by Andy West
Climate change affirmative responses to all survey questions are culturally determined, and across National Publics related to religiousity. Cultural attitudes inappropriately push climate policy.
- Introduction
Post one of this series demonstrated a strong correlation across nations between religiosity, and their responses to unconstrained questions aligned to Catastrophic Climate Change Culture (CCCC), from a YouGov climate-change attitudes survey. The bold-blue series in Chart 1 below shows this, with the muted-pink for a less strong alignment. This expression of belief in CCCC I term Allied Belief (ABel); it’s caused by a (shallow) alliance of CCCC with (all) the main religious Faiths, which disables Innate Skepticism (ISk) of CCCC.
The second post showed that very different results are obtained for climate-change affirmative responses to reality-constrained questions (muted-orange and muted-red series), which across nations anti-correlate with their religiosity. The bold-orange series shows the (estimated) Core Belief (CBel) in CCCC, i.e. from individuals who still grant it top-priority in the presence of ‘ultimate’ constraint. The muted-red trend and red crosses bound this estimate somewhat with actual measurements. Reality clashes re-enable ISk about CCCC for religious people. The second post fully explains all Chart 1 features.
This ‘big picture’ chart is needed to better understand the following sections. All of the questions that produce linear responses with religiosity per above, I term as ‘Strongly-Framed’ questions. But we met some questions in Post 1, such as ‘Do you think that you personally could be doing more to tackle climate change?’, for which (as was confirmed) a linear response for ‘doing more’ wasn’t expected. However, this doesn’t mean such ‘Weakly-Framed’ questions necessarily have no relationship with religiosity; it turns out that they do, but it’s not linear. For clarity, Table 1 towards the end of this post lists which questions are Strongly/Weakly-Framed.
- The Envelope of responses to Weakly-Framed questions
On the above chart, bold-orange to muted-red to muted-orange trends, represent responses to reality-constrained questions of decreasing constraint strength. Imagine a trend a little weaker still than the last in that sequence, so a bit higher up on the Y scale. Bold-blue to muted-pink trends represent responses to unconstrained questions with decreasing emotive / existential alignment to CCCC. Imagine a trend with somewhat weaker alignment still, so less gradient than pink. It seems that responses to Weakly-Framed questions are (in the main) anywhere between these two imagined trendlines, smeared as it were between pink and orange ‘modes’. For example, Chart 2 below show national responses for the ‘could be doing more’ option to the question quoted in Section 1 above.
Note: The superimposed envelope of expected responses (assuming the cultural modality explanation is true) is notional, drawn by using Chart 1 as a guideline for where the imagined trends described above would approximately sit, plus some margin for variability around the trends. In practice, I don’t know their precise positions and even less the legitimate variability of data-points relative to same [albeit the orange variability about trend is a lot larger than pink; I didn’t bother to depict this]. Yet the envelope covers most data, so is at least indicative of potential cause. National publics aren’t climate literate, so it seems unlikely that even where strong reality or strong CCCC alignment isn’t invoked, rationality could get purchase. It appears responses simply drift between the two main culturally-determined modes.
Given I don’t know where the edges of the envelope actually are, it seemed reasonable to speculate that Indonesia and Thailand might be legitimately covered, albeit an implication of noisy data. However, if Chart 2 has any meaning at all this couldn’t possibly be the case for Italy or Spain, which ought to have much lower climate concern scores, consistent with being closer to the low point between the two cones.
These two nations were noted in the last post to have a higher ‘Children’s Strike Weekly’ ranking than initially seemed likely for their religiosity level. For Spain at least, this is probably due to an unusually high religiosity gap between children and adults. Both nations also have very high youth unemployment levels, an open invitation for cultural causes claiming high moral ground, to which youths are more vulnerable. So, when Weakly-Framed questions don’t invoke more potent effects, might irreligious and disaffected youth wield sufficient influence to shift national attitudes? I don’t know. I figured looking at another Weakly-Framed question may help. Affirmative answers to: ‘The climate is changing and human activity is mainly responsible’ (the very first question mentioned in this series), are plotted below. The superimposed pink / orange trends and envelope are the same as on Chart 2 above.
The first thing to note is that this question is slightly more CCCC-aligned than I guessed. There appears to be more grouping around the pink line than the orange, albeit this isn’t quite enough to have broken the smeared / dual-mode pattern. This could mean the true pink line ought to be a little steeper, which in turn means Thailand is possibly within the envelope. However, not only are Spain and Italy clearly outside again (and in similar positions), they’re now joined by Indonesia and India. Interestingly, Indonesia has recently seen a wave of mass youth protests against perceived threats to democracy and liberal values, in a country where conservatism and Islamist elites are gaining more power. Countering with accusations of blasphemy can only help open a religiosity gulf between secular youth and religious elites (very relevant here). The linked article notes regional support and even direct links to youth climate protest, with Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines all named. India has a massive youth demographic, with 50% of its population below the age of 25, and has also featured mass youth protests over recent years. These have now coalesced against the new citizenship laws, but this wave started back in 2016 and is ultimately generic opposition to conservative religious power (this time Hindu), again seen as a perceived threat to liberal values and democracy.
All the nations mentioned in the above paragraph have national religiosity 50% or higher (however much less this is for youth), and are at the upper-edge of or above the envelope in either Chart 2 or Chart 3, or both. It seems something systemic is happening that can’t just be noise and is pretty likely linked to youth protest, but quite what?
If I assume a youth influence, however this works it may be a pointer to the future of the relevant nations, albeit interpreting that future isn’t so easy. It hinges upon what type of youth belief is the driver. Although some would represent an increase of core believers in CCCC, albeit occurring because more potent effects are absent the total belief is high, meaning much is likely Allied Belief. However, not this time through an alliance with religious faiths, but political culture, like the strong alliance between CCCC and Lib/Dem culture within the US. So, at the very least the relevant nations would shift leftwards on Chart 1, but could potentially fall out of the plot altogether if like the US (or Vietnam) a more complex local cultural jigsaw emerges, which needs a targeted analysis.
- A search for Rationality
Interestingly, about half the nations hold a similar position in Chart 2 and 3. This plus the bounded area is enough for a fairish correlation between the two responses (SI Chart F5yx, r=0.68). If we needed another hint that it is not rationality driving affirmative responses to ‘The climate is changing and human activity is mainly responsible’, this is it. As the first post notes, publics can’t possibly give rational responses to the correlating Chart 2 question.
