Fox News reports:
Study: Global warming skeptics know more about climate science
Are global warming skeptics simply ignorant about climate science?
Not so, says a forthcoming paper in the journal Advances in Political Psychology by Yale Professor Dan Kahan. He finds that skeptics score about the same (in fact slightly better) on climate science questions.
The study asked 2,000 respondents nine questions about where they thought scientists stand on climate science.
On average, skeptics got about 4.5 questions correct, whereas manmade warming believers got about 4 questions right.
One question, for instance, asked if scientists believe that warming would “increase the risk of skin cancer.” Skeptics were more likely than believers to know that is false.
Skeptics were also more likely to correctly say that if the North Pole icecap melted, global sea levels would not rise. One can test this with a glass of water and an ice cube – the water level will not change after the ice melts. Antarctic ice melting, however, would increase sea levels because much of it rests on land.
Liberals were more likely to correctly answer questions like: “What gas do most scientists believe causes temperatures to rise?” The correct answer is carbon dioxide.
The study comes on the heels of a 2012 study that found that global warming skeptics know just as much about science; the new study specifically quizzed people on climate science.
…
More: http://www.foxnews.com/science/2015/02/12/study-global-warming-skeptics-know-more-about-climate-science/
The study will be published on the Advances in Political Psychology website
Kahan, Dan (2015) Expressive Rationality and Cultural Polarization: Theory and Evidence, Advances in Political Psychology, Vol 2,
Kahan, Dan M., Wittlin, Maggie, Peters, Ellen, Slovic, Paul, Ouellette, Lisa Larrimore, Braman, Donald and Mandel, Gregory N., The Tragedy of the Risk-Perception Commons: Culture Conflict, Rationality Conflict, and Climate Change (2011). Cultural Cognition Project Working Paper No. 89. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1871503
Jo Nova also has an analysis here
The hot gas emanating from Washington D.C. makes my temperature rise!
This isn’t a scientifically valid “survey,” IT IS A THINLY DISGUISED MEANS OF PUSHING HUMAN CO2 PROPAGANDA.
Most GENUINE scientists KNOW there is no evidence that CO2 causes any significant change in the climate of the earth.
What — a — load — of — B.S..
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Now, on a sweeter and TRUER note #(:))
♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥
HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY, EVERYONE!
You genuine scientists, engineers, and scholars are the BEST!
And a song….
“Stand By Me” by Ben E. King (youtube)
Standing together, truth will win. Not all of us will be there when it does … and some of us like Willie Soon and Murry Salby have suffered dreadfully, …. and
there will be another fight ahead in the perennial war against tyranny, but THIS battle is WON — the Envirostalinists and Enviroprofiteers and their scientists-for-hire have been pushed to the margins. Thanks to you ALL, that is where they will stay.
Whether you are today joyfully celebrating with the love of your life or just quietly accepting what must be,
know that YOU — ARE — LOVED.
Always,
Janice
♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥
Janice,
I love you!
Oh, Rick K… . That was VERY sweet. Thank you for taking the time to write.
It was kinda hard to watch my Valentine be ignored…. and ignored…. and ignored some more.
This Valentine’s Day is hard enough as it is.
I hope that today is a good day for you.
With gratitude,
Janice
[Ah, but is a Valentine’s Day local solar time, local standard time, or universal Greenland Meridian Daylight Melting Icecap Time? Regardless, Happy Valentine’s Day/Night/Sunday! .mod]
Thank you, Mod! #(:))
Thanks Janice for the vid, tears, We two had a great simple dinner together ( she is sleeping it is past midnight here) but thanks, btw your comments are as always from the heart!
A Sybot! Thanks for saying so. So glad to hear that you have a “she” to have dinner with. 🙂 That you two need only a “simple dinner” to celebrate shows that your love is deep, indeed. A candle (perhaps), a simple meal, … and thou. “Simple” = truly romantic.
And, thanks.
Janice
I read the study, and what I came away with is collectivism good, individualism bad. The paper gave me the impression they were trying to figure out why there are skeptics and how to correct it. It isn’t lack of knowledge, quite the opposite. It boils down to who has a collective bent and who doesn’t. So watch science scores go down, don’t want too many people actually knowing science so they can question it, and watch efforts increase to manipulate children’s minds to a hive mentality.
Maybe I read it wrong, I’m no scientist. Maybe at best I’m a pessimist and at worst I’m a tin foil hat wearer. Anyone else read the whole paper?
FoxNews?? Any apparent support from that source is, unfortunately, akin to ‘damning with faint praise’
+1
Just for the record (this has been troubling me for a week, now!): My +1 was because Fox News has over the past 3 or 4 years become increasingly sickeningly lukewarm in its support for truth. “Fair and balanced” means: we pretend the statists’ positions are logically and morally equivalent to those of the ordered liberty people. (and we talk about O ALL THE TIME (publicity is publicity….grr)).
