Tuesday, November 6, 2012

PRODUCTION scientists pro Romney and Denial ; IMPACT scientists pro Obama and climate change reality ?

undergrad scientists DENY climate change, vote Romney
The latest Washington Post/ABC TV poll has a few figures you probably hadn't seen in this polled-to-death election season : the difference in GOP/DEMOCRAT support between people with undergraduate and post graduate degrees : undergrads pro Romney, post-grads pro Obama.


I believe it explains the push back on climate change reality in one easy sentence:

Undergraduates with degrees in science tend to go to work in factories producing things (and pollution) ; while scientists with post graduate degrees tend to work in universities and government assessing the impact of that pollution upon the wider world and society.

Allan Schnaiberg's election


Canadian sociologist Allan Schnaiberg - dead for years - could probably explain the current American election (the one that has both sides refusing to mention climate change)   better than anyone alive ---- thanks to his theory of the primal conflict between production science and impact science.

The pushback on climate change reality is coming from people with undergraduate degrees in science - enough to be minimally credible to speak on science matters , but not really involved in current world class basic research.

Typically, the lead climate deniers are TV weathermen in their seventies, with an undergraduate science degree from a fourth rate university that they obtained in the early 1960s, based on mediocre teachers whose own science education was last seriously updated in the late 1940s.

State of the art climate science today is simply quite different than it was 65 years ago and this is fuelling the conflict between two sides , both sides sincerely convinced that their science is the state of the art....

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