 I'm Larry Hamilton. I'm a professor of sociology and a senior fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. I study environmental sociology including humans in the Arctic and I also do a lot of public opinion surveys on science and environmental perceptions among the public. Well I think it's been very active. I think you've got some work going back to the 1990s where people started to notice the what was originally called an elite or top-down counter movement against the environmental movement against Earth Day and the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, all the sort of bipartisan legislation of the 70s. There was an effort to roll that back and I think that 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 sort of cultural identity reasons. In the literature there are some accounts that I consider to be top-down in explaining opposition to things like clean air and clean water. That is there are political elites, there are ideological think tanks, there are large donors, there are media networks that are arguing from the top and telling people that these are the arguments, these are the positions, here are some scientific sounding rationale or an economic sounding rationale. That all being top-down then bottom-up I think there are people who are more or less inclined to listen to those arguments and to credit them or to discredit the alternatives and some of that may be psychological, some of it may have to do with your social position, we see all kinds of differences in terms of gender and education and age but dominated by differences in ideology, worldview or political party. Unquestionably the reality is a mixture of both. The problem is that that's hard to study and people bring in different toolkits, researchers do, to try and explain these things so that one way to study this sort of complex feedback interconnections is to simplify it a lot, to develop experimental designs where all the inputs are randomized except for one stimulus that you control and you can get some causal inferences that way. Another approach which is more like what I do as a sociologist working with survey data is you figure well it's so complicated that we're just going to treat that almost as if it were random and see what patterns stand out that's the net effect of all these interacting top down, bottom up influences and 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's sort of some usual suspects you look at when you're looking at survey data, gender, education, age, political identity and 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. But what dominates all of those is ideology. It's a stronger effect than any of the others and in fact 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 and actually turns to a negative effect on environmental concern for some measures among the most conservative. Bias dissimilation is a term, it's one of many terms used to describe essentially the same thing which is that people will tend to remember or believe information that reinforces what they already think, that reinforces their prejudices basically. And by the same token they will discredit, they will disbelieve and perhaps even discredit the source of information that conflicts with their prejudices. And this is well known from a lot of different psychological studies and it is so well known it goes by many different names. I think in one of my papers I have six or eight different theoretical frameworks that all say essentially the same thing that if it agrees with what you believe already then you're likely to remember that and to believe it. If it conflicts with your prejudices then you are gonna discredit it and also you now know you can't trust that source. Well, it's very active now and this is where the top down part becomes really prominent. I think that at the top of the information food chain right now seems to be bloggers and things like that. I think that very often you see new ideas maybe coming out first in scientific reports but those aren't very accessible to most people and they are digested very quickly by bloggers who will spin them in different ways. Some of them trying to accurately reflect what they understand the scientists who have said or sometimes even the scientists themselves will be bloggers but other times they may wish to give it a different ideological spin and repackage it for an audience that knows what websites to go to to hear what they would like to hear. Immediately near the bloggers in the food chain are media reporters and some of them connect directly with bloggers. Just it's a matter of timing. I see these arguments appear first on the blogs and I see them secondly showing up in media some exceptions being some journalists who actually are bloggers themselves and they move at the speed of electrons also it seems and then you see political leaders, media and so forth coming in a little bit later because mostly they don't have the capability to parse a scientific article on their own and they'll rely on specialists to do that but there are specialists who are in a sense ideological specialists as well as being able to restate a scientific study in words that still sound scientific. In my experience it's really hard to convert real believers on anything that you will just type yourself as an unreliable source if you if you contradict the things they really cherish. On the other hand in any survey or any election campaign you know there's a huge group in the middle that is not committed and that can be swayed in the these are the independent voters the uncommitted voters that you hear so much about in the run-up to an election and it drives pollsters crazy because they can't predict what those folks are doing and what that really tells you is that they make up their mind based on perhaps superficial things at the last minute like was there a really effective negative campaign ad did some candidate use the wrong words to describe something you know did the economy suddenly go up or down and that's hard to forecast the climate analog of that might have something to do with was there a climate event at the last minute because I think those things have very transient effects they don't change fundamental opinions but they can there is psychological research showing that a hot room or a spicy chewing gum