HOWEVER, Fox News is the most accurate major TV news source out there at this time.
There! Now, I can finally stop thinking about my +1 !
Well, is Fox News supporting the survey or reporting it since some of it reflects their general skeptical view of CAGW?
Really? The #1 cable news network for 13 straight years?
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/2014-cable-news-ratings-cnn-beats-msnbc-in-primetime-demo-fox-still-1/
“In total viewers for primetime, Fox nearly tripled its nearest competition with 1.748M. ”
…
Still no match for network news.
..
http://stateofthemedia.org/files/2013/03/2-Evening-News-Audiences-Decrease-at-ABC-and-NBC-Rise-at-CBS.png
rodmol~ That’s because FOX can’t sink That low…..
“Far more people watch the three network evening newscasts than prime time cable news shows— roughly ten times more. But as cable news is always on, polls show more people say they “regularly” get news from cable.”
http://www.journalism.org/numbers/cable-news-vs-network-news-viewership/
Interesting that NBC nightly news, the report with the most facile liar, got the highest ratings.
A silly, probably biased non scientific survey like this is exactly what we don’t want to see.
There is authentic science rooted in my skeptism. Using research or a survey like this to support the position only weakens the case because it is clearly non scientific.
If I insist it rained 5 inches overnight at my house and you don’t believe me and part of my evidence is that the grass is wet and everybody heard thunder, it shows that my underlying evidence must be weak.
I need some thing like a rain gauge measurement or radar estimate to prove my case that it rained 5 inches.
“Antarctic ice melting, however, would increase sea levels because much of it rests on land.”
I’m not disagreeing with this statement, but the amount of rise may not be equivalent to the entire ice volume as much (the majority?) of the Antarctic land mass is below current sealevel and “only” the ice above current sealevel will add to the rise. Which is not to say there won’t be a problem.
““only” the ice above current sealevel will add to the rise.”
Not even that because glacier ice has more than 10% lower density than seawater. So if for example the ice rests on bedrock 1000 meters below sea-level only the part of it more than 100 meters above current sea-level would cause sea-level to increase. This oddly enough means that even if all of the West Antarctic ice-sheet was to melt, the effect would only be about half of that of a melting of the Greenland ice-sheet.
tty
Not all, but a substantial fraction of Greenland’s interior ice cap (that 90% which is trapped between the mountains along both seacoasts, meeting at the southern top of Greenland. The center of the Greenland ice cap does raise substantially above sea level, but the granite “floor” below the central icecap is BELOW sea level. Not everywhere of course, but about half the interior is below sea level to one depth of another.
“Liberals were more likely to correctly answer questions like: “What gas do most scientists believe causes temperatures to rise?” The correct answer is carbon dioxide.” That answer is actually incorrect. It is water vapor, many times over. If you are asking “What gas do most scientists believe that will cause temperatures to rise and which is produced by human activity”, you might come up with CO2. The “doomsday” cargo cult climate models all rely on significant water vapor amplification for their doomsday results. Things aren’t so simple.
As far as Fox vs. CNN vs. Bloomberg vs. The Economist vs. …, I have found the cargo cult folks run every one of them but Fox. Yes, Fox has a political slant, but nary a day goes by without Bloomberg running a “Doom is coming!! Repent of your ways!!” story on CAGW. CNN usually has one per day and TE usually has one every week.
Oh, and the degree here is PhD with the thesis about retrieving temperature profiles of the atmosphere from the precursors to the AMSU.
I caught that one, too. I was surprised to finally find that point so far down thread. But it was only 2.5 hrs since the first post.
So, where are the questions and how many of the “correct answers” are incorrect (or at lease argumentative) upon close study?
If you are in the upper quartile of intelligence: The more you know about climate science, and its methodology, the more skeptical you become. The lower two quartiles are content to memorize what “the scientists think”.
Totally agree. Most of those people [lower 2] failed to make the Jerry Springer show.
As usual, studies that even support skepticism of climate disaster don’t get a free pass I’m happy to see. What the devil is a ‘political psychologist’ doing making a quiz about global warming science? Indeed, what the devil IS a political psychologist anyway? I’m afraid Recursive Fury Lew has opened the doors wide to the peanut gallery. Since his becoming a climate scientist (there doesn’t seem to be much of a barrier to it these days and the pay and opportunities for advancement for the ‘right stuff’ is certainly attractive) he has encouraged psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists and philosophers to join the end of the world gang. I give this paper a zero. It’s point of departure is debunked assumptions about climate change. I regret that skeptics actually took the quiz. Frankly, I don’t know the answers to these questions. When he says ‘scientists’ believe CO2 is the culprit so that is the right answer, I have to ask what does he mean by ‘scientists’? We recently had another shrink blame air pollution for the reason why people shoot themselves in Utah and Wyoming. Good lord, the real problem is how to make all this stuff stop!
