Climate and Elite Opinion 气候问题与精英观点 作者：David Friedman @ 2014-12-12

译者：小聂

校对：乘风（@你在何地-sxy） 陈小乖（@lion_kittyyyyy)

来源：Ideas，http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/climate-and-elite-opinion.html

I have spent a good deal of time observing and participating in arguments about global warming. One striking point that I have not seen discussed is the sharp divergence between elite opinion and mass opinion.

我曾花大量时间关注和参与有关全球变暖的讨论。有一个惊人却从未被讨论过的现象是，在此话题上精英和大众的观点存在着巨大分歧。

Elite opinion, the New York Times, official statements by various scientific organizations and the like, views global warming as a dire threat, one that requires drastic and immediate action to prevent. Mass opinion, not only in the U.S. but, according to at least one poll I saw, world wide , puts it very far down in the list of what people are concerned about, perhaps tenth or twentieth.

《纽约时报》和各类科研机构发布的官方声明，或诸如此类的精英观点，认为全球变暖是个紧迫威胁，需要立刻采取有力措施加以避免。大众的观点，不仅仅在美国，在全球范围内，该问题在人们的关切事项中排位都特别靠后，大概在十几到二十几名，至少我看到过的一份全球调研是这么显示的。

This pattern is reflected in the online discussions, where people concerned about warming mostly base their arguments on some version of "everyone who is anyone agrees with me." Their picture of the situation, pretty clearly, is one in which the truth is perfectly clear and it is only uneducated fundamentalists or people in the pay of the oil companies who can disagree.

这种情况也反映在网络讨论中，在那里，全球变暖担忧者常见的说法，都是类似于“众所周知——‘众’的意思是同意我的任何人”的论证。很显然，他们眼中的图景是：真相一清二楚，且只有无知的原教旨主义者或领酬于石油公司的人才会有不同看法。

My reasons for questioning part of that picture, not the fact of warming due to human actions but the likely consequences, I have discussed in past posts here.

我部分质疑该图景的原因，不是对人类活动造成了变暖这一事实有异议，而是质疑关于变暖可能后果的看法。我曾在过去的博客文章里解释了质疑的原因。

My general skepticism of elite opinion comes from many past disagreements with it, most notably on political and economic issues. My point here, however, is not about whether the elite view is right or wrong but about the relation between the elite view and the mass view in different countries.

我对于精英观点的普遍怀疑来自于过去和他们的数次争论，尤其是在政治和经济议题上的分歧。尽管如此，我在这里想说的并不是精英观点正确与否，而是他们在不同国家里和大众观点之间的关系。

Among western developed countries, Australia appears least supportive of action against warming, Germany most, the U.S. in between. Germany has been involved in a very high profile effort to push down its output of CO2. The current Australian government, so far as I can make out, has mostly rejected calls for anything along similar lines. In the U.S., the President is strongly in favor of climate action, the Congress reluctant to support it, with the result that the administration has been trying to implement its views by regulatory action instead of legislation.

在西方发达国家中，澳大利亚最不支持对抗全球变暖的行动，德国反之，美国处于他们之间。德国一直大张旗鼓的想要降低二氧化碳排放量。而据我所知，现任澳大利亚政府拒绝了大部分对类似活动的倡议。在美国，总统是行动派，国会却不情不愿，结果就是，行政当局一直试图通过管制措施而非立法过程来践行其观点。

After a summer in Australia many years ago, I concluded two things about the country. One was that it had a larger variety of flavored potato chips than anywhere else in the world, including all the British versions and all the U.S. versions.

多年以前，在澳大利亚度过了一个夏天之后，我对这个国家做了两点总结。第一点是，相比世界其他地方，这里的薯片口味最多，包括了所有英国和美国的口味。

The second, possibly related, was that Australia had a full range of social classes built almost entirely out of an originally working class population. One implication, consistent with at least casual observation, is that Australians have less respect for their betters, their social superiors, their elite, than any other population on the globe.

第二且可能相关的一点是，澳大利亚层次丰满的整套社会阶层，几乎全部源自同一个本是工人阶级的群体。一个至少与初步观察相吻合的推断是，对他们中的佼佼者、上层阶级、或是精英们，澳大利亚人相比于世界上的其他人群更少景仰。

Germany, I think, represents the opposite pattern. The U.S. is somewhere in between. Unlike European countries, the U.S. never had a system with well defined social classes, the sort of system where there was a close correlation between how much money someone had, how much education he had, and how he spoke.

在我看来，德国代表了相反的模式。美国处于他们之间。不像欧洲国家，美国从未有过一个界限分明的社会阶层系统，即那种人们的财富水平、受教育程度以及说话方式之间有着紧密相关性的阶级系统。

One result is that Americans are less inclined to see all political issues as my class vs your class than Europeans (I must confess that my view of Europeans is heavily weighted towards Great Britain, as the only European country whose language I am fluent in). Another, I think, is that Americans have less respect for their elite.

这使得美国人比欧洲人更不倾向于把所有政治议题看作是阶级斗争（我必须承认我对欧洲人的看法更多是基于我对英国人的看法，因为这是唯一我能熟练运用其语言的欧洲国家）。此外，在我看来，美国人更少迷信精英。

If I am correct—I am far from expert in the various societies and may be misinterpreting them—there is a pattern. Countries where the elite is more influential are more likely to take costly actions aimed at reducing global warming.

假设我是对的——我远非熟知各类社会的专家，而且很有可能对他们抱有错误的认知——那么，确实存在这样一种固有模式：那些精英更具影响力的国家，更可能采取高成本的举措来阻止全球暖化。

At a final tangent, I recently came across an online post , based in part on another post by a blogger I think very highly of, which nicely stated one of my reservations about arguments for the current elite view of warming.

最后，离一下题，我最近看到了一篇博客文章，其内容部分基于一位我高度认可的作者。这篇文章很好地阐述了我对有关当前全球变暖的精英观点的一个保留意见。

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