Scientific Literacy vs. Concern Over Climate Change

New submitter gmfeier writes "An interesting study reported in Nature Climate Change indicates that concern over climate change did not correlate with scientific literacy nearly as much as with cultural polarization. Quoting: 'For ordinary citizens, the reward for acquiring greater scientific knowledge and more reliable technical-reasoning capacities is a greater facility to discover and use—or explain away—evidence relating to their groups’ positions. Even if cultural cognition serves the personal interests of individuals, this form of reasoning can have a highly negative impact on collective decision making. What guides individual risk perception, on this account, is not the truth of those beliefs but rather their congruence with individuals’ cultural commitments. As a result, if beliefs about a societal risk such as climate change come to bear meanings congenial to some cultural outlooks but hostile to others, individuals motivated to adopt culturally congruent risk perceptions will fail to converge, or at least fail to converge as rapidly as they should, on scientific information essential to their common interests in health and prosperity. Although it is effectively costless for any individual to form a perception of climate-change risk that is wrong but culturally congenial, it is very harmful to collective welfare for individuals in aggregate to form beliefs this way.'"

Comments

FWIW, that quote was not part of my submission

[gmfeier]

It just magically appeared. I am no more fond of it than you are.

Re:An English translation, for us non-sociologists

[ColdWetDog]

Well, the translation of the TFA (as opposed to the bizzarro summary) is that climate models are very difficult to parse and so it's easier to talk about pretty much anything else. Even the culturally congruent lefties don't use modeling much.

Doesn't surprise me. I'm a biologist by training, grew up in the era of quantitative biology and still find the reporting on the models pretty much useless. I don't really have a good feel for exactly how good the models are, how fast they change, what their strong points are, what their weak points are.

I could spend the time to read the literature, except that I really can't. That would involve hundreds of hours of skull sweat that frankly I don't have even if I do have the background to assimilate it. And most people don't have that background.

So, for the vast majority of humans, it does boil down to a leap of faith. I have more faith in dedicated scientists from multiple disciplines and localities working with inadequate, but nonetheless rather powerful, tools and concepts than in governmental / religious / financial institutions with a really narrow financial / social viewpoint.

But that's just me.

Re:Pollution not a valid argument for the left

[lessthan]

Okay, here it is. In and around 1800, CO2 was about 0.028% of the Earth's atmosphere. It is currently around 0.0395%. This data comes from the ice core from Law Dome, Antarctica and current observation.
Have you ever played with a scale? The old-timey ones with the scale on one side and the counter-weights on the other? It doesn't take much to cause a huge imbalance, and if you are going to argue that the world is a little more robust than that, I would refer you to the 150 acres per minute of rainforest lost, the 30 mile per year that the Sahara desert's border is moving south, and the more than 700 documented animals that humanity has caused to go extinct (since the 1600s). CO2 is one facet in a larger, we-are-changing-the-whole-of-the-earth problem.