The apparent lack of rationality in the above responses prompted me to hunt for any rationality. I used the same ‘envelope’ charts as above, mapping responses to one of the most objective questions from the main YouGov climate-change attitudes survey. This Weakly-Framed question asks which countries have had the most negative impact on climate-change and, as demonstrated in the first post of the series, responses aren’t linear with religiosity. Answers are available from relatively common and culturally unconflicted knowledge. However, even in this case rationality plays a very modest role, very much second fiddle to cultural influence that occurs via the same two modes as above. Due to word-count limitation, I shunted this analysis to SI Footnote 2.
- Elite attitudes
Similarly to children, another sub-demographic within irreligious nations at the LHS of Chart 1 where core belief in CCCC prospers more than in the general population, is the elite. Even within democracies, small elites can heavily sway policy to a direction not supported by the populace. For instance, the UK, Germany and Scandinavia, all have very strong emissions policies despite per the bold-blue series in Chart 1, having a very high national skepticism of existential climate issues (plus, all nations have very small Core Belief in climate catastrophism). This wouldn’t be a problem if the policies were aligned to mainstream science conclusions. But ultimately, being initiated by an emotive belief in CCCC, they are latterly and inevitably trending towards CCCC goals; i.e. the emergency avoidance of imminent global catastrophe. The easy acceptance of Greta/CSW by secular elites is not a coincidence.
In highly religious countries, much of the influence of elites and the functioning of society is still closely tied to religious expression. Notwithstanding the relatively new (and superficially high, i.e. from ABel) climate concerns, those elites and indeed society generally haven’t to date abandoned this model. Yet in countries where religion has long atrophied over generations, newer culture can more easily muscle into elite layers via the provision of high-moral-ground plus emotive persuasion. Subconsciously, the latter features are extremely desirable as shortcuts for promoting / extending an elite profile (see SI Footnote 3), when exhausted religion no longer supplies this service.
Major XR and CSW presence within irreligious nations (per the last post) are not expressions of what the local publics think, en-masse, but extreme frustration expressed by small minorities because for sure their local publics mostly don’t think like them. In mistakenly assuming such actions reflect popular feeling, and thus compliantly onboarding extreme demands (which also contradict mainstream science), already culturally compromised elites are marching dangerously further and further out of alignment with the mass of their own publics. Tension from such dislocations is already causing some significant backlash (e.g. SI Footnote 4). Highly religious nations are protected from similar extreme policy choices, by the strongly continuing commitment of their elites to much older irrational fairy stories, aka religions.
The expectation is that policy push from elite attitudes would occur most within nations from the LHS of Chart 1, much like XR and CSW presence. This expectation can be checked by looking at the penetration of highly challenging policies (socially or to infra-structure or both) that also have a high virtue-signaling aspect. Whether or not the policies truly provide major benefit to emissions reduction or the environment generally, is not particularly relevant. A suitable such policy is the promotion of Electric Vehicles (EVs).
- Policy push case – EVs
Chart 4, introduced in the last post, represents either of the orange series on Chart 1 (depending on the scale), with many more nations thrown in. The Y scale happens to match estimated CBel, i.e. the original UN poll vote-share for action on climate-change, divided by 6. The blocks a) to d) and the color-coding, emphasize religio-regional groups. Significant variability about the main trend is largely due to GDP-per-Capita (GDPpC) within each religio-regional group.
So, we expect EV policy penetration to largely be dictated by cultural motivation, and hence be highest at the LHS. BUT… this won’t be wholly independent of economic issues; those countries that are motivated for this policy must also have a robust enough economy to create incentives plus charging infra-structure, plus a high enough GDPpC for the local market to afford EVs. Adapted to economic necessity, the above prediction suggests that nations with strong economies (in an absolute sense) plus at the top-leftmost, will have the greatest EV penetration.
The numbers trailing some of the nation labels derive from the Top 18 Electric Car Countries in 2020, showing penetration per nation by market-share of new EV sales. Eleven nations in Chart 4 also appear within that league table; I compressed the ranking into a scale 1 to 11, in order to skip the missing ones. While strict ranking order from top-left isn’t observed, all but one of the ranked nations are indeed at the top-left corner, as expected.
The only exception in that peer-group without a ranking, is the Czech Republic, which has the lowest absolute GDP (45th in IMF list) of the peer group. Conversely, the only nation not in the top-leftmost bunching, is Japan. This nation (in a unique religio-regional group unrelated to the dark blue coding), possess the highest absolute GDP (3rd in IMF list) on the chart. This data reasonably confirms the above expectations from cultural positioning, with secondary economic considerations.
As noted in section 4 of the last post and even in normal times, a huge problem for those governments trying to push this and other challenging policies, is that once the public grasp the reality issues associated with implementation, their support is unlikely to get beyond the thick orange Core Belief line in Chart 1, maybe at the most the muted-red Strongly-Constrained Belief line. Unless for special circumstances, like the immense amounts of hydro-electricity in Norway. And in current times, a huge new reality constraint has appeared in the form of COVID-19, which for a year or two at least will squeeze even the CBel line still further downwards regarding the choice of a true top priority.
- What this series tells us
Assuming findings are confirmed, and that my explanations are the best fit for same.
Affirmative attitudes to climate-change in the public sphere are cultural. As such they’re also the product of net cultural interaction, mainly with wrt the long-established religious faiths. The surface alliance of CCCC with religion creates an impression of faith support, which flips into resistance for any reality- constrained circumstances. Overall, where religiosity is low, climate activism is higher (including child religiosity for child activism), likewise for main policy. A secondary influence in reality-constrained scenarios is GDP-per-Capita. This likely exacerbates a cultural factor, modulating the main religiosity trend. Core Belief and policy-support is lower where GDPpC is lower within any religio-regional group.
Even responses to Weakly-Framed questions appear to mainly be determined by cultural influence, albeit occupying a wide envelope. While prediction from religiosity of climate attitudes inside that envelope is not possible, that they smear between the two main cultural modes is good support itself of the overall cultural explanation. Systemic excursions from the envelope are perhaps due to youth influence; merely a culturally divergent sub-demographic. Even the most objective climate survey question yields very little rationality in responses. Table 1 summarizes findings.
- Some concluding thoughts
While each of the mainstream Faiths is theoretically a separate cultural entity, their relationships with CCCC as presented in this series don’t appear to depend on the particulars of any faith, only on national levels of belief. At least purely in respect of reactions to the newcomer of CCCC, currently, all Faiths appear to act as though they’re part of a single culture. Hence, what the presented charts are showing at heart is the interaction between two major cultures (i.e. religion and CCCC) that have come under each other’s influence.
