Conservatives Don’t Deny Climate Science Because They’re Ignorant. They Deny It Because of Who They Are.


<a href="">Rugdal</a>/Shutterstock

For many years, the US National Science Foundation, more recently with the help of the General Social Survey, has asked the public the same true or false question about evolution: “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals.” And for many years, the responses to this question have been dismal. In 2006, 2008, and 2010, for instance, less than half of the public correctly answered “true.”

In 2012, however, the NSF and GSS conducted an experiment to try to better understand why people fare so badly on this evolution question. For half of survey respondents, the words “according to the theory of evolution” were added to the beginning of the statement above. And while only 48 percent gave the correct answer to the unaltered question, an impressive 72 percent correctly answered the new, prefaced version.

So why such a huge gap? Perhaps the original question wasn’t tapping into scientific knowledge at all; rather, it was challenging the religious identity of creationists who think the earth is less than 10,000 years old. Presented with the new phrasing, however, even many creationists know what the theory of evolution states; they just deny that it is true. So are these people really “scientifically illiterate,” as many in the science world might claim, or are they instead…something else? 




Dan Kahan BDEngler/Wikimedia Commons

Such is the finding of a new paper by Yale law professor and communication researcher Dan Kahan, recently profiled in depth by Ezra Klein in a much read Vox article aptly titled “How politics makes us stupid.” Kahan is becoming widely known for his research showing that political ideology interferes with our most basic reasoning abilities; even our math skills, it seems, go right out the window when political passions come into play. In this new paper, though, Kahan isn’t showing how dumb we are. Rather, he’s doing the opposite: Showing that if you ask the questions the right way, Americans know a lot more about climate science than you might think. (Even conservatives.)

“Whether people ‘believe in’ climate change, like whether they ‘believe in’ evolution, expresses who they are,” writes Kahan.


Probability of giving the correct answer on a question about climate change in relation to individuals’ political ideology and science “intelligence.” Dan Kahan.

This “smart idiot” effect has prompted a ton of hand-wringing on the left; by now, Kahan has captured it in many studies. In the context of the current research, though, he’s just getting started.

Mirroring the NSF’s approach to evolution, Kahan created a new questionnaire that he hopes can more extensively measure people’s knowledge about the science of climate change. But—crucially—in this questionnaire, most of the questions started out with the phrase “climate scientists believe that…” Such is Kahan’s attempt (only an initial one, he stresses) to disentangle people’s identities and political ideology from what they just plain know.


Examples of “Ordinary Climate Science Intelligence” items and the public’s probability of giving the right answers. Answers (from left to right, top to bottom) are “carbon dioxide,” “true,” “false,” and “false.” Dan Kahan.


Left right differences in responses to climate science “intelligence” questions. Correct answers (from left to right, top to bottom) are “carbon dioxide,” “true,” “false,” and “false.” Dan Kahan.

Granted, there is an argument to be made that part of this depends on the nature of the questions. Kahan threw in a number of trick questions, including one that almost everybody got wrong: “Climate scientists believe that if the North Pole icecap melted as a result of human-caused global warming, global sea levels would rise.” That’s true of the South Pole, because the vast Antarctic Ice Sheet sits atop a landmass. It’s also true of Greenland. But it’s not true of the North Pole, where the ice cap is comprised of floating sea ice, whose melting won’t raise sea levels any more than the melting of ice cubes on a summer day causes your glass of water to overflow.*

There was another noteworthy pattern in question responses. Whenever Kahan posed a question about a risk of global warming that turned out not to be real—for instance, “Climate scientists believe that human-caused global warming will increase the risk of skin cancer in human beings”—he tended to trick liberals a bit more than conservatives. But that’s simply because liberals were more inclined to believe bad things about climate change, and conservatives to dismiss them.

In any event, Kahan concludes, on the basis of these results, that the public basically does understand climate science, on both sides of the aisle. “Everyone has gotten the memo on what ‘climate scientists believe,'” he writes. It’s just that there are certain questions, and certain ways of phrasing them, that lead conservatives to trumpet their political identities, rather than express their knowledge, in response to survey questions. Or as Kahan writes:






Clarification, 6/30/2014

After this article was published, a reader pointed out that actually, the sea level rise brought on by melting Arctic sea ice will be small, but not zero. Indeed, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently updated an FAQ, which used to assert that “if the North Pole ice cap melts it has no effect on sea level,” to read that “if the North Pole ice cap melts it has little effect on sea level.” What’s going on with this? According to a 2010 paper in Geophysical Research Letters (summarized by the Nature Climate Change blog “Climate Feedback” here), sea water is “warmer and more salty than ice,” so when sea ice melts and transforms into ocean water, it takes up a somewhat different volume. However, “globally, the effect is almost negligible” on sea level, concludes the post.

In a blog post, Kahan wrote that while this might mean he needs to score “wrong” answers on this question right, and “right” answers on this question wrong, it doesn’t change the broader conclusion of his latest study:

Because there is clearly no meaningful relationship between getting the “right” or “wrong” answers on the proto- climate-science literacy test and either people’s cultural identities or their beliefs about climate change, it doesn’t matter which answer one treats and which as wrong in that respect. That is, there is still no relationship.


More MotherJones reporting on Climate Desk




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