UQx Denial101x 1.7.2.2 Full interview with Larry Hamilton
Channel: UQx Denial101x Making Sense of Climate Science Denial
Date: 2016-08-15

Larry Hamilton professor of sociology and a Senior Fellow at Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire discusses his research into what kinds of demographics are linked to denial of climate science. 

Excerpts from interview:
"you've got some word going back to the 1990s where people started to notice what was originally called an elite or a top-down countermovement against the environmental movement, against Earth Day and Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, all the sort of bipartisan legislation of the '70s. There was an effort to roll them back. I think that may have started at the top, and there may be economic interests involved, but it's become much, much broader so that now people buy into anti-environmentalism from both top-down and bottom-up cultural identity reasons. "

"It turns out there are very systematic patterns, very replicable, that stand out in tens of thousands of survey interviews that we're doing in all sorts of different places. 

 Broadly speaking, there are sort of some usual suspects you look at when you're looking at survey data: gender, education, age, political identity. In terms of gender, women tend to have higher levels of concern or perceptions of risk compared with men. In terms of age, younger people tend to give higher credibility to science and to express greater concern about environmental issues. In terms of education—this is stronger than really the gender or the age effects for the most part—people with higher education tend to be more concerned about environmental issues and to give higher credibility to scientific reports. 

What dominates all of those is ideology. It's a stronger effect than any of the others. In fact, it changes some of the other effects so that education has a positive effect among liberal to moderate respondents, and it has a near-zero effect among conservative respondents. Actually, it turns to a negative effect on environmental concern for some measures among the most conservative."

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