Well a study backing what most of us already knew has been published.
“The conspiracist ideation that all of the world’s scientific academies have conspired together to create a hoax known as global warming has found traction in American mainstream politics,” Stephan Lewandowsky of the University of Western Australia and his colleagues wrote in their study.
In particular, Republican Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma has alleged that thousands of scientists working independently over decades are actually part of “the greatest hoax” to increase regulation on businesses and individuals.
The study of 1,377 people who visited climate change denial blogs found endorsement of laissez-faire free markets predicted the rejection of climate science and other established scientific facts, such as that HIV causes AIDS or that tobacco smoking causes lung cancer.
“The pivotal role of personal ideology in the rejection of climate science has been repeatedly demonstrated,” Lewandowsky and his colleagues explained. “We highlighted the magnitude of this effect among climate-science blog denizens, who have a strong interest in the issue, and we additionally showed that endorsement of the free market also predicted the rejection of two other well-established scientific facts.”
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/04/21/study-finds-belief-in-free-market-economics-predicts-rejection-of-science/Abstract form Journal Article:
Abstract
Although nearly all domain experts agree that carbon dioxide emissions are altering the world’s climate, segments of the public remain unconvinced by the scientific evidence. Internet blogs have become a platform for denial of climate change, and bloggers have taken a prominent role in questioning climate science. We report a survey of climate-blog visitors to identify the variables underlying acceptance and rejection of climate science. Our findings parallel those of previous work and show that endorsement of free-market economics predicted rejection of climate science. Endorsement of free markets also predicted the rejection of other established scientific findings, such as the facts that HIV causes AIDS and that smoking causes lung cancer. We additionally show that, above and beyond endorsement of free markets, endorsement of a cluster of conspiracy theories (e.g., that the Federal Bureau of Investigation killed Martin Luther King, Jr.) predicted rejection of climate science as well as other scientific findings. Our results provide empirical support for previous suggestions that conspiratorial thinking contributes to the rejection of science. Acceptance of science, by contrast, was strongly associated with the perception of a consensus among scientists.
