More Scientifically Literate People Are More Skeptical of Global Warming

Liberals love to believe that conservatives are anti-science, and that they (the liberals) embody objective scientific enlightenment.

This tendency is, of course, quite selectively observed. Liberals entirely ignore the economic science that says that minimum wage laws are harmful. And liberals are more likely to believe that astrology is somehow scientific. Indeed, among voters in the 2004 presidential election, more Kerry voters than Bush voters said astrology was “very scientific” or “sort of” scientific.

But where supposed global warming is concerned, liberals wrap themselves in the mantle of “science” and proclaim that skeptics are flat-earthers.

But now comes a study, from a mainstream academic journal, financed by the National Science Foundation, showing that the more somebody knows about science and math, the more likely they are to be skeptical of the supposed risks of global warming.

When asked “How much risk to you believe climate change poses to human health, safety or prosperity?” those with a higher level of science literacy/numeracy saw less risk. The difference is not large, but it runs in entirely the “wrong” direction. It is also statistically significant: greater than could be accounted for by mere chance.

The most straightforward interpretation of the results is that the more people know about science, the more sophisticated and skeptical they tend to be. They know that ideology, careerism and group think affects scientists as much as anybody else, and they know about Piltdown Man, Lysenko and cold fusion. Scientists will claim that science is “self correcting,” and therefore we should believe whatever science says. But sophisticated people know that science can take a long time to correct, especially when powerful interests and/or ideological biases are in play (as with Piltdown Man and Lysenko).

The authors of the study, who seem to be true-blue (or perhaps true-green would be better) believers, don’t draw this obvious conclusion, but rather invoke social conformity. They say:

For the ordinary individual, the most consequential effect of his beliefs about climate change is likely to be on his relations with his peers. A hierarchical individualist who expresses anxiety about climate change might well be shunned by his co-workers at an oil refinery in Oklahoma City. A similar fate will probably befall the egalitarian communitarian English professor who reveals to colleagues in Boston that she thinks the scientific consensus on climate change is a hoax.

The problem with this argument, of course, is that it works equally well for climate scientists, who are as sensitive to the opinions of their subculture as anybody else. Indeed, more so, since to prosper (and even to get tenure) they need to be within the acceptable range of opinion.

This tendency to demean — and indeed to threaten and intimidate — those who are skeptical about global warming seems to suggest one of two things. Either those who support that view are at some level insecure about their position, and not willing to see an open and free-wheeling debate, or they are part of such a narrow little subculture that they really can’t understand how anybody can disagree with them.

More Fraud on “Global Warming”

From The Times:

The chairman of the leading climate change watchdog was informed that claims about melting Himalayan glaciers were false before the Copenhagen summit, The Times has learnt.

Rajendra Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it. He failed to act despite learning that the claim had been refuted by several leading glaciologists.

The IPCC’s report underpinned the proposals at Copenhagen for drastic cuts in global emissions.

Dr Pachauri, who played a leading role at the summit, corrected the error last week after coming under media pressure. He told The Times on January 22 that he had only known about the error for a few days. He said: “I became aware of this when it was reported in the media about ten days ago. Before that, it was really not made known. Nobody brought it to my attention. There were statements, but we never looked at this 2035 number.”

Asked whether he had deliberately kept silent about the error to avoid embarrassment at Copenhagen, he said: “That’s ridiculous. It never came to my attention before the Copenhagen summit. It wasn’t in the public sphere.”

However, a prominent science journalist said that he had asked Dr Pachauri about the 2035 error last November. Pallava Bagla, who writes for Science journal, said he had asked Dr Pachauri about the error. He said that Dr Pachauri had replied: “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.”

The Himalayan glaciers are so thick and at such high altitude that most glaciologists believe they would take several hundred years to melt at the present rate. Some are growing and many show little sign of change.

It’s clear that the anthropogenic global warming crowd does not consist of disinterested scientists, bureaucrats and citizens. It consists of crusaders.

But the crusaders aren’t people who have picked a random cause. A lot are liberals who are always looking around for an excuse to control the economy. And among the scientists the grants, prominence and influence that comes with global warming hysteria are a strong incentive.

Consider, for example, this:

Rajendra Pachauri’s Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), based in New Delhi, was awarded up to £310,000 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the lion’s share of a £2.5m EU grant funded by European taxpayers.

