More Information Increases Global Warming Skepticism

There is a Yale University survey which finds that the more people know about the climate, the more skeptical they become. They sampled 1,540 people on the following different types of information: how much scientific literacy they possessed (e.g., how well they answered questions about things like the time it takes for the Earth to circle the sun and the relative sizes of electrons and atoms), how numerate they were (e.g., their ability to engage in mathematical reasoning), what their cultural values were, and their thoughts on the risks of global warming and nuclear power. Overall, the more knowledge lowered the global warming concern (p-value around 6%).

The cultural value groupings were 'individualism and hierarchy' who believe industry and technology have low risk and restricting gun ownership is bad, vs. 'egalitarian and communitarian', who believe industry and technology have a high risk and restricting gun ownership is good. I'm clearly a 'individualism-hierarchy' guy on that score, and can see why it dominated the explanation of the results, because if you are afraid of industry and technology, you probably love the Global Warming solutions to regulate technology and industry more. It would have been better to merely ask if they were Democrats or Republicans, because that would be less obviously correlated with the survey on nuclear power and global warming.

Chris Mooney in DeSmogBlog has a post on this paper that neglects the overall correlation on knowledge and climate worry. He didn't mention that for both groups more knowledge was significantly associated with lower nuclear risk concern, or that for the 'individualism-hierarchy' group more knowledge was significantly different than zero. Most importantly, he neglected to note that the 'higher knowledge-higher global warming' correlation within the those +1 standard deviation in the 'egalitarian and communitarian' camp was not statistically different than zero (I'm eyeballing it at around 12% p-value, these are psychologists so they do numbers reluctantly, it seems). Mooney is a professional pundit who lectures everyone on how to do science, which I guess involves ignoring standard errors and burying the lede when it hurts your point.

As Chris Mooney wrote The Republican War on Science, this is contrary to his thesis that we had more scientific candidates we would all agree with the progressive agenda to eliminate a missile defense system, not mention risks of abortions, and fight global warming (presumably with ethanol subsidies and bans on nuclear power). So he spun the survey to focus on the fact that the disagreement polarized the hierarchical-individualists and communitarian-egalitarians alone, and concludes that 'a little knowledge is a dangerous thing'. Yes, Mr. tendentious English major without an understanding of standard errors, it is.