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Australian Study Treats Climate Change Skepticism as a Mental Disorder
September 17, 2022
A team of psychological researchers from Australia is delving into the mindset of those who refuse to buy the notion that man-made climate change is quickly creating an unlivable, barren wasteland on Earth. Researchers from the University of the Sunshine Coast looked to explain why such “cranks” continue to deny what they call “the reality of climate change, its causes, impacts and the need for mitigatory action.”
The study’s authors — Breanna Fraser, Patrick Nunn, and Rachael Sharman — set out to discover why climate change skeptics think the way they do, beyond what they call “sociodemographic and value factors.” Instead, the study proposed to look at psychological factors involved in climate change skepticism. The study asked 390 Australian participants why they refused to buy the climate change narrative.
“This mixed-methods study investigated whether more malleable psychological factors: locus of control; information processing style; and anti-reflexivity, predicted climate change scepticism above and beyond socio-demographic and value factors,” the study’s abstract declares.
According to the researchers, climate change skeptics were guilty of using “mental gymnastics” in order to deny what they called “the near-universal agreement among scientists on the reality and impact of climate change.”
Near universal? Really? What about the 1,100 scientists — including a Nobel laureate — who recently signed a declaration proclaiming “there is no climate emergency?” Among those scientists were 134 signatories from Australia, the same nation the participants in the survey were from.
The researchers found one very interesting result: Those who actually study an issue instead of blindly relying on government propaganda were actually more likely to be skeptical of so-called climate change.
“Contrary to our predictions, people with high analytical abilities were even more likely to be sceptical about this,” stated study authors Nunn and Sharman in a piece for The Conversation…
Also, in the study’s view, people who value individual liberty are less inclined to buy into the notion of a full-blown climate crisis.
“Those with stronger individualistic worldviews — their priority is individual autonomy as opposed to a more collectivist worldview — were more sceptical about humans causing climate change,” the authors stated…
Sky News’ Andrew Bolt made the point that the study was an attempt to classify climate change skepticism as a mental condition.
https://thenewamerican.com/australian-study-treats-climate-change-skepticism-as-a-mental-disorder/