Told Ya So!!! Skeptics More Scientific Than Alarmists!

I wasn’t sure what to title this…. I was going to go with….. HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA!!!!!!

This ought to make some peoples heads explode!  A new study was released yesterday.  …..

From the abstract…..

Members of the public with the highest degrees of science literacy and technical reasoning capacity were not the most concerned about climate change. Rather, they were the ones among whom cultural polarization was greatest.

Continuing with parts of the study….. [science comprehension thesis = (SCT)]

SCT asserts, first, that ordinary members of the public underestimate the seriousness of climate change because of the difficulty of the scientific evidence³. If this is correct, concern over climate change should be positively correlated with science literacy—that is, concern should increase as people become more science literate.

Second, and even more important, SCT attributes low concern with climate change to limits on the ability of ordinary members of the public to engage in technical reasoning.

If this position is correct, one would also expect concern with climate change to be positively correlated with numeracy. Numeracy refers to the capacity of individuals to comprehend and make use of quantitative information¹¹. More numerate people are more disposed to use accuracy-enhancing system 2 forms of reasoning and are less vulnerable to system 1 cognitive errors^{11, 12}. Hence, they should, on this view, form perceptions of climate-change risk less biased towards underestimation.

Figure 1: SCT prediction versus actual impact of science literacy and numeracy on climate change risk perceptions.

LMAO!!!  Oops it went the opposite direction!

But, there’s a lot more…….

cultural cognition thesis =CCT

CCT also generates a testable prediction. CCT posits that people who subscribe to a hierarchical, individualistic world-view—one that ties authority to conspicuous social rankings and eschews collective interference with the decisions of individuals possessing such authority—tend to be sceptical of environmental risks. Such people intuitively perceive that widespread acceptance of such risks would license restrictions on commerce and industry, forms of behaviour that hierarchical individualists value.

Our data, consistent with previous studies⁶, supported this prediction. Hierarchical individualists (subjects who scored in the top half on both the Hierarchy and Individualism cultural-world-view scales) rated climate change risks significantly lower (M=3.15, s.e.m.=0.17) than did egalitarian communitarians (subjects whose scores placed them in the bottom half; M=7.4, s.e.m.=0.13). Even controlling for scientific literacy and numeracy (as reflected in the composite scale Science literacy/numeracy; see Supplementary Information), both Hierarchy (b=−0.46, P<0.01) and Individualism (b=−0.30, P<0.01) predicted less concern over climate change.

I’ll cut this down for you.  People who see the value of the individual, espouses the principles of Liberty are more skeptical than totalitarian socialists.

This claim generates another testable prediction.(SCT) If cultural cognition is merely a heuristic substitute for scientific knowledge and system 2 reasoning, reliance on it should be lowest among those individuals whose scientific knowledge and system 2 reasoning capacity are highest. SCT thus implies that as science literacy and numeracy increase, the scepticism over climate change associated with a hierarchical individualistic world-view should lessen and the gap between people with hierarchical individualistic world-views and those with egalitarian communitarian ones should diminish.

In other words, the lunatics have posited that our culture and social views prohibit us from knowing much about science.  And that as skeptic knowledge of science increases, we’d become more concerned with the climate.  Oops, that was wrong, as well.  It seems the more scientific literate skeptics are, the more they know proponents of  CAGW are FOS.

However, this SCT prediction, too, was unsupported. Among egalitarian communitarians, science literacy and numeracy (as reflected in the composite scale Science literacy/numeracy) showed a small positive correlation with concern about climate change risks (r=0.08, P=0.03). In contrast, among hierarchical individualists, Science literacy/numeracy is negatively correlated with concern (r=−0.12, P=0.03). Hence, polarization actually becomes larger, not smaller, as science literacy and numeracy increase (Fig. 2 and Supplementary Table S4 and Fig. S3). As the contribution that culture makes to disagreement grows as science literacy and numeracy increase, it is not plausible to view cultural cognition as a heuristic substitute for the knowledge or capacities that SCT views the public as lacking.

So, let’s review.  The more able one is in science and numeracy the more likely one is to be skeptical.  As figure 2 demonstrates, ideology trumps scientific knowledge in the beliefs for “egalitarian communitarians“.  As we can see increase in scientific literacy and numeracy barely changes the belief about CAGW.  However, we see more movement with the Hierarchical individualists as their scientific literacy and numeracy increases.  In other words, skeptics actually process information rather than parrot a party line.

Read the study here.

h/t to Fox News!!!

Alternate addy for the study  http://www.climateaccess.org/sites/default/files/Kahan_Polarizing%20Impact%20of%20Science%20Literacy.pdf