Tag Archives: hamilton

POLL: Tea Party Members Really, Really Don’t Trust Scientists

Mother Jones

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It’s one of the biggest trends in US politics over the last decade: A growing left-right split over the validity of scientific information. This “science gap” is apparent most of all on the issue of climate change, but the problem is much broader, encompassing topics ranging from evolution to the safety and effectiveness of condoms in preventing sexually transmitted diseases.

Yet even those of us who know how politicized science has become may be surprised by some new polling data out of the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire. There, survey researcher Lawrence Hamilton has run a new analysis of 568 New Hampshire residents, asking them a variety of questions including the following: “Would you say that you trust, don’t trust, or are unsure about scientists as a source of information about environmental issues?” Hamilton then broke down the responses by party, separating out members of the tea party from more mainstream Republicans. And look at the result:

Lawrence Hamilton, 2014.

This is pretty striking: The first three political groups—Democrats, independents, and non-tea party Republicans—all trust scientists on the environment. But then you come to tea party members, and suddenly, distrust in scientists soars. The numbers are stark: 60 percent of traditional Republicans trust scientists on the environment, versus only 28 percent of tea partiers.

Hamilton says he’s surprised by the strength of these results. “I didn’t realize it would be at the level of division that it was,” says Hamilton. He adds that while Republicans and tea partiers in New Hampshire aren’t precisely the same in all respects as they are elsewhere in America, “in general, New Hampshire is not drastically unrepresentative.” When it comes to tea partiers and more traditional Republicans on the national level, Hamilton says that he “would expect similar gaps to show up.”

So what’s going on with this plummeting trust in scientists on the ideological right? The main factor, Hamilton thinks, is that the highly polarized climate issue is leading climate deniers to break up with scientists in general. “Climate change is sort of bleeding over into a lower trust in science across a range of issues,” says Hamilton. That means the consequences are not limited to the climate issue. “The critiques of climate science work by often arguing that science is corrupt, and then that spills over to other kinds of science,” Hamilton observes. Prior research has found that watching Fox News, in particular, leads to a declining trust in climate scientists.

The new data on trust in science comprise just one part of Hamilton’s new report. The study also looked at partisan gaps on a number of other scientific issues, and compared the size of those gaps with those that exist on non-scientific issues. And again, the result was pretty surprising: In New Hampshire, there is a bigger partisan divide over climate change and whether environmental scientists are trustworthy than there is over abortion and the death penalty. Note that in this analysis, unlike in the earlier figure, Republican responses include both those of traditional Republicans and those of tea partiers. It is the latter who are driving much of the partisan gap on issues like trust in science:

Lawrence Hamilton, 2014

Last week, we got some of the scariest news about global warming yet: We may have already helped set in motion an irreversible destabilization of the West Antarctic ice sheet, thus locking in 10 or more feet of sea level rise over the coming centuries. It’s the kind of news that ought to serve as a wake up call for all Americans, causing them to stop and say: Enough. We’ve got to do something here.

But as these data make clear, when it comes to science, there’s no such thing as “all Americans” any more. There are highly polarized camps, divided over the very validity of the information.

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POLL: Tea Party Members Really, Really Don’t Trust Scientists

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PHOTOS: Koalas, Tennis Players Grapple with Australian Heat Wave

Mother Jones

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Parts of Australia are in the midst of a massive heat wave, straining resources and sparking fires. Matches had to be suspended at the Australian Open in Melbourne, where temperatures hit 109 degrees Fahrenheit. Here are photos showing the toll this extreme heat has taken on the country’s forests, animals, and visiting tennis stars.

A fire-fighting helicopter extinguishes a fire burning throughout Victoria’s Grampians region. Country Fire Authority/ZUMA

Fans cool off in a fountain outside the Rod Laver Arena on day five of the Australian Open. Jason O’Brien/ZUMA

Despite the heat, Serena Williams set a tournament record by winning her 61st Australian Open match. Ken Hawkins/ZUMA

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PHOTOS: Koalas, Tennis Players Grapple with Australian Heat Wave

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Scientists Find That Polluted Oceans Could Make Fish Anxious

Mother Jones

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This article originally appeared on The Atlantic and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

We’ve known for a while that the ocean is rapidly becoming too acidic for some forms of marine life to survive. We know that this is caused by continued rising emissions of carbon dioxide, which dissolves from the atmosphere into the ocean to form carbonic acid, which in turn dissolves/corrodes calcium carbonate-based coral reefs and shellfish.

Now we also know that ocean acidification does more than break down marine skeletons—it can actually cause behavioral changes in individual organisms. Simply stated, ocean acidification is making fish anxious—or, at least, anxiety as we measure it in fish.

Scientists from UCSD’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Canada’s MacEwan University recently published this surprising finding in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Science. But what does it mean for fish to be anxious? According to this study, all it takes is observing how much time the fish choose to spend in dark versus light areas of their habitats. The test subjects were juvenile rockfish, whose natural environments—kelp forests—off the California coast offer varying levels of shade and sunlight. The researchers put a control group of rockfish in a tank with “normal,” or unaltered, seawater and observed the fish moving continuously between the light and dark areas of the tank. They put a second group of rockfish in a tank with seawater of elevated acidity, meant to approximate the expected pH of the ocean one hundred years from now, and observed something different.

Previous studies have shown that fish dosed with anxiety-inducing drugs will, instead of moving continuously around their tanks, prefer to dwell in the dark spots. Turns out, putting fish in slightly more acidic water is just like administering an anxiety-inducing drug. “They would go to the dark part of the tank and they wouldn’t move. They just stayed there,” study co-author Martín Tresguerres told the L.A. Times last week.

“If the behavior that we observed in the lab applies to the wild during ocean acidification conditions, it could mean that juvenile rockfish may spend more time in the shaded areas instead of exploring around,” Tresguerres said in a press release last Wednesday. “This would have negative implications due to reduced time foraging for food, or alterations in dispersal behavior, among others.”

Notice that we’re not even talking about shellfish like lobsters or shrimp, who may or may not be experiencing mental anguish in awareness of their threatened bodily integrity. Let it be said, though, that a future study on anxiety in lobsters is not out of the question. “Behavioral neuroscience in fish is a relatively unexplored field, but we do know that fish are capable of many complicated cognitive tasks of learning and memory,” according to Trevor James Hamilton, another of the study’s co-authors.

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Scientists Find That Polluted Oceans Could Make Fish Anxious

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