A “political psychologist” is a societal parasite, that spends their time trying to get lies past your BS detector. They learn how to wrap lies, in benign sounding words, that worm their way deep into your sub-conscious, before your logical mind, has a chance to reject the lie. It then becomes a “superstitions sub-routine” that can over-ride your logical decision making, without your knowledge, unless you know it exists, and prepare for it. It is how “known liars” get re-elected, so they are very valuable, to politicians.
I thought they were all political psychologists at this point.
This study implies that skeptics know only slightly more than warmists. My experience is quite different. My friends that are skeptics are scientists and engineers, my friends that are warmists are artists and musicians. The warmists don’t have a clue what a differential equation is much less how to solve one.
Yes, indeed. The thinkers are well-informed. My experience is similar, but the division is not in left v. right brain type, but in political orientation (socialist v. free market…. and M. C. we KNOW that not ALL socialists agree with AGW… just talking about the general trend of the anecdotal evidence ….). I am a musician, pretty creative, …. and QUITE EMOTIONAL!! (and I am a rock solid free market, pro-liberty, Constitutional conservative).
The key factors seem to be:
1. intelligence and or
2. lack of an emotional attachment to socialist views (which TEND to be pro-AGW).
The 4 v. 4.5 was just another cunning bit of propaganda, i.e., essentially a l1e.
{See also Chip Javert on error bars at 9:03am: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/02/14/a-new-study-shows-climate-skeptics-have-more-knowledge-on-climate-science-than-alarmists/#comment-1859469 and Russ R. at 10:18am: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/02/14/a-new-study-shows-climate-skeptics-have-more-knowledge-on-climate-science-than-alarmists/#comment-1859512 }
Janice, I apologize to all the intelligent musicians I may have offended. I was wrong to group musicians into a single group.
As Kahan was studying US sceptics the left-right thing may be more significant.
Although in the past he has found that that is not the case.
Certainly in the UK today the three leaders of the left, right and mediocre parties all signed a joint declaration that climate change is:
But that’s the UK – not where Kahan was studying.
Dear Mr. Kramden,
No need to apologize! You were simply reporting your experience. It may be the norm! You have proven one thing, though: you are a courteous, kindhearted, person. Thanks for caring enough to write to me.
#(:))
Janice
But you didn’t, you only talked about how it is grouped in your personal environment, nothing to apologize for.
Ralph, you have nothing to apologize for. You did not characterize musicians as a group. You characterized a group as “warmists” and then described their members. Just like saying “most terrorists attacks are committed by Muslims” does not mean that all Muslims are terrorists.
Good insight Janice.
People that understand, and value, the free market, know that it will provide solutions to problems, much more efficiently and targeted, than a governmental bureaucracy will. People that distrust the free market, and think it is controlled by “evil rich villains”, think the government will save us from Big Oil, exploiting our own self-destructive tendencies.
If you drive a Prius, and think your neighbor, who drives a SUV, needs to be “regulated into a car I approve of”, then you are not really open, to discussing the need for the regulation. It is a emotional response, that selects any reasonable excuse, that satisfies the desire to “fix what is wrong with THOSE people”.
Thanks, Russ R.! #(:))
Ralph,
I also accept your apology on behalf of myself and the other eighteen intelligent musicians in the world.
Andy West has a high regard for Kahan’s previous work. He clearly distinguishes it from the work of Lewandowsky.
Although he still disagrees with Kahan’s previous work he makes a good case that the work has been honest.
He wrote an interesting article about that work on Climate Etc.
Thanks MC 🙂
No need for gratitude; I should be thanking you.
I did read what you said to me at the Bishop’s.
And I was the one who was grateful because I found it thought provoking.
Was trawling the internet today looking for absurd AGW stories and came upon this gem. It actually made me laugh out loud!
http://www.parachuteadvansed.com/node/3037
It’s always fun to ask a warmist what the most important greenhouse gas is. They smell a trick question, their brain starts to rotate in its cavity und you can see them trying to remember what it was.
Given the question of media credibility that the Brian Williams imbroglio has raised, this Fox-inspired pap is just that: pap.
Yeah, the Fox fiasco regarding “no-go” areas also comes to mind.
Very few skeptics dispute AGW. Some do. Most think AGW exists.
