Wednesday, May 30, 2012

The more science you know, the less worried you are about climate


Americans with higher levels of scientific and mathematical knowledge are more skeptical regarding the dangers of climate change than their more poorly educated fellow citizens, a U.S. National Science Foundation-funded study has found.
The results of the survey are especially remarkable as the researchers were doing so from the position that the “scientific consensus” (carbon-driven global warming is ongoing and extremely dangerous) is a settled fact, and the priority is now to find some way of getting U.S. voters to believe in the need for urgent, immediate and massive action to reduce CO2 emissions.
As scientific/tech knowledge and numeracy appears to be more common among what the study called “hierarchical individualists” than among “egalitarian communitarians,” this meant that in the sample as a whole, the effect of more scientific knowledge and numeracy was to increase skepticism.
The rest here.

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