It means that EU taxpayers are funding research into a scientific claim about glaciers that any ice researcher should immediately recognise as bogus. The revelation comes just a week after The Sunday Times highlighted serious scientific flaws in the IPCC’s 2007 benchmark report on the likely impacts of global warming.

The IPCC had warned that climate change was likely to melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 - an idea considered ludicrous by most glaciologists. Last week a humbled IPCC retracted that claim and corrected its report.

In this context, it’s hard to believe that things like ClimateGate are just the result of honest misunderstandings or innocent over zealousness.

Elite Scientists Who Question Man-Made Global Warming

One of the typical claims made by the global warming activists is that there is a scientific concensus on the subject, and that no reputable scientist disputes it.

This, quite simply, is a brazen lie. There is no other word to describe it.

From Marty Nemko, a list of elite scientists who insist there is plenty of doubt about Al Gore’s pet cause.

Unlike younger citizens who have only seen Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” in their high-school or college classes, we remember a long of series bogus environmental scare stories, all supported by considerable scientific opinion and all highly touted by the media: the “New Ice Age,” the Club of Rome Report, the Population Bomb, etc.

All of these were soon enough discredited. But the fact that they were discredited disappeared down a Mainstream Media memory hole, and the new global warming hysteria is treated as though nothing like this has ever happened before.

Heresy! “Scientific” Orthodoxy Allowed to be Challenged in Louisiana

From National Review online:

To the chagrin of the science thought police, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal has signed into law an act to protect teachers who want to encourage critical thinking about hot-button science issues such as global warming, human cloning, and yes, evolution and the origin of life.

Opponents allege that the Louisiana Science Education Act is “anti-science.” In reality, the opposition’s efforts to silence anyone who disagrees with them is the true affront to scientific inquiry.

Students need to know about the current scientific consensus on a given issue, but they also need to be able to evaluate critically the evidence on which that consensus rests. They need to learn about competing interpretations of the evidence offered by scientists, as well as anomalies that aren’t well explained by existing theories.

Yet in many schools today, instruction about controversial scientific issues is closer to propaganda than education. Teaching about global warming is about as nuanced as Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Discussions about human sexuality recycle the junk science of biologist Alfred Kinsey and other ideologically driven researchers. And lessons about evolution present a caricature of modern evolutionary theory that papers over problems and fails to distinguish between fact and speculation. In these areas, the “scientific” view is increasingly offered to students as a neat package of dogmatic assertions that just happens to parallel the political and cultural agenda of the Left.

Real science, however, is a lot more messy — and interesting — than a set of ideological talking points. Most conservatives recognize this truth already when it comes to global warming. They know that whatever consensus exists among scientists about global warming, legitimate questions remain about its future impact on the environment, its various causes, and the best policies to combat it. They realize that efforts to suppress conflicting evidence and dissenting interpretations related to global warming actually compromise the cause of good science education rather than promote it.

The effort to suppress dissenting views on global warming is a part of a broader campaign to demonize any questioning of the “consensus” view on a whole range of controversial scientific issues — from embryonic stem-cell research to Darwinian evolution — and to brand such interest in healthy debate as a “war on science.”

The Louisiana Science Education Act offers such teachers a modest measure of protection. Under the law, school districts may permit teachers to “use supplementary textbooks and other instructional materials to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review scientific theories in an objective manner.” The act is not a license for teachers to do anything they want. Instruction must be “objective,” inappropriate materials may be vetoed by the state board of education, and the law explicitly prohibits teaching religion in the name of science, stating that its provisions “shall not be construed to promote any religious doctrine.”

The law was so carefully framed that even the head of the Louisiana ACLU has had to concede that it is constitutional as written.

Of course, this bill only allows balanced treatment of “hot button” scientific issues. It doesn’t require it, and it should -- with the unfortunate proviso that teachers who want to present one-sided indoctrination will do so, regardless of any state mandate.

(My students tell me that teaching of abstinence was required in their high-school sex education classes, but it was a “joke” since liberal teachers sneered at the idea that teens should abstain from sex.)

The author goes on:

Second, the idea that the current scientific consensus on any topic deserves slavish deference betrays stunning ignorance of the history of science. Time and again, scientists have shown themselves just as capable of being blinded by fanaticism, prejudice, and error as anyone else. Perhaps the most egregious example in American history was the eugenics movement, the ill-considered crusade to breed better human beings.

