Bishop Hill The logic at Yale
May 28, 2012 Climate: Sceptics Climate: other USA Today reports on a new paper in Nature Climate Change (and to slightly misquote Carl Wunsch, just because it's in Nature Climate Change, doesn't make it wrong). The paper in question reports the results of a survey into opinion on climate change.
Support for climate science doesn't increase with science literacy, a survey suggests. Rather, people with technical backgrounds just dig in harder on their views about global warming, finds the study in the Nature Climate Change journal.
There is, however, some rather hilarious logic involved in reaching this conclusion, as least as reported by USA Today.
The study sought to test two explanations for the split, said Yale's Dan Kahan, who led the study, in a statement: "The first attributes political controversy over climate change to the public's limited ability to comprehend science, and the second, to opposing sets of cultural values."
No doubt to their surprise, when the authors analysed the results, they discovered that the scientifically literate were more likely to be sceptical of global warming, finding "a small increase in the odds of folks seeing global warming as not too serious in the most science literate people in the survey".
As US Today tells it, this means that the scientific-literacy explanation can be entirely discounted (global warming is known to be serious, right?), which leaves the only the alternate cultural-value explanation.
Clever eh?
Reader Comments (58)
So all those years of maths, physics & engineering lectures, plus half a career hunched over slide-rules (yes I'm that old) & computers, was a complete waste of time really - I already had my fully developed model of the universe hard-wired in my rigid & unyielding redneck psyche.
While all those "social science with modern dance" graduates are equipped with the mystic emotional capability of absorbing the physical reality of science through their pores as they swan around picking daisies and admiring sunsets.
Have I got it right?
... as an afterthought, I regard any form of science based on people ticking questionnaire boxes in the same light as those surveys they used to have in Cosmopolitan Magazine - asking ladies if their orgasms were satisfactory.
Activist scientist Steve Easterbrook now has a post up about this study .
His version is a bit less accurate then that provided by the Daily Mail
(He claims no difference, when in fact there is a small but significant negative correlation between science knowledge and CC concern).
His post is a nice example of the desperate contortions activists will go through in order to avoid facing up to the facts.
The terms "hierarchical-individualist" and "egalitarian-communitarian" seem to be closely linked to Kahan and the other authors. They have found similar disjunctions before and have consistently attributed them to the oxymoronic clusters labled as above. They seem consistently in their analyses to ignore the fact that their "e-c" grouping, being consistently less numerate, do not reliably or consistently differentiate between "hazard" and "risk" while a better educated (in mathematics and natural sciences) individual will realize that while there might exist a hazard that the "team" could be right, the "risk" of that is very small, approaching zero. This creates associations between folks who are rationally unwilling to stampede off a cliff screaming "the sky is falling" because someone else said so (individualists will pause and look up), and those who are unwilling to pay for soothing someone else's insecurities (lots of folks who find political correctness to be dictatorial, intrusive and totalitarian). The best explanation that I can envision for the authors' use of "hierarchical" is that they have at some level actually bought into the "big money-big oil-big industry" conspiracy theories.
Duster
The two dimensional “communitarian v individualist”, “hierarchical v egalitarian” mapping of humans has been around for a while. His Grace even used it in a post here once, trying to sort us sceptics out (I was an eccentric outlier).
We egalitarian-communitarians are less numerate because we contain more uneducated chavs in our midst, though, as well-bred Guardian readers, we’d never do anything so politically incorrect as to mention it.
The more numerate hierarchical individualists (or Tories, as we call them in UK) tend to notice the flaws in CAGW, not because of their superior scientific insight, but because they pay more taxes, and are the first to notice when energy bills go up.
I am appalled. You mean that people with brains in their heads do not believe everything that they are told by Brain Williams? How can we as a civilization survive?
Wow. In reading the article inn ScienceFair, I am astounded at the limited choices they allow themselves for explaining this. They don't allow for any other possible explanations than science literacy or culture splits. They take as givens that global warming is real, and that human's carbon emissions cause it. They take as given that the climate scientists have presented a convincing argument. They take as given that anyone who doesn't agree is not INDEPENDENTLY allowed to assess the evidence on his/her own or that such assessment might be correct. IOW they simply assume that whoever doesn't accept it must be doing it for non-scientific, illogical, or social reasons.
Wow. Wow. Wow. As time goes on I am more and more disappointed in what is allowed past the scientific reviewers and editors. THIS passed muster? Wow wow wow.