Carlton and his colleagues sent surveys to nearly 2,000 biophysical scientists at universities in the Big 10 conference (which primarily includes universities in the Northeast and Midwest). The scientists surveyed included experts in a broad range of disciplines, including biology, chemistry, physics and geosciences, and also included some climate scientists.
The inspiration for the survey came partly from the idea that many prominent climate change doubters in the scientific sphere come from disciplines other than climate science. The driving question, according to Carlton, was, Are these people representative of what scientists believe about climate science?
The surveys included questions about four major issues: what the scientists believed about climate change, what they believed about climate science, where they got their information and what kinds of cultural and political values they had. Out of the sample, 698 scientists responded.
The survey results indicate that a firm majority of scientists believe in anthropogenic climate change. The researchers found that 93.6 percent of respondents believe that global temperatures have risen since their pre-1800s levels. Out of these, 98.2 percent said they believe that human activities are contributing to the rise in temperatures, meaning that altogether 91.9 percent of the respondents believe in anthropogenic climate change.
A 2012 study in Nature Climate Change found that the most scientifically literate members of the public were likely to be the most culturally polarized. So the researchers wanted to find out if scientists were also affected by some of the same things that we know affect the publics belief in climate science, Carlton said.
In fact, cultural and political values do seem to play a role among scientists. Those who believed that global temperatures are rising were more egalitarian, more communitarian and more liberal than those who did not, the survey revealed. There were also differences among those who said they believed in anthropogenic climate change. For instance, 100 percent of egalitarian communitarians said they believed in a human contribution to climate change, compared with 90.3 percent of hierarchical individualists.
There is this idea that something like belief in climate change is purely a rational or knowledge-based thing, Carlton said. These results show that its not. Its the intersection of knowledge, your values, your identity its somewhere in the intersection of all these things.
That said, Carlton pointed out that the effects of cultural values on climate beliefs were less pronounced than past research has indicated they are in the general public. This is an effect he also found unsurprising, given that many biophysical scientists do interact with climate change indirectly or directly.
