From Yale Alumni Mag, “What do Americans think about global warming?“

It’s a pity the text on the image is so small. I’m going to try to replicate it, just in case you’re having trouble reading the caption:

Stable: Earth’s climate system is very stale. Global warming will have little or no effects.

Random: Earth’s climate is random. We do not know what will happen.

Fragile: Earth’s climate is delicately balanced. Small amounts of global warming will have abrupt and catastrophic effects.

Gradual: Earth’s climate is gradual to change. [?] Global warming will gradually lead to dangerous effects.

Threshold: Earth’s climate is stable within certain limits. If global warming is small, climate will return to a stable balance; if it is large, there will be dangerous effects.

In case you are wondering how big each group is, here you go:

The left to right ordering of the bubbles is probably not coincidental: global warming believers tend to be liberals, while deniers tend to be conservative. The disengaged, cautious, and doubtful tend toward political moderatism, not picking either obvious side.

Amusingly, I consider myself a political moderate, though to be fair, it’s a moderatism of considering myself “somewhere between anarchism and fascism.”

Some people are “moderates” because they just don’t want to get into annoying arguments with others, a position I find very reasonable in this day and age. But others are moderates because they just aren’t smart enough to make sense of either side’s arguments.

The Disengageds and their neighbors are the most likely to favor the Random hypothesis: the climate is totally random and we can’t predict it at all.

I suspect this is what life is actually like for unintelligent people: stuff seems to happens for no particularly coherent reasons at all.

IQ tests measure, among other things, your ability to figure out patterns. Finding patterns in data and making non-obvious connections requires cleverness and insight. For those not gifted with such skills, many of life’s events seem simply random.

It’s all about the patterns.