can affect people's opinions about global warming there actually is one study and I couldn't tell you who did it you can look this up but I think they they contrasted mint versus cinnamon gum and also there are other variations on whether the plant in the corner is green or dying and whether the windows are open or closed so if you're interviewing people in this room they would think you know definitely global warming is here what we found was a very short-term effect that whether the previous day the interview day or the day before seem to have a positive influence on acceptance of the reality of climate change and my initial thinking of that was was well then maybe the weather will make people's minds up where science was not able to but the more I've looked at that the more that seems really transient so if it's warm one day if it's cold the next they can go back again that there isn't a deeper lesson there in our study in New Hampshire we found it mainly affected the independent voters that the Democrats knew what they thought the Republicans knew what they thought the independence were somewhat blowing in the wind and I'm I'm not sure how general that finding is yet that's some of these findings have been replicated in dozens of studies and some of them so far just one so there we have different degrees of confidence in them and I think it's there are a number of studies that have found effects from short-term whether or in experiments from ambient conditions in the in the room actually how generalizable those are I think is unclear because there are other studies that have tried to look at longer term events and sometimes you see them and sometimes you don't we for instance we we did one study regional study in rural areas where it seemed that winter warming in in snow country was very visible that if the temperature winter temperatures rise a few degrees in snow country it means that the season lasts that has a later starter and earlier finish that the lakes ice out earlier that ski slopes closed down sooner there are lots of really visible things that are not so visible for the same temperature effect in a more temperate environment part of the the sort of bottom up effect that people very much to use visceral experiences in forming their beliefs that now they shouldn't do this but informing their beliefs about the the nature of the global system and that that may be something very human maybe even scientists could be caught doing it sometimes but it is frustrating if you're trying to communicate research the question of trust in scientists is a live topic of debate and you can put together experiments where you manipulate the identity of science and and the content of the message and find a degree of symmetry that that if people if conservatives don't like the message then they will discredit the scientist and if they do like it then they will credit it and vice versa for liberals I think that occurs more in in experiments than necessarily in the real world where there are multiple complex inputs because the really big issues where there are political disagreements about the science really really core areas of science things like the age of the earth evolution climate change are not symmetrical there those are areas where liberals and moderates have largely accepted the science and the strongest resistance comes from conservatives well this is a new direction for us but it turned out we could do it retrospectively we ordinarily had been just dividing people on a democrats to republican scale and it just sort of started this year realizing we could go back and use another question our surveys to pull out tea party supporters as a as a fourth group and once we did that we saw right away that on on quite a number of issues the tea party supporters seem to be more different from the non-tea party republicans than the non-tea party republicans were from the independence and this was a statistical finding that we discovered initially over about 12 different issues 12 different questions that we asked the I think it will very regionally like if you do that survey in different regions you may get a different profile of people belonging to the parties so my generalizations right now come largely from New Hampshire data which is which is not a bad proxy for the U.S. but obviously it's not the same thing well I've I've always been an environmental sociologist and I am very interested I pay a lot of attention to the environment as as it's studied and as it's experienced and in fact as an undergraduate about three-quarters of my education was in marine biology so it was it's sort of a natural view for me to to listen to the scientists to talk with them they're often my co-authors collaborates about half of my articles are in natural science or interdisciplinary journals so more than most social scientists I've I've always been part of that or had a connection with that world and a lot of my work nowadays is in the Arctic where natural science is a very strong voice and presence my I first started doing stuff related to climate change because in the Arctic when you were talking to natural scientists in the by the mid-1990s late 1990s that was all they were talking about they were just astonished at what they were finding in their data sets we're seeing a lot of diversity now as scientists are trying to go outside of the sort of glacial pace of of scientific presentations and publications you're seeing people writing YouTube videos and blogging and doing op-eds and speaking to local town halls and church groups and so I think it's letting a thousand flowers bloom it's wonderful that people are trying all these things and I think it's very important to get the message out something that I've discovered is I've tried a little bit of this myself is that you really need to the backbone there of peer reviewed studies that it's all very well to go on local media and give your opinions about something but as soon as someone challenges that you you need to be able to back up what you've said so that this is not a replacement for traditional science communication it's an additional day job and that that increases the burden and not everybody is good at everything I think some people are good at videos and some may be good at writing op-ed pieces it's all making a contribution