People send me stuff.
In my Inbox today was a link to a Science Poll conducted by the Pew Research Center. The aim of the poll was to gauge American knowledge of science and it is a parallel poll to one conducted by telephone. Given the millions spent on global warming/climate change messaging, I was shocked to see the results of this question on Carbon Dioxide. Note what I circled in red.
Similarly, I thought far more people would get this grade school science question right. Only 20% did.
The choices for both of the questions were amazingly simple, and I thought these would score far higher in the general population. One has to wonder about the 24% of college graduates that also missed the CO2 question and the 69% that missed the Nitrogen question. I also wonder what percentage answered “Carbon Dioxide” as the primary gas of Earth’s atmosphere instead of Nitrogen.
I got 100% on the test by the way.
You can take it yourself here: http://www.pewresearch.org/quiz/science-knowledge/
See how your results compare with the 1,006 randomly sampled adults that took part in the Pew national telephone survey and review how you responded to each question.
For more findings from the survey, read “Public’s Knowledge of Science and Technology.”
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Actually I would propose that you can immediately dimiss any statement which says “most scientists believe” as a pathetic appeal to authority. For any given subject, most scientists will not be experts in that field. The majority of scientists are not experts in climate – so their opinion has little value. It would be like asking what most doctors think about a treatment for a rare form of cancer. A doctor might have some good ideas… but there are experts in every field, and their value comes in what they know *outside* of what the generalists know…
tmonroe – you are absolutely right, but you learn to save that attitude toward test questions until you’ve gotten into the schools and programs you want to get into, right 😉
Well Anthony, what did they expect when they shortened CARBON dioxide to “Your CARBON foot print”
Remember 50% of the population has an IQ under 100 and they VOTE! (As long as their Community Organizer remembers to send around the bus to pick them up and carefully instructs them on how to vote and bribes them with candy or…)
Hell, it’s even worse. The average adult American is even dumber that the average human
http://nypost.com/2013/10/08/us-adults-are-dumber-than-the-average-human/
Greg says: October 8, 2013 at 9:52 am
I dread to think what happens when you give these people a voting slip.
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You get Obama and Blair.
R. de Haan says: October 8, 2013 at 12:20 pm
Hell, it’s even worse. The average adult American is even dumber that the average human
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But not as dumb as the output of the average madrassa, where the boys spend the first 7 years of their education reciting the Koran.
This deliberate and institutional lowering of education standards, to produce automaton cannon-fodder, is truly horrifying. When I were a lad (sic) I imagined we would have bases on Mars by now, and everyone would have the education of the best UK grammar schools. But the politics and appeasement of the political left has ensured that we have regressed back into an educational Dark Age.
Most people believe trees grow out of the ground into the air rather than into the ground from the air.
OK, 100% here too.
Shouldn’t the Question on CO2 read:
Of the following, which gas do most scientists say has a warming effect in the atmosphere?
I do not believe that most scientists agree that atmospheric CO2 is the primary cause of “global warming”.
I strongly suspect that we WUWT-ers are skewing the poll.
Don’t wish to sound arrogant but that was a frighteningly trivial quiz. Skewed question about CO2 warming, but we’ll let that pass. Apparently I scored better than 93% of co-respondents by answering all questions correctly. Now that’s depressing.
What do you expect when half the population is below average intelligence ?
Half of Americans also believe aliens have abducted humans.
(median is roughly equal to mean for IQ)
How about taking those who score less than 90 %, and moving them to Sweden?
You answered 13 of 13 questions correctly. If we could just get journalists to take this test and then eliminate all of them that don’t score 100%.
PEW TRUST if ever there was an oxymoron. . . .
100% here ,and i am probably the least educated person posting on this thread. left uk high school at 16,physics education to “o” level in 1986.either the last or penultimate year of “o” levels.
I was doing fine until the demographic part of the test.
If people agree with you, but for the wrong reason (in this case, the problem is likely due to being American public school graduates, that is, they’re dumber than a bag of rocks), is that a good thing?
Are the liberals starting to believe maybe they shot themselves in the foot by dumbing down education so much that only 58% identified CO2 as the alleged cause of global warming? It would be interesting to know that those same people believe about AGW. I can see the spin already — “d-word-ers” ignorant of basic science!
Ok mostly easy but the nitrogen question is not something that a lot of ‘normal’ folks know. How much of all you learned in 7th or 8th grade to you actually remember, especially things you don’t use or haven’t thought of for 30 years? I’m sure I could dig up a few things that would stump all of you from Jr. Hi.
For those who didn’t notice, the results shown are only for those 1006 people who took the test by phone. Note also that 1% got all wrong answers. The low scores could be in part due to difficulty taking the multiple-choice test verbally.
Funny thing: when I initially took the test I got 100%. I then clicked the link to further discussion of test results (http://www.people-press.org/2013/04/22/publics-knowledge-of-science-and-technology/) and it appeared there was a different test. When I saw I was taking the same test again I whipped through the questions ASAP and got one wrong answer. I figured I’d just gone too fast and didn’t look to see which question that was.
I then had my partner take the test. Looking over her shoulder I could see she missed only one question. But at the end of the test it showed two wrong answers. Looks like a glitch somewhere.
I also noted that the correct answer isn’t CO2 but H2O, and wondered if that could lead to come incorrect answers, but neither H20 nor “Other” were options. However, hydrogen was one of the options, and I think a case can be made for it. Thinks about it. (But I don’t think that’s why so many got it wrong. I think they had no clue and guessed)
“I think all of mankind’s problems would be completely eliminated if we were to eradicate all sources of carbon in the environment”. — Ima Misanthrope
Max Hugoson on October 8, 2013 at 1:10 pm
You suggest they would blend in? Even if it’s bad here, most people don’t perform as bad as those who participate like in Jay Leno’s surveys. Only the red/brown/green crowd …
Reply to Bob Tisdale — you beat me by 100%, I had to ask my wife my age….
I thuink Question #12 : ‘”What gas do most scientists believe causes temperatures in the atmosphere to rise?” is a Science Current Events question, not a strictly scientific question, so gets a pass. The correct answer, in that sense, is CO2.
“… they know nothing about the subject and assume that the “experts” know what they are talking about.” — artwest
That’s really the whole problem there. If you assume they don’t know, you ask for experiments and other proofs. If you assume they do know, you end up buying beachfront property in Arizona.
But that doesn’t mean anyone should take a stand on anything, let alone everything. As you long as you don’t care what the experts say about what you don’t care about, then who cares? The problem is when you do care about what the experts blather on about in a subject you don’t care to know. Nitrogen? Doesn’t pay the bills. Fireball Earth? My Word! I’ll save money on my heating bill! We’re doomed!
Go Home says:
October 8, 2013 at 1:35 pm
” I was doing fine until the demographic part of the test.”
Same here. According to my Ferengi wife, I’d fit right in with a bunch of 1,000-year-old Vulcan geezers on a nite out at the local Klingon Komedy Klub. Those were tough questions at the end, eh?