New research on climate skepticism

[tombogan03884]

http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2012/jan/13/new-research-on-climate-skepticism/

Learning more about science in general may not make individuals more likely to accept the science behind climate change, according to a new Yale research paper.

In a large-scale study conducted by the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School, researchers determined that understanding science does not make people more likely to base their beliefs about the risks of climate change on scientific evidence. Instead, the researchers concluded that as scientific and reasoning skills increase, people who are skeptical of climate change become more doubtful, while those who are worried about climate change become more concerned. Researchers attributed this finding to individuals rationalizing science in favor of their pre-established worldview, an ability that increases with scientific understanding.

“This is the first time we have shown that the impact of peoples’ values in shaping their perceptions of risk is actually amplified by their science literacy and numeracy,” said researcher and Yale law professor Dan Kahan. “The fact that the disagreement intensifies in step with science literacy and numeracy tells us that the role culture is playing in this disagreement is much more complicated than people otherwise would have presumed.”

In a survey of over 1,500 adults, researchers measured participants’ understandings of basic science through questions such as “It is the father’s gene that decides whether the baby or a boy or girl — true or false?” and scored their quantitative reasoning skills through simple mathematical word problems. The researchers also gauged cultural values by asking participants to evaluate statements about gender, race and class, such as, “Society as a whole has become too soft and feminine.”

These results were then compared to the participants’ numerical ranking of their view on climate change risk. Individuals with a “hierarchical, individualistic” perspective tended to be skeptical toward climate change, while people with an “egalitarian, communitarian” worldview tended to believe in it, an effect that was positively correlated with scientific literacy and quantitative reasoning skills.

“This finding is robust and advances the field,” University of New Hampshire sociology professor Lawrence Hamilton wrote in an email to the News. In a phone interview, Hamilton credited the research for “confirming and extending” the conclusions of recent studies in the growing field of climate change perception research.

Hamilton questioned Kahan’s finding that people with better knowledge of science and stronger reasoning skills are slightly more likely to be skeptical of climate change than people with lower levels of comprehension, stating that the conclusion is “not yet ready for strong generalization.”

If confirmed, Kahan’s research would oppose the popular belief that controversies over climate change stem from the public’s inability to understand and interpret scientific evidence. Instead, the study demonstrates that the controversy over climate change results from the fact that peoples’ positions on climate change carry additional meaning as signals of their cultural values.

“Science is not coming through in a pristine sense,” University of Toronto sociology professor Shelly Ungar said. “Instead it is being bent by ideology. [People] are picking the science they like based on their ideology.”

Ungar, Hamilton and Kahan all attributed some of the dispute to the polarized way science is communicated in the United States. Kahan called for a “neutralize[d]” dialogue to avoid adding cultural significance to scientific fact. “We’ve got to avoid communicating that the position somebody takes on an issue has a consequence for the kind of person you are,” Kahan said.

For example, Kahan said, the only people who saw former Vice President Al Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth” were those who already believed that climate change was a danger.

Fifty-eight percent of the American public says there is solid evidence that the average temperatures on earth have been increasing, according to a May 2011 Pew Research Center release.

[tombogan03884]

http://reason.com/blog/2012/01/13/skeptic-wins-global-warming-bet

In 2008, Research Institute for Global Change climate modeller James Annan and David Whitehouse, an astrophysicist who is a scientific advisor with the Global Warming Policy Foundation in Britain bet a £100 that, using the HadCrut3 data set, there would be no new global temperature record set by 2011. The HadCrut3 data set is put together by the Hadley Centre's Climatic Research Centre in Britain. The bet was made at the instigation of the BBC radio program "More or Less." The result?

Whitehouse has won.

Over at the GWPF website, Whitehouse offers his view on global temperature trends and his take on the bet:

    Back in 2007 many commentators, activists and scientists ... said the halt in global temperatures wasn’t real. It is interesting that the Climategate emails showed that the certainty some scientists expressed about this issue in public was not mirrored in private. Indeed, one intemperate activist, determined to shoot my New Statesman article down but unable to muster the simple statistics required to tackle the statistical properties of only 30 data points, asked the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit and the Met Office, to provide reasons why I was wrong, which they couldn’t.

    What was true in 2007 is even more so in 2012. Since 2007 the reality of the temperature standstill has been accepted and many explanations offered for it, more than can possibly be true! We have seen predictions that half of the years between 2009 and 2014 would be HadCrut3 records (a prediction that now can’t possibly come to pass) which was later modified to half of the years between 2010 and 2015 (likewise.) The Met Office predict that 2012 -16 will be on average 0.54 deg C above the HadCrut3 baseline level, and 2017 -2021 some 0.76 deg C higher. Temperatures must go up, and quickly.

    So how long must this standstill go on until bigger questions are asked about the rate of global warming? When asked if he would be worried if there was no increase in the next five years James Annan would only say it would only indicate a lower rate of warming! Some say that 15 years is the period for serious questions.

    In a now famous (though even at the time obvious) interview in 2010 Prof Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia confirmed that there was no statistically significant warming since 1995. There was an upward trend, but it was statistically insignificant, which in scientific parlance equates to no trend at all. In 2011 Prof Jones told the BBC that due to the inclusion of the warmish 2010 there was now a statistically significant increase between 1995 and 2010. Since 2011 was cool it doesn’t take complicated statistics to show that the post 1995 trend by that method of calculation is now back to insignificant, though I don’t expect the BBC to update its story.

