Climategate, Public Opinion, and the Loss of Trust

In a nationwide representative survey conducted in 2008 and 2010, Americans' beliefs about climate change, awareness of risk, and confidence in scientists are declining markedly. Utilizing the social expansion of the risk analysis framework, this analysis empirically demonstrates the impact of "climate gates" - international scandals caused by unauthorized e - mail between UK and US climate scientists Examine you. The results show that "Climate Gate" has a major impact on public beliefs and confidence in scientists against global warming. However, the main loss of trust in scientists is an individual with a strong individualistic worldview or politically conservative ideology. Nonetheless, Americans generally trust scientists in general rather than other sources of global warming. It also explores several other explanations about the decline in public understanding, including poor economic conditions, new governments and parliaments, media attention to reduction, and unusual winter weather.

According to Anthony Leserowitz, Director of Yale University 's Climate Change Communication Program, climate gates had a big impact on public opinion. It significantly lowered the public's attention to climate change and led to a serious loss of trust to scientists. However, as currently expected, these declines concentrate on people with specific Americans groups, Republicans, Conservatives, and "individualism" values. Liberalists and those with 'value-based' values ​​do not often lose confidence in climate science and scientists. "In a sense, climate gates are like Rorschach's tests," Leserowitz says.

Climate gates have had a major impact on public beliefs on global warming and confidence in scientists. However, the main loss of trust in scientists is an individual with a strong individualistic worldview or politically conservative ideology. Nevertheless, Americans generally trust scientists over other sources of information on global warming. By the end of 2011, Steven F. Hayward wrote as follows. "The climate gate has done a thing about the global warming controversy that the Pentagon document for 40 years ago made for the Vietnam War: it definitely changed the story According to the editorial of Nature magazine, many of the media People "are guided by hot scandals from men with a clear agenda and disappear with actual facts and backgrounds".

Model 1: In social demography, Caucasians are more likely to lose confidence in climate scientists due to climate gates (p <0.05; F = 1.60; adjusted R2 = 0.011). Model 2: Politically oriented, political ideology and political parties are strong predictors of public confidence loss to climate scientists. Conservatives are most likely to lose confidence (Figure 2), Republicans, independent members, other party members, and individuals without factions lost confidence in scientists over the Democratic Party (dummy variable group (SI Fig. 2). Both political ideology and parties' identity explain 37% of the variance of trust losses (F = 53.13, p <.001). Model 3: In the world view, individualism is a powerful predictor of loss of confidence, and equalityism is a strong prediction of Americans without losing confidence in scientists. Worldview explained 47% of total variance (p <.001; F = 123.19; Adj. R 2 = 0.471; and SI