Thursday, October 25, 2012

Are Some People Just Too Ignorant?

I do often hear my climate catastrophe worshipping colleagues say that some people are just too darned stupid to understand how smart my colleagues are.  Meaning that this whole "democracy" thing is a problem. Voters should shut up and do what experts tell them to do.

An interesting study, along these lines:

The polarizing impact of science literacy and numeracy on perceived climate change risks

Dan Kahan et al.
Nature Climate Change, October 2012, Pages 732–735

Abstract: Seeming public apathy over climate change is often attributed to a deficit in comprehension. The public knows too little science, it is claimed, to understand the evidence or avoid being misled. Widespread limits on technical reasoning aggravate the problem by forcing citizens to use unreliable cognitive heuristics to assess risk. We conducted a study to test this account and found no support for it. Members of the public with the highest degrees of science literacy and technical reasoning capacity were not the most concerned about climate change. Rather, they were the ones among whom cultural polarization was greatest. This result suggests that public divisions over climate change stem not from the public’s incomprehension of science but from a distinctive conflict of interest: between the personal interest individuals have in forming beliefs in line with those held by others with whom they share close ties and the collective one they all share in making use of the best available science to promote common welfare.


A nod to Kevin Lewis.

More after the jump....



I would propose that science education is also likely to make one skeptical of the evidence for, supposed impact of, and solutions to, the problem of climate change.  Not long ago, the question was can we survive "global cooling."  Interestingly, whatever the question, the answer is, "end capitalism and implement global planning with experts (usually the speaker) in total command of everything."

My own views, if it matters:

1.  Is global climate change happening?  Yes, without question.
2.  Is the primary cause human activity?  Yes, though climate change is always happening.  But the scale and time period here really is remarkable.  Plausible to think it is substantially human-caused.
3.  What should "we" do about it?  Who is this "we," quien-no-sabe?  If "we" could agree to put a global tax on carbon-creating actions, all of them, everywhere, and it could be administered fairly and at low cost, that might work.  But requiring me to recycle glass, just because it makes other people admire my commitment...that's dumb.  None of the measures I have heard proposed would have more than a 1/10 of 1 percent impact.  There is nothing we can do, without a world government.  I understand that this is actual goal of the alarmists, who know full well that their proposals are nonsense.

8 comments:

VangelV said...

Sorry but your views are without a scientific basis. The fact that the world has warmed since the end of the Little Ice Age is not surprising because the planet is supposed to warm up after a cooling period ends. The question is why the earth warmed and on that front the CO2 emissions argument fails miserably because more warming has taken place before CO2 emissions became material than afterwards. And on that point we saw a decline in temperatures as human emissions exploded with the increase that everyone is hyping up only coming after the PDO went into a positive cycle in the latter part of the 1970s. The problem for the CO2 proponents is that we have seen no warming for the past 15-16 years even though CO2 concentrations have gone up substantially.

The scientific evidence, for what that is worth, shows that temperatures are driven by solar activity, ocean cycles, and other natural factors that are ultimately linked to the sun. In the bigger picture man is not a big factor.

August said...

Democracy is a problem. Most people are too stupid to understand the knowledge problem.
They claim global warming is a problem and therefore must be fixed. How? By socialism. Of course, most people are too stupid to realize their policy prescriptions are actually socialist. Climatology is an interesting case- it is most prominently infected with multi-variant computer models, which are precisely the sort of models any sort of 'scientific' form of socialism will use. The predictive power of these climatology models are abysmal, just as horrible as the the predictive power of centralized planners the world over. My birthplace, New Orleans, was supposed to have gone underwater (and stayed there) in 2001. This is only one of many terrible predictions they don't answer to.
Meanwhile, there are a few experts in solar activity who get serious money for making long term local weather forecasts.

brucerb said...

"My birthplace, New Orleans, was supposed to have gone underwater (and stayed there) in 2001."

New Orleans - bad example.

Regardless of climate change, the only reason New Orleans is not mostly underwater today is because of big government spending - call it socialism - forcing the Mississippi to stay in the channel it just happened to be in in the 1800's and keeping the sea natural forces at bay. It seems unlikely that after Katrina, private capital would have been invested in keeping New Orleans a functioning city without the federal funds to keep the water out and rebuild the infrastructure. Indeed, many of the areas most at threat from the predicted rising sea levels from climate change are also the areas most at threat from hurricanes and long term natural forces. So while more government intervention is called for to ward off global warming, past and current government intervention encourages people to live in the most vulnerable areas.

Jeff said...

Yeah, it's a little troubling how often "a planned economy with me and/or people like me in charge" is touted as the solution to problems both real and imagined. I'm glad I don't work in academia. I'm pretty sure I'd have been driven insane by the rigid, reflexive, crypto-Marxism permeating higher education.

Brad Hutchings said...

This result suggests that public divisions over climate change stem not from the public’s incomprehension of science but from a distinctive conflict of interest: between the personal interest individuals have in forming beliefs in line with those held by others with whom they share close ties and the collective one they all share in making use of the best available science to promote common welfare.

This is an awful conclusion. Science/policy stacks like global warming (or climate change) require great scrutiny. Although he wouldn't go there with global warming, David Weinberger's interview on EconTalk provides the best model for such vast problems of "truth". You get your experts. We'll get our experts. And we'll have a ruthless expert fight. Perhaps some truth will spill out. It would be nice if we could do that fight with facts and logic.

Here's where I depart from Weinberger's view. It's also OK if it gets really personal, so long as both sides are willing to go there. With climate change, it seems perfectly "OK" for supporters to claim that skeptics are Neanderthal Lorax killers, while the skeptics generally don't get more personal than pointing out the feedback loop of funding. If we're going to fund this research, it would be wise to try to equally fund scientific research supporting and opposing the view, and fuel the battle for truth. But we don't.

August said...

I understand where you are coming from but New Orleans isn't a bad example because their predictions were based on sea levels rising. The sea levels didn't rise to the levels they were threatening me with when I was twelve, and thus, New Orleans, Venice, and a half-dozen other countries still exist despite their dire predictions that they would if we didn't do anything. Incidentally, they are doing that again- saying there will be some tipping point if we don't do whatever the hell it is they want us to do this week.
Climatology is one of many fields that needs a complete reboot. We can't verify a single study, and all their predictive models suck. This isn't science- this is rather sophisticated rent-seeking masquerading as science. I was particularly saddened to hear some of this actually goes on in other places, like dna research.

Dave said...

At brucerb,
I'm with August as far as New Orleans goes. The public infrastructure isn't keeping the Gulf of Mexico down.

But you sure make a compelling argument for why the government should stop wasting millions of dollars on infrastructure that encourages people to live in a place that they wouldn't live otherwise. I'm not sure if that was your goal, but that's what I took away from it.

Anonymous said...

I aways thought the point of the environmentalists ("alarmists") was to change preferences over consumption. Levying taxes to account for externalities is one way to change behavior, but I see their goal as changing minds.

If individuals realize their impact on the environment and change their taste towards renewable resources, that will have a large impact.