For an analogy, I’m reminded of those illustrations of two stars falling into each other’s orbit, with the occurrence of complex gravitational and energy interactions. To further this analogy, one a bright young star (CCCC) and the other an old red giant (mainstream religious faith). Except we may know less about the cultural case right here upon Earth than the stellar one millions of light years distant. Stretching the analogy, most people from the relevant social-science disciplines don’t actually recognize a CCCC; it’s kind of ‘invisible’. But like a black hole orbiting the old red giant, we can tell it must be there because behaviors in the region only make sense if two bodies with mass and energy (here, cultural mechanisms) are interacting. Hence a culture (of catastrophe) must be exerting powerful influence within the social domain of climate-change, and interacting with religion.
There are other bodies in this equation, in the US particularly the heavyweights of Rep/Con and Dem/Lib culture, which entangle old religion and new CCCC both (and enough to locally disrupt the global trends shown here; the US has a 4-way cultural dance). Overall though, I’m surprised at just how consistent the entanglement of religiosity and CCCC appears to be, globally. Which also means we can use religiosity as a reliable lens to make the workings of CCCC clearer.
The false narratives of CCCC (all strong cultural narratives are false, their ‘purpose’ requires this) are powerfully affecting nations and faiths of all types across the globe. Over the years, many commenters have articulated in some form that the movement against man-made climate-change is effectively ‘a religion’ in itself. The effects presented here are more confirmation that for the public domain at least, they’re right. Such commenters are intuiting ‘a cultural entity’, where religions happen to be the cultural entities they’re very familiar with. Considering CCCC’s scale, the now generations-long trend, especially within Western societies, of less rule by the emotive and more by rationality, could well go into reverse through this single phenomenon alone. The only thing holding off its irrationalities in many nations, ironically, is religious faith.
Covid-19 Addendum: I’ve seen comment to the effect that Covid-19 is likely to be fatal for catastrophic climate-change culture. My money on this is no better than anyone else’s. But it says that once Covid-19 is in the rear-view mirror, however long that takes, CCCC will still be a serious force. Long evolved bio-cultural mechanisms make cultures tenacious, they can pivot to new circumstances and come back from heavy damage; even turn adverse conditions into advantage (there are already crude attempts, but they’ll get more sophisticated). CCCC’s wagon is hooked to science, which ought to be fatal on its own one day. But I doubt that day is here. For guidance, the major faiths span a millennial scale and survived the Black Death plus many more real-world calamities, their fairy-tale fears plus hopes still intact. This doesn’t mean the little secular sister of CCCC necessarily has similar staying power, but ultimately, it works on the same underlying mechanisms.
Admin notes
There are 3 posts in this series, all of which have the same style of Supplementary Information, which consist: 1) an expanded post, 2) a footnotes file, and 3) an Excel datafile. The text below is a streamlined post version, geared to get the concepts across more readily and uncluttered regarding side-issues, detail on methodology, intricate depth, path my exploration took etc. For folks who want more, the expanded post is ~4800 words. Be aware that the footnotes file, also having various external references, relates to the expanded post (though a couple are pointed at below). Likewise, all the chart IDs within the Excel datafile are numbered for the expanded post. However, all sources / data for the charts below can easily be found (I provided SI IDs in the text). The datafile includes various extra charts too.
Footnotes [Footnotes ]
Extended post [ Extended Post]
Datafile [Datafile]
Sorry, your graphics and tables continue to be significantly sub-par…
Bob, you can get all the charts at hi-res from the links at the end.
Andrew , great insight here
But which links at the end show better chart detail. Footnotes. Extended posts or data file ? Please.
Dave, both the Extended Post and the Data-file. In the former, charts are embedded in a Word File that has more detail / depth than the summary post, plus many footnote references for more. In the latter, are the Excel originals of the charts, with data, plus various further charts too.
Why cavil so , Bob?
The probity that scintillates from Andy’s essay informs the CCCC commentariat in a most stupendous manner of the radiant virtues latent within the rich convolutions and and ventricles of his prose. To contemplate the astonishing suavity of all the reverences to his past unpublished work must persuade them with facility that neither his affections nor arguments are vitiated with or by any defect or privation of the liberal and exalted sciences of metaphysics.
Far from it—all must judge that compared to Parts I &II, the debut of IIII in Part III presents the contrarian blogosphere witha cornucopia and encyclopedia, an unmeasurable profundity of knowledge in the most peregrine and sublime disciplines that are rarely the concomitants of the ignorant editors who have sullenly failed to acknowledge the eclipse of CCCC by IIII in the year MMXX. This gently compels readers, who in preceding times absolutely subjugated their admiration for his revolutionary contributions to condescend to assure him that his gargantuan works are an exceptionally welcome contribution to the journals that reject them, for editing is a tiring business and essays that conduce to reviewers falling asleep are as welcome a respitre as reading Rabelais in these stressful times.
oh noes… purple prose 0:
O woes !
A Rabelais Poe !
As it was published in 1456, the original may well outlast the output of the bot that pingbacked your link :
Culturally-determined reaction to weather replace: Section III
Posted on Might 16, 2020 through curryja through Andy West
Local weather replace affirmative responses to all survey questions are culturally desperate, and throughout Nationwide Publics associated with religiousity. Cultural attitudes inappropriately push weather coverage.
Creation
Pantagruel coldn’t have put it better.
“…the original may well outlast the output of the bot that pingbacked your link”
So you discovered a gobbledegook bot. Even for a drive-by this is weak.
Covid-19 Addendum:
Far from being fatal to CCCC, the virus will imbue climate change with a ‘shock of the new’ and represent the ultimate antidote to the Apocalypse Fatigue I think we’ve all been feeling in this debate.
As a scholar—but NOT as a human—I can’t wait to see how much the climate has changed during lockdown! Scientists fear it’s been happening with complete impunity while they weren’t looking, so citizens are advised to return to outdoors life gradually and cautiously.
Remember, look out your window first, then door (in case your house is now submerged). If your door handle is hot, never go outside—there’s probably a wildfire.
Before releasing your children, warn them that they’re about to experience 2 or 3 months’ worth of climate change in one hit. Quietly check whether your dog or cat has become extinct so that you can prepare your kids.
Finally, we know climate change hits marginalized persons, persons of woman, and persons of color the hardest, so if you belong to any of these high vulnerability classes, you may wish to reconsider whether life after lockdown is really right for you. Staying inside forever is an increasingly valid lifestyle choice.
Thanks for popping by, Brad. You do it so well; we might sometimes have trouble discerning from the real thing ;)
What odds are Culture Wars bookies laying on the latest CCCC beating the last one and IIII in the race for inane echo chamber acronym of the year?
