<!doctype html public "-//W3C//DTD W3 HTML//EN">
<html><head><style type="text/css"><!--
blockquote, dl, ul, ol, li { padding-top: 0 ; padding-bottom: 0 }
--></style><title>Forest Owners' Response to Climate
Change</title></head><body>
<div><font face="Lucida Grande">PLOSONE Published: May 25,
2016</font></div>
<div><font
face="Lucida Grande">http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0155137</font
></div>
<div><font face="Lucida Grande"><br></font></div>
<div><font face="Lucida Grande">Forest Owners' Response to Climate
Change: University Education Trumps Value Profile<br>
<x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab>Kristina Blennow, <br>
<x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab>Johannes Persson, <br>
<x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab> </x-tab>Erik
Persson, </font></div>
<div><font
face="Lucida Grande"><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab> </x-tab>Marc
Hanewinkel</font></div>
<div><font face="Lucida Grande"><br>
Abstract</font></div>
<div><font face="Lucida Grande"
size="-1"
>http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj<span
></span>ournal.pone.0155137</font></div>
<div><font face="Lucida Grande"><br>
Do forest owners' levels of education or value profiles explain
their responses to climate change? The cultural cognition thesis (CCT)
has cast serious doubt on the familiar and often criticized
"knowledge deficit" model, which says that laypeople are
less concerned about climate change because they lack scientific
knowledge. Advocates of CCT maintain that citizens with the highest
degrees of scientific literacy and numeracy are not the most concerned
about climate change. Rather, this is the group in which cultural
polarization is greatest, and thus individuals with more limited
scientific literacy and numeracy are more concerned about climate
change under certain circumstances than those with higher scientific
literacy and numeracy. The CCT predicts that cultural and other values
will trump the positive effects of education on some forest owners'
attitudes to climate change. Here, using survey data collected in 2010
from 766 private forest owners in Sweden and Germany, we provide the
first evidence that perceptions of climate change risk are
uncorrelated with, or sometimes positively correlated with, education
level and can be explained without reference to cultural or other
values. We conclude that the recent claim that advanced scientific
literacy and numeracy polarizes perceptions of climate change risk is
unsupported by the forest owner data. In neither of the two countries
was university education found to reduce the perception of risk from
climate change. Indeed in most cases university education increased
the perception of risk. Even more importantly, the effect of
university education was not dependent on the individuals' value
profile.</font></div>
<div><br></div>
<x-sigsep><pre>--
</pre></x-sigsep>
<div><font face="Bookman Old Style"
color="#000000"
>##################################################################</font
></div>
<div><font face="Bookman Old Style" color="#000000"><br></font></div>
<div><font face="Bookman Old Style" color="#000000">"Localized
ecological systems are known to shift abruptly and irreversibly from
one state to another when they are forced across critical thresholds.
Here we review evidence that the global ecosystem as a whole can react
in the same way and is approaching a planetary-scale critical
transition as a result of human influence."</font><br>
<font face="Bookman Old Style" color="#000000"></font></div>
<div><font face="Bookman Old Style" color="#000000">Barnovsky et al.
Approaching a state shift in Earth's biosphere.<i>
Nature.<b> </b></i> 07 June 2012<br>
doi:10.1038/nature11018</font><br>
<font face="Bookman Old Style" color="#000000"></font></div>
<div><font face="Geneva" size="-1" color="#000000"><br>
<br>
</font><font face="Geneva" color="#000000"><br>
</font><font face="Times New Roman" color="#000000"><br>
</font></div>
</body>
</html>