BPSDBA number of folks have had a look at the more recent Yale Project on Climate Change “Six America’s” study, the breakdown on public perceptions of climate change science.
While I am not quite ready to start discussing this, I think it is important that we remember the broader context within which we operate. For that reason I wanted to share the following:
- Only 53% of adults know how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun.
- Only 59% of adults know that the earliest humans and dinosaurs did not live at the same time.
- Only 47% of adults can roughly approximate the percent of the Earth’s surface that is covered with water.*
- Only 21% of adults answered all three questions correctly.
- 22 percent believe President Bush knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance.
- 30 percent believe Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.
- 23 percent believe they’ve been in the presence of a ghost.
- 18 percent believe the sun revolves around the Earth.
“About 1 in 4 Americans can name more than one of the five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment (freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly and petition for redress of grievances.) But more than half of Americans can name at least two members of the fictional cartoon family, according to a survey.
“The study by the new McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum found that 22 percent of Americans could name all five Simpson family members, compared with just 1 in 1,000 people who could name all five First Amendment freedoms.”
I’ll use “Is America scientifically illiterate?” as an insertion point to the many, many discussions going on around “Unscientific America” by Mooney and Kirshenbaum.
These particular studies focus on the United States, but I do not mean to suggest that America is unique in this respect. The numbers and particular beliefs will vary with culture and geography, but the fact remains that the basic demographic will be universal, viz that:
a shocking proportion of any population will be ignorant of things that many others would consider very basic, and
every population will have a hard core (approx 10 to 20%) who are deeply and broadly ignorant, and possibly irredeemably so for all practical purposes.
This is the context in which we attempt to educate about the scientific facts of climate change. That being said, here are some of the discussions of “Six America’s 2009”
- Study: climate views of U.S. break down into six broad categories
- US climate poll: the difference a year makes
- Global warming’s “Six Americas”
“Many of America’s most important commercial crops require between 400 and 1800 hours each winter when the temperature is below 45 degrees Fahrenheit.” Earth Gauge
We give our consent every moment that we do not resist.
Denier “Challenge” aka Deathwatch Update: Day 314 … still no evidence.
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Greenfyre's 
It’s depressing, isn’t it? We are not talking about some primitive society but one whose wealth would be impossible without science and engineering.
Shame the survey didn’t include the cause of the seasons; I’m betting that the score for that would be even worse.
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Many people are quite aware that the Earth orbits the Sun once per year but some of those think the seasons are caused by varying distance from the Sun, not by the Earth’s axial tilt.
So, the score would be higher (worse).
Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that was used to produce the hockey stick. In his original publications of the stick, Mann purported to use a standard method known as principal component analysis, or PCA, to find the dominant features in a set of more than 70 different climate records.
But it wasnt so. McIntyre and McKitrick obtained part of the program that Mann used, and they found serious problems. Not only does the program not do conventional PCA, but it handles data normalization in a way that can only be described as mistaken.
Now comes the real shocker. This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not. To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends. This method of generating random data is called Monte Carlo analysis, after the famous casino, and it is widely used in statistical analysis to test procedures. When McIntyre and McKitrick fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape!
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Mike, there’s a question for you in an unpublished post entitled “Pseud’s corner”.
This one would fit the bill.
Let me know what you think (it is your blog, after all).
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The Doonesbury panel is spot on.
The worst informed people will simply criticize any attempt to base discussions on facts as ‘elitism’, and will go on to conflate elitism (which means whatever they want it to) with socialism, vegetarianism, abortion, and homosexuality. So clearly, facts must be bad, and intellectuals are the spawn of Satan.
But of course! The existence of facts means that some statements are facts, and some statements are not facts. Discriminating statements on the basis of factuality is, of course, the beginning of inequality and segregation and, no doubt, fascism (oh noes!).
— bi
Small caveat: As a test preparation instructor, I’d also note that in any group of questions of any length, most people (that I have observed, including the otherwise very knowledgeable) will miss between five and ten percent of them just because they misread the question, misread the choices, or misbubbled (or misspoke) their response.
In low stakes questioning (such as in surveys, rather than on the GRE, for example,) a similar percentage are answering wrong on purpose because they are temporary or permanent twerps.
So I always wonder about the actual size of the “intractably ignorant” category–especially after I take a new test (for my job) and discover that I have claimed that a pentagon has six sides. Doh!
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Thanks for replying. I hope that they do limit these factors, and even if they don’t, I certainly agree that there is a certain nonreducible category of willfully ignorant people.
P.S. My three year old know the correct answer to one of the science questions, my nine year old to two (and his failure to answer the percentage of Earth’s surface covered by water is much more a function of his hazy understanding of percents than an unfamiliarity with land and water.)
Then we got into an interesting discussion of what revolve means, and three began to revolve around nine for a while. Thanks for the supplemental curriculum. 🙂
Tamara
The majority of liberals also oppose nuclear power. Go figure….
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anon, are you trying to show yourself as a prime example of American stupidity?
“Do you oppose nuclear power?” is not a factual question.
— bi
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By the way, the word “Reasonists” has unfortunately been taken over by “Who’s John Galt?” whackos. Ugh…
— bi
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I’m guessing that the tenets of Freedom™, Liberty™, Objectivism™, Reason™, Rationality™ are saying that they can’t abandon this sinful socialist world just yet.
But they will leave, that they will, and when the leave, the whole socialist economy will crumble. Be afraid, be very afraid.
— bi