The strong field of Idiotarian Invincible Ignorance Idiopaths and Covidophobes for Catastophic Chloroquine Consumption should make for an interesting finish.
“There is no cultural aspect to hard science …”
ianl, if you are referring I presume to climate science, this post does not measure or address this at all. It addresses cultural attitudes in national *publics*, which do not include the enterprise of science in any way. Not only that, regarding those who are adherents of CCCC, as noted within the text of this series of posts, the core narratives of their belief are in direct contradiction to *mainstream* science (as say represented by the IPCC AR5 technical papers).
While waiting for non-cultural questionnaires, a reminder:
https://twitter.com/jayvanbavel/status/1261671817078624256
Faiths and their accompany social trends seek to provide solutions to questions lingering in the back of the mind. Those who mull these questions construct the framework that eventually evolves into the social trend thereby providing handy and simple handles on which the general public can hang; kinda going along for the ride, a crowded bus ride.
The coronavirus pandemic has many people aware that being crowded together is not a safe place to be and some sort of social distancing, ie, isolation is a better strategy, at least for now.
The other reality is that huge sums of money are currently being spent on the impact of the pandemic. In an “opportunity lost” cost analysis, there will be no money for remediation of CCCC. Many people already know that there will not be money to pay subsidies, build big renewable projects, regulate unbearably for a noble cause, but most important, people already know, raising fixed living costs such as utility costs and transportation cost means that people on lower incomes will bare the largest pain for actions on CCCC. Those who were recently economically doing OK and have lost their jobs, will be the most vocal because they know what they have just lost.
COVID-19 has derailed the faithful’s campaign for CCCC action. Soon, CCCC will lose its appeal as any possible interruption of the catastrophe is a long way off, and, nature’s own course will make such discussions, moot.
However, there will arise another religion to replace CCCC. “Social Inequity” seems to be good candidate.
RiH
It would be great if you were right, especially regarding the pressure CCCC generates for huge expenditures based upon a narrative that directly contradicts mainstream science, let alone skeptic or lukewarmer science. But as noted in the text, cultures are good at evolving, and while covid takes with one hand it offers CCCC opportunity with the other. ‘Green Recovery’, and ‘See we can change everything after all’ narratives are growing, and seem to be heeded in some quarters at least, e.g. the UK government is leaning this way.
Huston Smith studied world religions and concluded that all religions fill people’s need to answer four fundamental existential questions. In brief, they are Who am I? Who is the Other? What is Life? What is Death?
Covid19 is an existential crisis (unlike global warming/climate change) because it raises that fourth question immediately and personally. The only thing people want answered by some trustworthy authority: What are my chances of catching Covid19 and dying from it?
Interestingly, the Dutch are providing a fact-based answer to their citizenry, while the US CDC has not. All that is needed is a simple chart, like this one presented to Netherlands Parliament April 15, 2020, and more recently confirmed and enhanced:
https://storage.googleapis.com/conservativereview/2020/05/netherlands-IFR-chart1.png
Daniel Horowitz adds details in his article https://www.conservativereview.com/news/horowitz-one-chart-exposes-lie-behind-universal-lockdowns/
My synopsis is https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2020/05/16/1-pandemic-question-dutch-answer-cdc-silence/
>Who am I? Who is the Other? What is Life? What is Death?
For Catastrophic Climate-Change Culture, something like:
Someone who is saving the planet.
The (FF funded) Deniers.
That which is Net-Zero sustainable.
Global climate-catastrophe eliminating many species including humans.
Good one, Andy. To be fair to Huston, the other in religious terms is more than just the other tribe: He was referring to the ultimate “Not Me”, that which is despite me or anyone wanting it to be so.
Ron,
The Horowitz article says: “As you can see, the death rate doesn’t even climb above 0.1% until you reach over 70, with a steep and dangerous growth of risk over 75 and 80. ”
Both tables seem to indicate that the 0.1% threshold is age age 50 or 55.
What am I missing?
Not sure about your point Mark. Under 70 years old, you have a 1 in 1000 chance of dying from Covid19. j
In the state of Georgia:
May 17th
Tested – 351,175
Deaths – 1,606
Death rate (all ages) based on testing:
0.457 %
Population (07/2019): 10,617,423
Death rate based on population:
0.015%
That’s a very pitiful number. Thank god.
Climate change is normal, natural, necessary, unstoppable and it is characterized by alternating warm and cold periods. In the most recent ten thousand years, warm periods last a few hundred years, they are followed by cold periods that last a few hundred years.
The people who want to control everything, use whatever is happening to scare as many people as possible to align with whatever they are using to scare people at that time. Climate alarmism mostly only scared the western countries and the Oriental countries pretended to go along and determined how that they could profit. The virus alarmism is working much the same way. Virus alarmism mostly only scared the western countries and the Oriental countries pretended to go along and determined how that they could profit.
Climate has always changed and life on earth has always adapted or perished, this is always going to be true. The most helpful thing that people have ever found is the benefits from using fossil fuels for low cost, abundant, reliable energy. If we continue to do that, humans will survive and do well. If we do not do that, a large percent of humans will perish.
‘Which countries, if any, do you think have had the most negative impact on global warming and climate change?’ Followed by a list of 25 countries, where up to 5 can be chosen.
Not much need to read the rest. This is just another Alarmist Posting.
…indeed which type of questions don’t generate at all what those making the survey thought they were measuring. But they do produce exactly the kind of cultural responses (both for and against, in publics, and none rational), which tell us the size and shape of CCCC within each national public.
CCCC = Catastrophic Climate Change Culture.
A classic climate denial argument. As far as I know, no countries as of today have had any noticeable changes as a result of increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. You climate clowns are grumbling that polar bears should be dead now, that polar ice and snow were a thing of the past. No responsible climate body or scientists have claimed this. These are questions about risk management and what will happen in the future, not such as the heroes of You climate clowns, Trump and Bolsanaro, have shown that they do not master. The pattern of behavior we all are looking for is termed “bonus pater familias,” not Orangutang Management. (sorry Orangutangs)
Rune, the survey questions are a means to an end. Due indeed to bias (intended or not and at whatever level), the public responses to them aren’t what those making the surveys thought they were measuring. Responses are cultural in nature, which allows us to see the levels (and type) of belief in (and rejection of) catastrophic climate culture in each national public. Vagueness, bias, inaccuracy, whatever in these questions (very few are truly objective), *amplify* what we’re looking for here.
