So why is he spouting off about climate change?

That’s a harder question to answer because the reasons for denial overlap for most people, and almost no one is honest about their motivations for it. And of course I don’t know him personally. That all said, I’ll try to unpack why I think he’s a denier.

First off, Peterson consistently interprets things he has skimmed in line with his biases. That’s apparent in his treatment of Taoism, The Enlightenment, Jung, feminism, lobsters and the like. He’s a textbook case of a couple of things:

Confirmation bias — He interprets data to match his bias and preconceptions much more often than he changes his mind to fit reality and data. He’s intellectually arrogant outside of his own field. He doesn’t do the work. In the case of global warming and climate change, he’s predisposed to not believe in it, so interprets data to fit.

Dunning-Kruger Effect — This is the false sense of self-confidence people without competence feel early in their investigation of complex fields. Even smart, educated people are subject to it. Peterson demonstrates this constantly with facile reads of innumerable fields outside of his area of actual expertise, clinical psychology. What’s interesting is that he’s undoubtedly fully aware of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, yet obviously feels it doesn’t apply to him.

Second, why would Peterson have this bias that he’s confirming about global warming and climate change?

Well, he was born in Alberta, which is climate denial central for Canada. He went on to Queen’s University in Ontario, Harvard and then UofT, all places of higher learning where sanity prevails, but apparently while you can take the boy out of Alberta, it’s harder to take Alberta out of the boy. This is pure supposition on my part, but is supported by an Albertan commenter who indicated that Peterson’s hometown and the school he initially attended there are indeed a hotbed of denialism.

Third, he’s made himself famous mostly by attacking progressives and liberals, and they accept climate change so ipso facto…

He certainly doesn’t maintain anywhere near the same level of contempt for the much worse excesses on the right as he does for minor excesses on the left and in academia. His statements about post-Modernism and Marxism on campus have to be read to be believed. Strike that, they have to be read with disbelief, and likely a stunned expression.

Liberals and progressives accept the science of global warming and climate change to a much larger degree than conservatives at this point in history. Some of the proposed arguments even sound like Marxism to scared right-wingers. So Peterson is predisposed to attack global warming and climate change because of who accepts it. It’s dumb as a box of hammers from a guy as smart as Peterson, but he still defends his lobster analogy despite withering corrections, so this is par for the course.

Finally, he’s been captured by his audience on the right.

Peterson originally did something good. He put all of his lecture videos on YouTube. Many of them are even worth watching apparently. Then he decided to die on the sword of being rude to transgenders, although he characterized it as freedom of speech, vastly overstating the entire issue. He’s famously thin-skinned about insults to him personally, however, bringing lawsuit after lawsuit against people who publicly dismiss his ideas. Freedom of speech is for him personally, not others in general it seems.

This made him beloved of the right, and to be clear, he’s pretty much a social conservative. He’s lightly Christian, he’s a strong believer in hierarchy, he’s a casual and consistent misogynist and he loves to be an authority. His thinking on economic matters is even weaker than on lobsters, so it’s harder to call him a fiscal conservative except for his frequently expressed revulsion over Commies on campus.

But as his former mentor at UofT said, Peterson loves the rhetorical patterns of demagogues. He loves that when they said something and got roars of approval, they repeated it more loudly, and then honed in on the subset of things that got them the biggest roars.

That’s all Peterson is doing. Saying things that his audience loves to hear, reveling in their roars of approval, then repeating himself.

And since his audience is mostly younger, white, conservative men, and that audience has a strong tendency to be climate change deniers and to love trolling liberals, when he says ‘climate change stoopid’, they roar their approval.

Given that he makes a very good income out of this audience, just as Shapiro and Coulter do, this is actually smart, even if venal, ugly and intellectually dishonest. But Peterson has shown every evidence of venality and intellectual dishonesty while spouting often ugly things — enforced monogamy anyone? — he later pretends were misunderstood for a couple of years. This is just par for the course.