Wednesday, May 30, 2012

The Great Climbdown...

...continues:

Global warming skeptics as knowledgeable about science as climate change believers, study says

Ya' think??

"Are global warming skeptics anti-science? Or just ignorant about science?

Maybe neither. A study published Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change finds that people who are not that worried about the effects of global warming tend to have a slightly higher level of scientific knowledge than those who are worried..."
[---]
""As respondents’ science literacy scores increased, their concern with climate change decreased," the paper, which was funded by the National Science Foundation, notes."
[---]
"Kahan said that he thought another finding of the study was more important: That people’s cultural views – how much they value things like individualism and equality -- affect their views on global warming much more than actual knowledge about science. Regardless of how much they know about science, individualists were relatively unconcerned about global warming, whereas those who value equality were very concerned."
Hence, the term "watermelon".

More.
""The aim of the study was to test two hypotheses," study member Dan Kahan said. "The first attributes political controversy over climate change to the public's limited ability to comprehend science, and the second, to opposing sets of cultural values.

"The findings supported the second hypothesis and not the first,"...That's the result of "cultural cognition," the researchers said, the unconscious tendency of people to fit evidence of risk to positions that predominate in groups to which they belong."
Case closed, IMHO.

Now I'm going to watch more videos from the Heartland Institute's climate change conference in Chicago.

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