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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.'"
Behold, one of the problems with trying to relay science to the common person.
Psychology/sociology is to science what Dr. Drew is to medicine.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
And Fox News, of course, pushed a story that only referenced the part of the study that found that climate change "skeptics" scored higher (by one point, 51 to 50) on a test of general scientific literacy, proving once (and for Fox) that the "skeptics" know more about science than climate change "alarmists" and are therefore right to doubt anything related to climate change.
Fox News: the experts at picking the one cherry on the entire tree that satisfies them since 1993.
TLR
A man no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company
It seems to me the better argument from the left would be: is polluting the air good for you or not?
That is the argument for those AGAINST AGW.
The reason being, CO2 is NOT POLLUTION.
That has been my biggest gripe with the AGW movement and the calls to reduce CO2. It has taken a lot of focus away from real pollution, trying to mitigate a substance that is utterly harmless!
If you are really for the environment you should be thinking about what battles actually help, rather than divert.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley