Pew Survey Documents Gaps Between Public and Scientists

PvtVoid writes: A new Pew Research Study documents an alarming gap between public perception of scientific issues and the opinions of the scientists themselves, as measured by a poll of AAAS scientists. Even worse, the gap is partisan, with clear differences between Republicans and Democrats, and between conservatives and liberals. For example, while 98% of AAAS members agree with the statement that "Human beings and other living things have evolved over time", only 21% of conservatives agree, compared with 54% of liberals. Global warming, similarly, shows an ideological gap: 98% of AAAS scientists agreed with the statement that "the Earth is getting warmer mostly due to human activity", compared with 21% of conservatives and 54% of liberals. Encouragingly, almost everybody thinks childhood vaccines should be required (86% of AAAS members, 65% of conservatives, and 74% of liberals.) Go here for an interactive view of the data.

Comments

Makes sense.

[Anonymous Coward]

In order to succeed as a scientist, one must be of above-average intelligence.

The opinions of above-average people, on issues that require above-average intelligence to really understand, will naturally be at variance with the opinions of merely average and below-average people.

I am sure there are plenty of average people who would disagree with me on this, however.

Re:Makes sense.

[jonnyj]

You are implying that ones political stance is an indicator of their intelligence?

That is the clear intention of the article summary, because it highlights only those issues where Democrats are more likely to agree with scientists than Republicans. A more honest summary would have also brought attention to the subjects where Democrats differ from scientists: nuclear power, pesticide use in foods and animal research, for example.

Correction

[PvtVoid]

The correct figures for the Global Warming question are: AAAS members 87%, conservatives 29%, liberals 76%.

One of these is not like the others.

[Iamthecheese]

The question of anthropomorphic global warming and evolution can be studied and understood on a factual basis as can whether vaccines help. Whether vaccines should be required is not a question for science to answer. The summary conflates matters of fact and matters of judgement.

Re:One of these is not like the others.

[Translation Error]

Please don't call it anthropomorphic global warming. It doesn't like it when you do that. I believe the term you were looking for is anthropogenic.

Re:Alarming Freedom

[praxis]

They are free to believe what they want, but they are not free to consider their beliefs as factual as actual facts.

Re:Chicken Little

[Geoffrey.landis]

It's hard to trust anyone who's work is disseminated by the government or media today.

That's an assertion that's hard to challenge in the libertarian atmosphere of slashdot.

Research and reports are spun mercilessly for the gain of whoever needs it.

Indeed, it's always wise to track down the actual original data, and actually look at the data and see what we know, and how well we know it, rather than to trust the media interpretations.

It may not be scientist's fault but when you hear something like "the sky is falling" and then hear it refuted over and over, one starts to take things with a grain of salt.

The media does like to run doom and destruction stories-- they are more of a story than talking about things like "slow increase in temperature over a time scale of decades."

Take, for example, Global Cooling back in the 1970's.

OK, let's take it for an example. There was never a scientific consensus about global cooling in the 1970s. The American Meteorological Society did a review, trying to look for the origin of that. http://journals.ametsoc.org/do... They summarize: "There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age. Indeed, the possibility of anthropogenic warming dominated the peer-reviewed literature even then.

That was refuted with Global Warming in the 2000's

It was not really "refuted" per se, since it was never a scientific consensus in the first place.

and now it's simply Global Climate Change which seems to be a catch-all.

"Global Climate Change" was the term coined by the (first) Bush administration.

I don't deny GCC but I certainly want to see the data.

Excellent! That's the difference between deniers and skeptics: deniers will make any possible excuse to avoid looking at data. As it turns out, there are literally terabytes of data.

I will suggest starting with the Working Group 1 report, The Physical Science Basis of Climate Change, which summarizes what is known and how we know it. I'm most familiar with the 4th report (www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/contents.html), from 2007, but you might want to go directly to the more recent update, the 5th: http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/...

From there, dive into the data from whichever source you prefer-- I'd suggest possibly the Berkeley Earth data, which does an interesting job of comparing alternative hypotheses against the temperature data: http://berkeleyearth.org/summa...

What's the old adage that Regan grabbed from the Russian's; "Trust but Verify" I think was it.

Excellent. Much better than the denier's motto: "Never trust, never verify, never look at the facts."