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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.'"
I'm pretty well educated, and all that jargon gave even me a fucking headache. Here is a much better summary, FTFA:
A US government-funded survey has found that Americans with higher levels of scientific and mathematical knowledge are more sceptical regarding the dangers of climate change than their more poorly educated fellow citizens. . . .
According to the [authors], this is not because the idea of imminent carbon-driven catastrophe is perhaps a bit scientifically suspect. Rather it is because people classed as "egalitarian communitarians" (roughly speaking, left-wingers) are always highly concerned about climate change, and become slightly more so as they acquire more science and numeracy. Unfortunately, however, "hierarchical individualists" (basically, right-wingers) are quite concerned about climate change when they're ignorant: but if they have any scientific, mathematic or technical education this causes them to become strongly sceptical.
And here's a news-flash for whoever wrote that summary: Terms like "Culturally congruent risk perception" have no obvious meaning for the general reader. Field-specific jargon is just annoying to everyone who doesn't happen to be in your field (i.e., almost everyone else on the planet).
And could you say "culturally" a few more dozen times in your next summary? It really makes you sound smart, and not full of shit at all.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
It just magically appeared. I am no more fond of it than you are.
The problem is not scientific literacy, bur that you need to be an expert in several fields.
Claims are made from both sides with explanations and theories beyond what most laymen can understand, beyond what even those with a basic scientific literacy can understand.
I consider myself scientifically literate to a basic level and generally have no problem reading studies or extracts to get a basic idea on an issue. The whole climate change thing is impossible though. People make specific claims about carbons, how they bond in the atmosphere, half-lives, tree rings, ice, sea levels...
There is too much stuff being quoted and claimed from both sides, often seemingly backed up.
What we need is a nice, easy summary page, summarizing all the relevant studies so far, and what they imply or mean when it comes to climate page. AN overall summary taking every study into account, giving a good indication, meaning to oppose it is to go against peer reviewed studies or to speculate without a firm basis.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
The scientific theory of human caused global warming is that the prime or exclusive cause of the observed warming over the past 100 years, outside of known cycles, is CO2 emissions from humans. Ok, no problem. That is a theory that can be looked at and evaluated, though you are correct it is quite complex to evaluate it.
The problem then comes when it is demanded that you not only accept that, but you accept that the only thing to do about it is to massively reduce CO2 emissions and to do that we need things like cap and trade and so on. If you disagree with any of that you are a "denalist" and "anti-science". They try to act as though the politics and policy of a solution are part and parcel to the theory.
Not even close. You can believe that the theory is correct and disagree with the proposed solution for any number of reasons. However question any part and people want to claim you are anti-science. It really does get like a religious argument: "You accept everything we say or your are the enemy."
CO2 absolutely IS "pollution", in a sense: our atmosphere is supposed to be a balance of various gases: O2, CO2, N2, and some other trace gases. The ratios of those gases is important for life and for maintaining our ecosystem. More CO2 means hotter temperatures due to the greenhouse effect, just like too little O2 means we have trouble breathing. So while CO2 isn't a "toxin" as long as the air you're breathing has the right amount of O2, too much of it causes problems. The question is: how much is too much?
The thing that's really annoying, however, about some of the environmentalists, is their cries for power plants to emit less CO2. I got a petition just like this a couple days ago. Do these people not understand basic chemistry? While too much CO2 is obviously a bad thing, they're talking like you just need to add some "scrubbers" to a power plant and they'll take out the CO2!! Did these people never take a chemistry class in college, or know anything at all about combustion? You can't reduce CO2 output without basically shutting the plant down, and no one is going to accept shutting down all the power plants, or reducing their output and having to put up with rolling blackouts. More nuclear power, however, would allow us to use less fossil-fuel-generated power, but these same people are all against nuclear power too (there's a Slashdot stories a couple stories down from this one today about this).
I understood the writeup very well. It goes directly to the heart of the debate, for me at least.
The global climate change issue has morphed from a brief global cooling 'scare', to global warming debate, and now global climate 'change'. During these changing arguments, I've become convinced of these beliefs:
1- Many parties have ulterior or hiden motives. These vary from wanting to advance their cultural or political policies to wanting to prevail in a factual or scientific debate, and others. I also have an ulterior motive in this debate, and of course I see mine as honest and true, and of course just as I assume everyone else does.
2- All parties seem prepared to use whatever eivdence supports their motives, and discredit the rest. Just as the writeup would suggest.
3- This is not new, and is (I propose) evident beyond contradiction to anyone who engages in minimal critical analysis of the issue. If it wasn't evident to you earlier, you are not paying attention, or not trying very hard at all.
4- Many parties purposefully either fabricate or embellish the evidence they present to make their case. Some do so despite knowing of contrary evidence, and some simply refuse to consider any other evidence at all.
5- Many who make their eivdence fit the argument have good intentions, and seem genuinely to not understand why others, seeing this, tend to mistrust their argument entirely.
Early on, when 'cooling' became 'warming', I started asking why this was so important. And one of the first things I learned was that many who joined the debate and believed that warming was occurring, and that it was man-caused, and could 'only' be solved by reducing our impact on the planet, was that they already wanted us to 'reduce our impact' on the planet, and this was the latest and hopefully (for them) conclusive argument . Scientists rarely like to admit mistakes (neither do I) so many climatologists are engaged in futher analysis of their data to make it fit when reality doesn't quite match with their predictions. Looking at the work done to adjust, normalize, and clean up this data to make it fit leaves me, in particular distrustful of their process.
Now we read some articles on ice melt, , and I'm left wondering how this could have occurred 14,000 years ago before industrialization, and if it could be happening now for those reasons, and nothing we can do would stop it. And the article I linked to doesn't explain much at all. And then this article blames fresh water consumption. We fix this by what, reducing population? Or just becoming more efficient users? Population growth wipes out all but the most aggressive and costly conservation, and then only if we ignore the developing world.
So this dovetails nicely into the anti-capitalist/industrial/consumer movement's goals, and the anti-population growth movement similarly will love this. Basically, they love anything bad for me. I'm just part of the 98% in America trying to get along, doing infinitely better than 90% of the rest of the world. I have a roof to sleep under, and something to keep me off the ground when I do - that makes me better off then most of the world. Add in my access to safe drinking water, and I probably do better than 95% or more of the world. My big complaint is how thick my steaks are.
So I do come to the debate with a very strong 'prove it!' attitude, and when the climate change proponents/worriers are so often aligned with the movements to take from me as much as they can, I rationally (if not logically) react with caution. Actually, skepticism, tainted with outright rejection. these groups can make no scientific argument - they are not motiviated by science.
And the scientists are largely so invested in protecting their reputations that I consider their arguments self-serving at best.
If warming is real, and we can stop it, I'm also conce
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.