Comparing the Relationship between Ideology and Climate change Skepticism Across Nations

A source of frustration for climate scientists is that evidence for anthropogenic climate change can be psychologically discounted because of people’s broader worldviews and ideologies. For example, climate skepticism is positively correlated with conspiratorial ideation, conservative political identity, and with ideologies of individualism and hierarchialism. Given that the vast majority of these data have been collected in the U.S., however, it remains unclear whether the ideological nature of climate change beliefs is an international phenomenon, or whether it reflects a distinctive ideological climate within the U.S. To test this, we sampled 5323 members of 25 nations. Positive correlations between climate skepticism and our indices of ideology (conspiratorial ideation, individualism, hierarchialism, and political conservatism) were significantly stronger in the U.S. than in the other samples. The data suggest that there is a political culture in the U.S. that offers particularly strong encouragement for citizens to appraise climate science through the lens of their worldviews. Furthermore, the weak relationships between ideology and climate skepticism in the majority of nations suggest that there is little inherent to conspiratorial ideation or conservative worldviews that predispose people to reject climate science, a finding that has encouraging implications for climate mitigation efforts globally.