…and indeed publics are not climate literate, so whether they respond in a manner supportive or resistive to climate-change narratives, these do not spring from rationality.
“These are questions about risk management and what will happen in the future…”
We as adults will do our own risk management. We are fine with what will happen in the future. And we’ve accepted it and will adapt to it in our own time.
The planet is not sick and our standard of care of it is good enough and will be better if we stop devoting resources to failed climate policies.
The importance of detecting the climate change signal, perhaps by mis-guided scientists or pretenders is similar to proving the existence of God.
Few things set you all off like claiming the climate hasn’t changed. It is, There is no God.
> No responsible climate body or scientists have claimed this.
Got it. All those predictions came from *fake* Scotsmen… and all the true Scotsmen could do was stand by, powerless to stop or even correct such misrepresentations of their work.
” Cultural attitudes inappropriately push climate policy.”
Really enjoy the Andy West articles. Thank you. I quoted him on my home page “don’t believe in science but do believe in the scientific method”. In terms of his headline that cultural attitudes determine climate policy I wonder what he makes of the Maldives where they are gung ho for climate because (i think) they find it profitable to be gung ho for climate.
Pls see
https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/05/14/maldives-sinking/
Thanks. That’s a very comprehensive article on Maldives, who appear to have turned climate change into an industry. Re City of Hope: ‘To build it, a state-owned company is pumping sand from surrounding atolls and depositing it on shallow reefs that surround the original lagoon.’ And so geo-engineering too. I hope there won’t be unintended consequences. But one would think that just the huge ramp-up of infra-structure and pressure on the water supply across the islands, must have some.
The new raised “artificial islands” appear to be doing fine even with those huge honeymoon villas on them but your point is a good one sir and it is a concern that was also brought up by the MIT team. Maldive’s advantage is that now that it has been christened the victim of the industrial revolution of the falangs, it has access to free services and to mucho dinero from the falangs.
chaamjamal,
Correctly or otherwise, I always thought the Maldivian (Dhivehi) word for kaffirs (Allah-less persons of whiteness) was faranjee, from the same Levantine Arabic word for kufr, Israelis or Europeans.
Cognate words like falang and farang, usually rendered as ‘foreign,’ seem to have entered Oriental languages as distant descendants of ‘Francia,’ which stood in for all of Europe (in a testament to the sheer reach of the metonymous Germanics).
If so, then the resemblance of ‘farang’ to ‘foreign’ is coincidental, since the latter derives from the Latin ‘foris’ (outdoors; external)—an ancestor it has in common with such words as ‘hors [d’oeuvre],’ ‘forest’ and ‘Fremd.’
Great amounts of rain will fall in the coming days over the Great Lakes and northeast US and eastern Canada.
https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/500hPa/overlay=total_cloud_water/orthographic=-100.49,37.15,1183
Still troubled by the rigour of the numbers.
Religiousity of a country estimated from questions to individuals like “Do you believe in religion?” Surmise, that depends on who is asking the question and whether a reward or punishment awaits the respondent, or even a perception of reward or punishment, such perception might or might not exist from person to person. So, from horribly subjective responses either just like this, or approximately like this, you create a mathematical scale like 1 to 100 and do correlation analysis.
You know as well as I do that confounding variables are a major problem for multivariate analysis. How, for example, do you mathematically adjust for the inherent bias, bias that is often present, in the person formulating the questions in the survey to determine religiousity? People motivated to construct surveys are seldom niave. Likely, they have strong bias that is near impossible to keep under control. Most surveys predicted a Trump loss.
Hard statistical work requires proper estimates of accuracy or confidence or both. How can this be done for the results of a survey? I know that survey people purport to estimate accuracy by stats like the number of participants, but this says nothing much about confounding variables like the aforementioned reward or punishment.
In short, Andy, I do not accept that your whole approach has credibility, especially statistical. What you are showing as correlations might be nothing more than a single, major dominator, like the propensity of survey participants to tell fibs when it suits their whim.
(My corporate boss once asked me to create an in-house survey facility, to engage a recognised consultant to harden it and to do a number of surveys so that when we met with politicians we had our own survey figures from the night before. It was an exercise that opened my eyes. So, I am writing from a base with some experience.)
Finally, I have difficulty reading your 3 sub-essays. There are many loose ends that might have answers in SIs or footnotes when they should be addressed as you go. I cannot find a coherent line of reasoning that says findings like “If you want to convince a person to spend money to prevent a postulated disaster, do ensure that you factor in the religion of the person (or person’s cohort, from weekdays or from Sundays, or the person’s government, or the party that ought to be in government, or …..)
If you want to publcise a social effect that you find fascinating, spell it out in a few clear words. Please do not try to spice it up with dubious mathematical exercises.
Apologies if I have been undeservedly insulting. We had our 56th wedding anniversary yesterday and might be getting old and cranky.
Geoff,
>Religiousity of a country estimated from questions to individuals like “Do you believe in religion?” Surmise, that depends on who is asking the question and whether a reward or punishment awaits the respondent, or even a perception of reward or punishment, such perception might or might not exist from person to person. So, from horribly subjective responses either just like this, or approximately like this, you create a mathematical scale like 1 to 100 and do correlation analysis.
See the first post and particularly the footnotes detailing the religiosity scale and alternate (academic scales). In the great majority of nations there is neither explicit reward or punishment, but there is peer pressure and self-assessment bias. In some nations like Vietnam (one party state repressing religion), this indeed appears to cause the country to drop out of the figures enormously. There isn’t even a religiosity figure for China on this scale for the same reason, but I’m sure it wouldn’t be valid either, if attempted. This limits what nations can go into the pot, but not by much.
>You know as well as I do that confounding variables are a major problem for multivariate analysis. How, for example, do you mathematically adjust for the inherent bias, bias that is often present, in the person formulating the questions in the survey to determine religiousity?
As you can see from the religiosity questions, they are so incredibly simple (e.g. ““Is religion important in your daily life?”), that there is very minimal opportunity for the encroachment of bias. All possible details of particular faith / region / ethnicity / social-hierarchy based behaviours are avoided.
>People motivated to construct surveys are seldom niave. Likely, they have strong bias that is near impossible to keep under control. Most surveys predicted a Trump loss.
This above question goes to everyone; while appropriate translation is necessary (particularly in the Far East where the term ‘religion’ itself needs handling more carefully as there’s more choice about meaning) – short of outright fraud by *not* using this wording, how could the question be manipulated? And why? These are via mainstream survey orgs that have no reason or motivation to obtain a fixed result. This doesn’t mean that biases aren’t present, but it is always about minimisation and this approach serves well for that.
