Do you think libertarians are science denialists?
Well, actually, there’s evidence to that:
Although nearly all domain experts agree that carbon dioxide emissions are altering the world’s climate, segments of the public remain unconvinced by the scientific evidence. Internet blogs have become a platform for denial of climate change, and bloggers have taken a prominent role in questioning climate science. We report a survey of climate-blog visitors to identify the variables underlying acceptance and rejection of climate science. Our findings parallel those of previous work and show that endorsement of free-market economics predicted rejection of climate science. Endorsement of free markets also predicted the rejection of other established scientific findings, such as the facts that HIV causes AIDS and that smoking causes lung cancer. We additionally show that, above and beyond endorsement of free markets, endorsement of a cluster of conspiracy theories (e.g., that the Federal Bureau of Investigation killed Martin Luther King, Jr.) predicted rejection of climate science as well as other scientific findings. Our results provide empirical support for previous suggestions that conspiratorial thinking contributes to the rejection of science. Acceptance of science, by contrast, was strongly associated with the perception of a consensus among scientists.
Of course this isn’t carved in stone, you can be an advocate of free market and accept climate science, and we’ve seen examples to the contrary with PsyEv and GMOs and nuclear energy (you know, scientific consensus matters only when it’s about climate change), but this is telling a lot.
I wonder if my science-embracing [economic] libertarian friends would change their minds if I was to show them evidence about free market assumptions being wildly anti-scientific and fact-denying.
