Well folks, I’ve gone and done it again. I’ve managed to get in to a long, drawn out debate on my private Facebook page with a couple of my friends who happen to be global warming deniers and I let me just say, it was illuminating. For the purposes of this set of posts and to maintain their anonymity, I’ll call my friends Cleanthes and Demea.
At the end of the day, I didn’t change their minds and of course, they didn’t change mind. For those neutrals out there, I’ve taken the liberty of cutting out the different types of arguments they made, categorizing them as neatly as I could in to the typical denier’s buckets, and lining up my arguments against theirs. Of course I’ll let you decide who carried the day.
By way of background, here’s the original study that prompted my status update. Basically I stumbled upon a study called Climate on Cable: The Nature and Impact of Global Warming Coverage on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC published in The International Journal of Press/Politics. The study results showed that one’s view of climate science had a statistically significant relationship with where one receives their news. Not surprisingly, Fox News viewers tend to be overwhelmingly dismissive of climate science.
Here’s my original facebook update:
Interesting but not at all surprising academic study on the relationship between exposure to cable news channel content and acceptance of global warming as a scientific norm, as well as how political partisanship moderates these relationships.
http://climateshiftproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/FeldmanStudy.pdf
I’ll follow up this post with both their arguments and mine. Enjoy and stay tuned.
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