How Not To Build Public Support For The Mitigation of Global Warming

Ted Nordhaus is an economist who accepts the hypothesis that human behavior is the cause of global warming.  He has his own approach to the problem, from an economic perspective and from a mitigation perspective.  In this article, he and a colleague suggest that scare tactics about global warming tend to polarize debate on the issue.  Conservatives become more skeptical about global warming when atypical weather events are used as evidence for global warming. 

The psychology of global warming denial, and our understanding of the best means of persuasion, are not well understood even by Nordhaus and his colleague.  The real message in this article is that a greater use of nuclear energy should be a part of any solution, and that conservationists who oppose increasing the use of nuclear power are making a mistake.