>Hard statistical work requires proper estimates of accuracy or confidence or both. How can this be done for the results of a survey? I know that survey people purport to estimate accuracy by stats like the number of participants, but this says nothing much about confounding variables like the aforementioned reward or punishment.
We are not looking for the level of accuracy that would win or lose an election, or anything close. If each harvested national religiosity figure was say 6 or 9 or 12% out or more, this would essentially make no difference to the global patterns observed. It’s just acceptable noise around the trends (which indeed we see). Unless they were all out in the same direction, say, which likewise wouldn’t affect trends but would affect absolute amounts, yet is highly unlikely in any case because all the different nations have different biases in play anyhow.
>In short, Andy, I do not accept that your whole approach has credibility, especially statistical. What you are showing as correlations might be nothing more than a single, major dominator, like the propensity of survey participants to tell fibs when it suits their whim.
Then you need to do much more to show why this would be. The data is all available at the links. Go for it. Fortunately, statistics does not know what subject it is being applied to, whether this is religiosity, fundamental particle physics, the height of children, or baseball wins. While not to be read slavishly or without context, the r/r2/p values are in the data-file for all the main charts, and they do show robust relationships in these data. Your alternate suggestion is exceptional in the extreme, in that you are proposing that across different world regions and ethnicities, highly varied political systems and social arrangements and national wealth and so on, all people within all these diverse situations are fibbing in a manner which nevertheless produces robust systemic responses across them all. If this is so, there ought to be some obvious way to demonstrate this; so you have all the data / sources / everything. Show why this would be so.
>(My corporate boss once asked me to create an in-house survey facility, to engage a recognised consultant to harden it and to do a number of surveys so that when we met with politicians we had our own survey figures from the night before. It was an exercise that opened my eyes. So, I am writing from a base with some experience.)
Yes, you mentioned similar before. But regarding the religiosity surveys, they are simple in the extreme. And the crossing of ‘atheist’ / ‘not a religious person’, reduces the self-assessment bias issue (see the footnotes in post 1 regarding this). Regarding the climate-survey questions, these are more complex and very few are objective as indeed it is such a culturally conflicted hot topic; they are subject to bias (whether deliberate or not), ambiguity, inaccuracy, whatever. But all these things *amplify* not obscure cultural responses. What is being measured here is not what the survey providers (or rather their clients) thought that they’d be measuring, i.e. responses based in rationality. Whether supportive or resistive to climate-change issues, the public responses are cultural, and the more bias / ambiguities within the questions, the stronger will be the cultural responses from publics who even to start with have no climate-literacy to help answer. This is all discussed throughout the series, and for instance the ‘strength of alignment’ of the unconstrained questions to CCC (see summary table in this post), is a reflection of how biased the questions are towards CCCC. The more bias the merrier in this respect, it brings out the cultural responses that we are trying to get better vision on.
>There are many loose ends that might have answers in SIs or footnotes when they should be addressed as you go.
Yes, you need to dig, I’m afraid. The main text needs to be kept to a readable size and not too bogged down in detail. For interested folks like yourself who indeed will benefit from detail, that’s why all the SI stuff is there.
>I cannot find a coherent line of reasoning that says findings like “If you want to convince a person to spend money to prevent a postulated disaster, do ensure that you factor in the religion of the person (or person’s cohort, from weekdays or from Sundays, or the person’s government, or the party that ought to be in government, or …..)
None of the surveys here do anything like that, and I’m not postulating that any should. The point about robust correlation is that (statistically) we can predict one attitude from another. If these results are verified, someone may well indeed incorporate this understanding within whatever it is they want to achieve, but you have to know a relationship exists before you can use it. Given that the vast majority of social science appears currently and wrongly to think mainstream ‘hard science’ is telling us that climate doom is imminent and certain (unless near net-zero), then they are completely blind-sided to even looking for things like this, never mind actually finding anything. As noted somewhere in the series (with references), pretty much the entire intersectional literature between religion and climate change is geared to figuring out how to use the various mainstream faiths as tools to promote emission reductions policies and ‘climate-change appropriate’ behaviours, and this fact is even acknowledged within the literature too.
>If you want to publcise a social effect that you find fascinating, spell it out in a few clear words. Please do not try to spice it up with dubious mathematical exercises.
I’ll be the first to admit that my presentation is not the best. However, you can’t complain about lack of detail and depth in one breath and then claim I need far fewer words in the next. The CCCC / religiosity relationship is also dual in nature, i.e. has some complexity, and the whole issue requires a fair amount of context for people here or it will just seem like ‘magic’ placed out there, rather than an actual explanation. The only maths in the series is the p/r/r2 outputs of Excel. All are there for you to see in the data-file. If you find anything dubious about them, please report back.
Ultimately, I’m sure the religiosity index could be improved. If you think that any such improvement would make the very robust correlations (and anti-correlations) shown here *worse* rather than better, I’d be very interested to know why.
>We had our 56th wedding anniversary yesterday and might be getting old and cranky.
Wow. Congrats.
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Andy, I do not understand most of your piece. You have either created your own language or you are using the language of a discipline I have not studied. In any case here are some thoughts based on what I think you are saying, given that I may well be wrong about that.
You seem to say that because what people say is aligned with their culture it is therefore irrational. As a student of reasoning I must disagree. When someone reasons they bring to bear everything they believe that is relevant to the issue. There is no alternative.
What you call cultures are systems of belief so it is predictable that one’s reasoning will reflect one’s culture. There is absolutely nothing irrational in this. Reasoning reflects belief.
Bother, see below at May 17 6.33 pm.
David, well there are several hundred definitions of ‘culture’ and many even within academic context, so terminology is an issue.
>You seem to say that because what people say is aligned with their culture it is therefore irrational. As a student of reasoning I must disagree. When someone reasons they bring to bear everything they believe that is relevant to the issue. There is no alternative.
And I think this is mostly a victim of terminology. A better fit is ‘cultural entity’. So belief in same is say like the avid adherence to a religion or an extreme political ideology. Such beliefs are irrational (but only within the context of the core narratives of the belief), in the sense that emotive commitment to the belief frequently bypasses (via essentially marshalling a raft of heavy biases) our reasoning. But this doesn’t mean that individuals who are adherents are irrational outside the context of said core narratives, or indeed that they are anything other than perfectly normal anyhow, because this very same system operates in all of us. It’s an evolutionary feature, not a flaw.
>What you call cultures are systems of belief so it is predictable that one’s reasoning will reflect one’s culture. There is absolutely nothing irrational in this. Reasoning reflects belief.
