Former Navy rear admiral David Titley suggests that if Atlanta runs out of water, we might be convinced that CO2 is dangerous; Yale's Dan Kahan suggests that Texans blame fires on gay marriage, rather than correctly blaming trace amounts of CO2

Santa Barbara conference tackles skepticism about global warming

“We may do it with duct tape. It may take a new kind of disaster, such as Atlanta running out of water, to fully get our attention, and we’ll probably spend more money on it than we need to,” [former Navy rear admiral] David Titley said at a conference on sea level rise at UC Santa Barbara. “But in the end, I think we’ll figure this out.”
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“I’ve told the Navy and Congress that we should expect a global sea rise between now and the year 2100 of about 1 meter,” Titley told a hall full of students and others Friday who attended the conference, called “Risk and Uncertainty and the Communication of Sea Level Rise.”

“If I’m wrong, I’m probably wrong on the low end,” he said.
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From the academic community, Dan Kahan, an expert on communication of science from Yale University, said the perception of risk is governed by an individual’s cultural outlook, not by a lack of knowledge.

“If you go to Texas, they have major fires, but that’s not convincing to them that climate change is happening,” he said. “They’re more likely to blame gay marriage. We’ve done polling. What is going on here? People are forming perceptions that reinforce their connection to their cultural group. It’s not a lack of science.”