Warmist Chris Mooney's lament: "if you go to blogs like WattsUpWithThat or Climate Audit, you certainly don’t find scientific and mathematical illiterates doubting climate change. Rather, you find scientific and mathematical sophisticates itching to blow holes in each new study."
Chris Mooney | “A Little Knowledge”: Why The Biggest Problem With Climate “Skeptics” May Be Their Confidence
Last week, an intriguing study emerged from Dan Kahan and his colleagues at Yale and elsewhere--finding that knowing more about science, and being better at mathematical reasoning, was related to more climate science skepticism and denial--rather than less.
[Yeah, he's saying the problem with the skeptics is they know too much to be easily fooled. ]
...
The surprise—for some out there, anyway—lay in how the ingredients of this stew mix together. For citizens as a whole, more literacy and numeracy were correlated with somewhat more, rather than somewhat less, dismissal of the risk of global warming. When you drilled down into the cultural groups, meanwhile, it turned out that among the hierarchical-individualists (aka, conservatives), the relationship between greater math and science knowledge and dismissal of climate risks was even stronger. (The opposite relationship occurred among egalitarian communitarians—aka liberals).
This is bad, bad news for anyone who thinks that better math and science education will help us solve our problems on climate change. But it’s also something else. To me, it provides a kind of uber-explanation for climate skeptic and denier behavior in the public arena, and especially on the blogs.
In my experience, climate skeptics are nothing if not confident in their ability to challenge the science of climate change--and even to competently recalculate (and scientifically and mathematically refute) various published results. It’s funny how this high-level intellectual firepower is always used in service of debunking—rather than affirming or improving—mainstream science.
[But debunking faux scientific nonsense IS an improvement, especially when con artists are using the nonsense to promote a radical political programme. ]
But the fact is, if you go to blogs like WattsUpWithThat or Climate Audit, you certainly don’t find scientific and mathematical illiterates doubting climate change. Rather, you find scientific and mathematical sophisticates itching to blow holes in each new study.
[True scientists should welcome that. ]
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