People who are attempting reason within the specific context of the core narratives of a religious (or similar but secular type of) culture that they are an adherent of, will be subject to a raft of emotive biases inculcated by those believed narratives. Biases are not reason, they are biases and undermine reasoning. This type of behaviour has been known about (for the religious case at least) formally since I guess mid-last-century, informally much longer. Such biases are what keeps creationism alive, what makes some religious folks refuse vaccines, or in the extreme fringe case be suicide bombers. As a student of reason you’ll know that even the classical civilisations knew about emotional bias and warned of its compromising of rationality. Core cultural narratives are generally emotive to the hilt and existential too if they can be, precisely to generate the emotive biases that lead to (beyond rational) loyal group membership, their actual purpose.
CCCC core narratives exactly fit this bill, and all the expected attitudes / behaviours are attendant, including those measured here. Most biased behaviour doesn’t present as anything like extreme, but this does not make it rational. National publics are in any case not climate literate, so they have a big problem from the start in responding rationally to climate survey questions, because rationality needs knowledge. But in any case, as measured they do indeed respond largely, as Dan Kahan puts it, ‘not with what they know’, but with (culturally) ‘who they are’.
“For an analogy, I’m reminded of those illustrations of two stars falling into each other’s orbit, with the occurrence of complex gravitational and energy interactions. “
Which is to say that they both have a gravity well and there’s no getting around that. They’ll say Science doesn’t have a gravity well as it’s something different like photons. Even if that were true, it would bend around the other two stars.
Even the existence of religion’s evolutionary dominance is not understood. Like black holes, we don’t have a complete understanding. But they are.
Religion has been under attack for a long time from smart people with money. Religions might ask, is that all you got?
“Even the existence of religion’s evolutionary dominance is not understood. Like black holes, we don’t have a complete understanding.”
Yep, agree.
To further things, CCCC is a religion. It seems that Science should react to it as it reacts to religion. We see efforts to prove the validity of CCCC from what is called Science. A government policy that places great weight on CO2 not emitted, indicates an endorsement of CCCC. A government sponsored religion. The building of cathedrals. The spreading of the word. This attracts religious hucksters. Disciples. When Science endorses CCCC or remains silent, CCCC has invaded it. And that Science becomes a religion.
The silence of most mainstream scientists in the face of CCCC, is indeed a huge issue. Probably much more so than fringe endorsers. And culture is indeed invasive, and for sure can outright hi-jack science (hence gaining authority in the public eye) as historic example shows.
Ragnaar says: “To further things, CCCC is a religion. It seems that Science should react to it as it reacts to religion.”
There are two distinct points of view; from the perspective of understanding, and the opposite perspective of belief.
Religion for the ancient Sumerian, was the belief of a supernatural force or forces that controlled the destiny of men. Those were the gods of old, and to be sure the Sumerians despised them for their wickedness.
The view on CCCC depends on the perspective. In today’s world Science has also become a religion of sorts, that is the belief that technology and what we think we know, has made us invincible to Nature. We have just been cut down to size.
“These have now coalesced against the new citizenship laws, but this wave started back in 2016 and is ultimately generic opposition to conservative religious power (this time Hindu), again seen as a perceived threat to liberal values and democracy.”
Amazing how non residents of India can misunderstand news flashes. Indian parliament endorsed with big majority a law to ease citizenship for religiously pursued minorities in adjacent Islamic states. Some Islamists plus their Western educated leftist friends call this law discriminatory: they never spoke up against actual Hindu, Buddhist or Christian persecution in Pakistan, Afghanistan or Bangladesh. These few protesters represent a small minority of India’s youth.
Most of India’s youth want finally reliable electricity and transport – which have be cheap too. That makes wind and solar moot, independent of their parents belief systems.
The problem is with well off Western educated Green extremists living in fantasy land.
Antonym, point taken about Western vision, but the 3 sources quoted there are all Indian writers based in India. Notwithstanding which, as noted, whether indeed the exceptions from the envelope (for several nations at the top of Chart 3) are caused by youth influence, is far from proven.
Very interesting post and comments
But, as a formal – and accidental – student and practitioner of organizational change – my reaction is – “the medium IS the message”.
This post is interesting but both obvious, and not really useful for inducing adaptive human mass behavior…
…except that it points to a unversal truth that keeps sustaining life on this planet.
The farmers and the ranchers can be friends, if they both realize that “truth” requires admitting ignorance and maintaining collaboration.
HEADLINE:
At the top level this post proves the points:
1. Human belief in “climate change” as defined by political organizations like the IPCC is definitely a form of “religion”. It is a belief system.
2. So is “Science”…as defined by academically-accredited scientists…a belief system….a religion if you will.
3. And “reality” happens over time, proving BOTH religions partly right, and partly to mostly wrong.
4. Both religions induce people to do good things (see positive principles of most religions)….and bad things (see “Phrenology” and early 20th Century Germany for example.)
To understand how “science” is a form of “religion” – a belief system – see how genomic sciences moved quickly from “cracking the genome” – and calling the “uncracked” material “jumk DNA”…to discovering that simply sequencing the top level of human genomic data – was only the start of a long and deep journey into the much larger “micro-biome”. The “cracked” genome of 20 years ago was simply the first step in understanding that “scientifically-certified” “junk DNA” was much more important than the “cracked DNA” pushed by the Human Genome Project….much like the IPCC pushes “Consensus Climate Forecasts”….one after the failed forecast after another, ad infinitum.
DISCUSSION:
Anglos (roughly humans living on the North side of Earth) tend to divide the world into “science” and “religion”.
One is said to be based on fact and data and one is said to be based on belief.
But to those who must try to stimulate humans to take any organized action – there is little difference between “science” and “religion”.
In fact, it could be said that “Science” – as defined in Anglo terms – is one of the World’s Great Religions.
It is a belief that “data” can reveal “truth” and that “truth” …. is “true”…..
….until a “scientist”, or scientific consortium, starts to tell millions of other people what to DO…based on narrow scientific discoveries…like the “cracked” top-level Genome.
That’s when scientific data prove that “science” is a belief system, held by a small sub-set of humans, and has rarely – durably – held control over massive human systems.
The long climate belief post above is a powerful piece of evidence of this reality.
Remember – I’m talking about human behavior in organizations.
Not whether penicillin can treat infections.
Data:
The main flaw in this post is that it – like most religious thinking – puts complex, unpredictable humans into bounded categories like “country”.
And it seeks to put extraordinarily diverse human thoughts into bounded categories like “religion”.
