I have several friends who I respect greatly for their intelligence and level-headedness who dispute climate change despite the fact that 98% of research climatologists agree about the existence of climate change and it’s potential impact.

NPR did a story a week or so ago about Cultural Cognition that answers the question. Essentially, Cultural Cognitions says that people tend to conform their factual beliefs to ones that are consistent with their cultural outlook, their world view.

Social scientist and lawyer Don Bramanis on the faculty at George Washington University and part of The Cultural Cognition Project and says, “It doesn’t matter whether you show them negative or positive information, they reject the information that is contrary to what they would like to believe”.

“Basically the reason that people react in a close-minded way to information is that the implications of it threaten their values,” says Dan Kahan, a law professor at Yale University and a member of The Cultural Cognition Project.

This explains why people still believe that vaccines are bad and linked to Autism despite the fact that there is absolutely no proof about this whatsoever – in fact, information that has been used as “proof” in the past has been wholly debunked as false and discredited.

I mentioned this to my better half and she said, “You drink at least that much. I mean you have a manhattan every night and that accounts for probably 5 gallons and that doesn’t take into account all the wine and port you drink”. I brushed this off as so much hyperbole.

Then I got to thinking more about it. I did the calculation this morning. I have a manhattan almost every single day. My manhattan is 3 ounces of Maker’s Mark bourbon, 3/4 of an ounce of sweet vermouth and 3 dashes of Angostura bitters. I did the math taking 3 ounces of bourbon times 350 days – figuring there must be at least a few days when I don’t have a manahatten – and came up with 1,050 ounces. Divided by 128 ounces – the number of ounces in a gallon – and i came up with 8.2 gallons of bourbon yearly. And, as Cristina so adroitly pointed out, that does not take into account a hundred bottles of wine + or -.

Is this an issue?