    The lesson is that for the recent warming spell, the one that begins about 1980, the years of standstill now exceed those with a year-on-year increase. It is the standstill, not the increase, that is now this warm period’s defining characteristic.

Unfortunately, the polarization in the climate change debate makes the partisan shenanigans in the U.S. Congress look like a kumbaya campfire singing circle at a girl's summer camp.

In December, Grant Foster, proprietor the global warming proponent blog, Open Mind, and Stefan Rahmstorf from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research published a new analysis in Environmental Research Letters that asserts that there has been no "standstill" in global temperatures. In their article they claimed to have teased a steady global warming temperature rise from five different temperature data sets by accounting for the noise of El Ninos, solar variations, and volcanic eruptions. After making their adjustments to the data, the two find that 2009 and 2010 are the two warmest years on record. Go here for Foster's explanation.

In addition, the World Meteorological Organization issued in December a provisional statement which declared:

    Global temperatures in 2011 have not been as warm as the record-setting values seen in 2010 but have likely been warmer than any previous strong La Niña year ....

La Nina years occur when the eastern Pacific Ocean cools substantially and thus affects the global average temperature. 

As background, in December University of Alabama in Huntsville climate researchers John Christy and Roy Spencer after analyzing 33 years of their satellite temperature data report:

    While Earth’s climate has warmed in the last 33 years, the climb has been irregular. There was little or no warming for the first 19 years of satellite data.  Clear net warming did not occur until the El Niño Pacific Ocean “warming event of the century” in late 1997.  Since that upward jump, there has been little or no additional warming.

    “Part of the upward trend is due to low temperatures early in the satellite record caused by a pair of major volcanic eruptions,” Christy said. “Because those eruptions pull temperatures down in the first part of the record, they tilt the trend upward later in the record.”

    Christy and other UAHuntsville scientists have calculated the cooling effect caused by the eruptions of Mexico’s El Chichon volcano in 1982 and the Mt. Pinatubo volcano in the Philippines in 1991. When that cooling is subtracted, the long-term warming effect is reduced to 0.09 C (0.16° F) per decade, well below computer model estimates of how much global warming should have occurred.

Interestingly, the Foster and Rahmstorf analysis finds that global warming has increased at almost twice the rate (0.16 C per decade) that Christy and Spencer report.

[MikeBjerum]

An important item that is missing from this article is "Who paid for the survey?".  It would also be good to know how the sample was chosen, and what Professor Kahan's theory was.  

Something that is not mentioned in the article is what better education means.  In science classes I learned to look at how the experiment is done, and how the data is gathered and compared*.  In several other classes I learned to question how is doing the research and where they come from.  I have even learned to dig deeper than what I am told.  Liberals tell us that the upper class want to keep us uneducated and ignorant so that we won't over take them.  However, it is much of liberal politics that try to pull the wool over our eyes.  Today we see a little bit of what education is doing to their scientific evidence.

*  Time weighted averages are a great tool that many like to use.  While they may be good when it comes to evaluating consumer habits, they can distort weather trends.  For those that don't understand a time weighted average, it is when you give more current data more power:

Ten year average totals the ten values, adds them, and divides the sum by ten.

Ten year weighted average multiplies the most recent year by 10, previous year by nine, next year by eight, until they use one of the first year, add the values, and dividing by 55 gives you the time weighted average.

A simple average will show that the average is somewhere midway in the range, while a time weighted average will typically fall close to the year given emphasis.

[Magoo541]

Averaging over time has two huge factors to overcome.
First, how is it measured and are the instruments calibrated and by whom?  Have ten people measure the spacing between their fork tines in their silverware drawer and you will see what I mean, especially if your respondents are global.   
Second the time period-I can prove climate change over the last 60-90 days but what about the Mini-Ice Age that occured between the mid-16th century and the mid-19th century (which couldn't have been caused by automobiles, planes, tranes or coal-fired power plants).  So what period of time should be considered?
In addition to those problems there has been a conspiracy, yes a real one-look up the definition, by a certain segment of the population to use this as a power grab. 
BTW next time you meet someone that thinks they are better than you because they drive a hybrid, tell them how much fuel it takes to get Airforce one off the ground-355 gallon (2200 lbs).  Michele "I'm not an angry black woman" Obama burns more fuel in her solo trips to the Hamptons than my family will in our lifetimes.  Then thank them for volunteering to drive the sacrificial vehicle for our high way safety

[tombogan03884]

My take on the 2 articles was that the more science you know the less likely you are to believe the agenda driven BS.

[Sponsor]

[Solus]

My take on the 2 articles was that the more science you know the less likely you are to believe the agenda driven BS.

That was what I got from them.

They discounted it by saying those who learned science and understood the facts would interrupt them to fit their political/social agenda.

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.   My advice to them is   "Don't judge everyone by yourselves."

[tombogan03884]

That was what I got from them.

They discounted it by saying those who learned science and understood the facts would interrupt them to fit their political/social agenda.

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.   My advice to them is   "Don't judge everyone by yourselves."

That is the basic difference between Conservatives and Liberals.
The Conservative weighs the facts and draws a logical conclusion.
The progressive on the other hand takes the facts that fit the political dialectic and disregards or suppresses the rest .