The form of “scientific” modeling underpinning the post above REQUIRES oversimplifying complex reality, because “science” requires defining discrete, finite, “nodes” …that can be related to each other by discrete, finite “links”…in order to abstract a “model” from extremely messy “reality”.
Let me rephrase that paragraph to make my point.
The form of “religion” underpinning the post above REQUIRES oversimimplifying complex reality, because “religion” requires defining discrete, finite “nodes” (“sinners” and “saved”)…that can be related to each other by discrete, finite “links”…in order to abstract a “model” (the Ten Commandments) from extremely messy “reality”.
“Science” and “Religion” are remarkably similar classes of human behavior. They have centralized rules, and they have largely unstructured, ever-experimenting followers…who bend the rules all the time.
When one tries to model human behavior, one usually loses the crucial “messiness” of constantly adapting belief systems.
When people start boxing up the complex dynamics of human organizations into small lists of categories and labels…organizational practitioners stop buying into the narrow models and wait for the predictions of the models to prove themselves 10% right and 90% wrong….again.
Is the political movement of “climate change” a religion?
Of course. That’s obvious to practitioners.
Is academic “science” a faith-based human process?
Of course. Testing hypothesis and finding oneself partly to mostly ‘wrong’ all the time – requires faith to keep going.
Why do practitioners hold these beliefs…that ‘science’ and ‘religion are both faith-based endeavors?
Here is how the applied organizational “sciences” work, and why their practitioners are justifiably skeptical about “scientific fact” and forecasts in large scale human/environmental systems.
Let me use a simple example.
About 20 years ago two of the most famous academic organizational scientists published a powerful, evidence-based concept of “THE Core Competence of The Organization”.
The idea was that all large organizations have only a few CORE competencies, among vast arrays of – just – “skills”.
If you wanted your organization to be “SUSTAINABLE” you had to comb the complex organization to distill those few, true, proven competences that everyone in the organiztion should follow and implement.
A small group of us practitioners, with (humbling) experience in trying to turn around failing organizations, or implementing ‘scientifically proven’ government policies (single-variable pollution control laws)…
…worked with these two famous academics to implement the principles of THE core competence of the company.
We gathered the top 10-20 leaders of corporations and asked them to “define the core competencies of your organization”
Our first diagnostic ‘hint’ that the ‘truth’ of the core competence principle was in doubt was when we began to execute the following process.
After working hard to get the top executives to agree on a CONSENSUS of the core competencies of the company, we would move down the company ranks and ask the same question of many layers of management – WITHOUT TELLING THEM WHAT TOP MANAGEMENT SAID.
We found that in every…repeat every…organization where we did this…
…by two or three levels down from top management, the “core” competencies were said to be completely different.
Think about that.
Then think about the Human Genome Project, and how outdated its simplistic view of the world was.
NOW – BACK TO THE WORLD OF CLIMATE SCIENCE AND THE POST ABOVE
This extraordinarily thoughtful and detailed post above can be read as further proof that in any HUMAN or biological organization (ecosystem)…
….the top level hypotheses will always be partly right and mostly wrong.
And models of the current state, that force complex behavior into rigid “nodes” in order to “prove” single “hypotheses”…
….will always be “experimental”.
And “truth” is always still somewhere out there in the future.
So, principles are all we have to go on as we bumble through our tiny fractions of time in an infinite “uni”verse.
Think
Of course “Climate Change” is a form of religion.
So…thank the gods…is “science”
We need both to be humans and make things better for everyone and everything.
Quote “So…thank the gods…is “science” “. That is the perspective from inside “the box” of religion. Science is the untethered search to understand all that is around us, including ourselves.
Follow the ants; extremely well stated. Probably most people are religious in one way or other, it’s a human innate predisposition, part of the human condition, to be trite.
Religion should be recognized beyond orthodox definitions, but more often than not isn’t, it’s instead recognized by cultural stereotype.
Science and politics; both have a deep religious congregation, often both are represented in a single expression of faith. For example, the Left uses science as a political badge, often wielded hysterically by the illiterate; hello Greta! This political expression is often leveraged against orthodox religion in todays culture. Yet ironically they both seek to gather a flock.
Political and science religiosity has aligned to predominately oppose orthodox religion in contemporary culture. Fundamentally these dichotomies of religious belief systems are centered on polar opposite philosophical tenets; either aligning with collectivist philosophy, or individualistic philosophy; yet both these examples bridge orthodox definitions of religion, though more so on the Left. For example, there’s a sizable orthodox religious demographic that aligns with collectivism on the Left, this is little discussed, but these of course are the ones who believe in science. Who would have guessed? Over 30% of the Democratic Party are born again Christians for example, factor in other eccentric religious sects represented among Leftists, and the percentage is higher, i.e., scientology, Buddhism, what have you.
Religiosity is malleable, it cloaks itself around societies while awaiting redefinition by culture. Who were the religious; Nazi’s or Jews?
Related… interesting to hear Steve Wynn’s analogy, talking about the experience of UK with German buzz bombs and looking at the change of behavior, four months out.
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So in several Middle Eastern countries, fewer people believe that human activity is driving climate change, but along with most other hotter places, many believe that the impact will be large. While the whole of Scandinavia has the fewest proportion of people who believe that the impacts will be large.
Ulric, as explained in Post 2 of the series, the apparent paradoxes between the orange / red trends falling left to right, and the blue / pink trends rising left to right (Chart 2), are due to cultural attitudes. The X-axis indeed being religiosity and not temperature. No trend actually correlates (or anti-correlates) with country temperature, except in some crudest LH-cooler versus RH-hotter kind of way (and even then with some anomalies such as Australia). For instance, the temp trend for Singapore rightwards on Chart 2 above is flat, whereas clearly all the coloured trends are still rising / falling with about the same gradients they had in the left half of the chart (i.e. if each half were plotted separately). Due to a quirk of history, secularism arose in the cloudier / north-western parts of Europe, and so in spreading out from there has tended to erode religious beliefs somewhat in ratio to their annual sunshine duration hours. But this is historical accident (which nevertheless has sometimes been interpreted as higher temp must be more conducive to religious regimes, I think not), and where this tendency happens not to have occurred, attitudes follow religiosity and not sunshine hours / temperature. So… the reason for the beliefs in the Scandinavian countries for example, is not at all because they are cooler, but because they are the least religious nations. (Caveat: as noted in the series, where v low religiosity is apparently achieved by a one-party state suppressing religion, this screws the above relationships, not least because real religiosity can’t actually be determined due to state interference).