But they know there are no AGW measurements. That means AGW has a a very tiny effect. MMGW has beel blown far out of proportion by self-serving feeders at the money trough:
Since AGW is too minuscule to measure, the alarmist narrative is hogwash. It has been so thoroughly debunked that only religious True Believers still try to preach it.
But they are losers, on the losing side of the debate. It will only get worse for them, as years pass with no global warming. Pretty soon, only the wild-eyed nutcases will remain. It’s almost at that point now.
Kahan may be a dyed in the wool alarmist but that doesn’t mean his work is worthless.
Nor does the means of secondary reporting.
Why should it?
I read the paper the link goes to (pleasantly not pay walled) but the specific questions asked about climate don’t seem to be listed. The questions determining basic science literacy are (and when I say basic, I mean very basic, I’m not sure knowing if the gene that determines sex of a baby comes from the man or the woman has much bearing on one’s understanding of GHE for example).
That said, the main thrust of the paper seems to be that being a skeptic is irrational, and having determined that skeptics know more about the science than the “rational” people, there must be some other reason for their irrationality. So the authors start with the premise that skeptics are irrational and seek to explain why, never considering for a moment that their better grasp of the science suggests that it isn’t they who are irrational in the first place.
I’m betting that if we had access to the full slate of questions asked, we’d find that it isn’t just the “most important ghg” question that is improperly formulated. When people who don’t understand the science seek to find out what is wrong with people who do, but disagree with the people who don’t, never considering for a moment that it may be themselves who have it wrong, what you have is an amusing piece of garbage politics that discredits itself in a most blatant fashion without even realizing that what has been done.
Assuming that climate change turns only on CO2 is the reason that Climate Scientists can’t get anything right, because that is the irrational assumption.
“What gas do most scientists believe causes temperatures to rise?”
Hydrogen, obviously, whose fusion atop the core of the Sun raises the Earth’s temperature above absolute zero.
Presuming that stuff in the Sun can properly be called a gas.
Actually, it’s a lousy/ambiguous/leading question, since each of the 3 nouns, 4 verbs, and one adjective (by my count) in the sentence can be interpreted several ways.
Why do they never ask: “What is the Global Average Temperature supposed to be?”
Climate Realists, aka Skeptics are more knowledgable not only about the faux science peddled by the so-called “consensus”, but also about the actual science. This “study” only asks about the skeptics’ knowledge of the faux science, which the “study” presents as actual science. Pretty neat trick.
It is very, very scary that psychologists are studying this. It suggests that they are trying to label :”skeptics” as mentally deranged. Somebody approved and funded this study. I wonder who?
If you are going to discuss something intelligently, you need to know all the available facts about that subject. If you are just going to make a statement based on your programming or prejudice, citations and discussion become most inconvenient and should be avoided, if possible.
I think reading this site exemplifies that, by allowing all viewpoints to be aired. If Sou and her friends want to moderate out what they don’t agree with, they will have a constantly shrinking group of disciples, IMHO.
Hmm, so I’m wondering why Fox posted this story because the study was done in 2011 and revised in 2013. Kind of old news, no? I found a website that wrote about it in 2011. I don’t recall it going main stream back then, or in 2013.
Based on my earlier comment and prediction are we already seeing the results via common core?
“He finds that skeptics score about the same (in fact slightly better) on climate science questions.”
Now we know why alarmists never want to debate with skeptics.
“What gas do most scientists believe causes temperatures to rise?” The correct answer is carbon dioxide.”
Ummm surely the answer is water vapour? Virtually all scientists would know this.
The answer CO2 is wrong.
There isn’t yet a paper to read, as FOX News reported February 12, 2015, “. . . a forthcoming paper in the journal Advances in Political Psychology by Yale Professor Dan Kahan.” So, I have nothing to say yet on the paper until it comes out so I can access it (somehow).
I will comment on a person quoted by FOX News in its article about the forthcoming paper.
Aaron Huertas (a UCS science communications officer) asserts the same false fundamental premise as the ubiquitous climate change cause supporters whose faulted premise have caused a significant public distrust of their views. His false fundamental premise is that the broader climate science knowledge base in total (IPCC endorsing climate change research plus the significantly disagreeing openly critical science research) has found objectively evaluated key Earth Atmospheric System (EAS) observations that validated a theory of significant climate change. That is the false premise used in their arguments containing the ‘begging the question (petitio principii) logical fallacy’.
The UCS is mis-focused by depending on its own subjective view of science. Consider instead that the ideological and political spectrum of humanity is irrelevant in climate focused science that objectively extracts itself from subjectivist based philosophy of science. All unassociated scientists, all science academies, all science departments at universities, all government science institutes and all scientific associations are asked to make this exclamation: “Re-Establish Trust in Climate Science by Removing Its Current Subjective Philosophies of Science”.
John