fossil fuel storage delays the worst that little bit, giving us more time to do something and/or to adjust to it.
When you’re accelerating toward a brick wall, even if the brake is broken you can at least take your foot off the accelerator.
Well, to be fair to Mangosteen, even if he was serious, the thread was evidently still in IMHO when he posted his contribution.