How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate

Dr. Andrew J. Hoffman talks about how the culture affects the climate debate. He starts by talking about the things we learn from our society affects our views. For example in 1960, people didn’t think of smoking as bad or harmful for health but social consensus has changed everything. Now the people are asked to stop smoking as it may cause cancer. The belief in science for climate changed has decreased over the years. It has decreased from 71 to 57 percent among Americans between 2008 and 2009 (Pew research Center, 2009) and rose back to 67 percent to 67 in 2012 (Borrick and Rabe, 2013). In a survey conducted by Yale George Masson university, around 16% of the people have high belief in Global warming and alarmed by this whereas 15% have no belief in global belief. The rest of the people lie in the middle with mixed thoughts. It has been seen that two-thirds of Americans rarely discuss about global warming. Then he talks about how the democrats and republican have different opinions.

We will notice the same in corporate culture too. The culture in an organization sometimes tends to dominate the ethical values. Those are the times when an employee is stuck between the decisions. Should he follow the ethical path and go against the organization. Or follow what others are doing and take unethical decisions. These days people end up trusting things that they don’t even know. For example we don’t know how the jet functions or what is the composition of a medicine but still we use that service. So the same concept goes with science and climate change. There are low chances of adverse climate change but the consequences are high. There are 9 boundaries in the nature that we are not supposed to cross but we have only crossed. In today’s world, the companies are polluting the environment and the effects are increasing on daily basis. Social consensus takes wider population in consideration while scientific consensus takes only limited population. But scientific consensus...