During the first decades of the 20th century, the nation’s leading biologists at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, and Stanford, as well by members of America’s leading scientific organizations such as the National Academy of Sciences, the American Museum of Natural History, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science were all devoted eugenicists. By the time the crusade had run its course, some 60,000 Americans had been sterilized against their will in an effort to keep us from sinning against Darwin’s law of natural selection, which Princeton biologist Edwin Conklin dubbed “the great law of evolution and progress.”

Today, science is typically portrayed as self-correcting, but it took decades for most evolutionary biologists to disassociate themselves from the junk science of eugenics. For years, the most consistent critics of eugenics were traditionalist Roman Catholics, who were denounced by scientists for letting their religion stand in the way of scientific progress. The implication was that religious people had no right to speak out on public issues involving science.

Of course, the proponents of scientific orthodoxy turn suddenly open-minded about heterodox ideas that serve their interests, or come down on their side of the Culture Wars.

Economic science condemns the minimum wage as forcefully as biology affirms evolution. But nobody would think of questioning a teacher who presented arguments in favor of the minimum wage.

Conspiracy theories thrive among high school teachers. These range from the entirely unsupported notion that the Oil Companies are conspiring to fix prices, to bizarre conspiracy theories about 9/11, to the more popular (but disreputable in the history profession) theory that a conspiracy killed John Kennedy.

So liberals are perfectly tolerant of dissenting and heterodox opinions -- except where they run afoul of their anti-religious biases (being critical of evolution) or their interests (global warming).

Lancet and Iraq Deaths: Propaganda Masquerades as Science

From Jeff Jacoby, an example of how a supposedly reputable medical journal can be used for proprganda purposes:

Few medical journals have the storied reputation of The Lancet, a British publication founded in 1823. In the course of its long history, The Lancet has published work of exceptional influence, such as Joseph Lister’s principles of antiseptics in 1867 and Howard Florey’s Nobel Prize-winning discoveries on penicillin in 1940. Today it is one of the most frequently cited medical journals in the world.

So naturally there was great interest when the Lancet published a study in October 2006, three weeks before the midterm US elections, reporting that 655,000 people had died in Iraq as a result of the US-led war.

Hundreds of news outlets, to say nothing of antiwar activists and lawmakers, publicized the astonishing figure, which was more than 10 times the death toll estimated by other sources. The Iraqi health ministry, for example, put the mortality level through June 2006 at 50,000. Iraq Body Count, a nonpartisan anti-war group that maintains a public database of the war’s victims, tallied some 45,000 Iraqi dead. If The Lancet’s number was accurate, more Iraqis had died in the 2½ years since the US invasion than during the eight-year war with Iran.

President Bush, asked about the study, dismissed it out of hand: “I don’t consider it a credible report.” Tony Blair’s spokesman also brushed it off as “not . . . anywhere near accurate.”

But the media played it up, for the most part unquestioningly. “One in 40 Iraqis killed since invasion,” blared a front-page headline in the Guardian, a leading British paper. CNN.com’s story began: “War has wiped out about 655,000 Iraqis, or more than 500 people a day, since the US-led invasion, a new study reports.” The CBS Evening News announced “a new and stunning measure of the havoc the American invasion unleashed in Iraq. . . . 655,000 Iraqis -- 2.5 percent of the entire population -- have died as a consequence of the war.”

Few journalists questioned the integrity of the study or its authors, Gilbert Burnham and Les Roberts of Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Iraqi scientist Riyadh Lafta. NPR’s Richard Harris reported asking Burnham, “Right before the election you’re making this announcement. Is this politically motivated? And he said, no, it’s not politically motivated.” Burnham told Newsweek the same thing: “There’s no political motivation in this. I feel very confident in the numbers.”

But the truth, it turns out, is that the report was drenched with politics, and its jaw-dropping conclusions should have inspired anything but confidence.

In an extensively researched cover story last week, National Journal took a close look under the hood of the Lancet/Johns Hopkins study. Reporters Neil Munro and Carl M. Cannon found that it was marred by grave flaws, such as unsupervised Iraqi survey teams, and survey samples that were too small to be statistically valid. The study’s authors refused to release most of their underlying data so other researchers could double-check it. The single disk they finally, grudgingly, supplied contained suspicious evidence of “data-heaping” -- that is, fabricated numbers. Researchers failed to gather basic demographic data from those they interviewed, a key safeguard against fraud.

“They failed to do any of the [routine] things to prevent fabrication,” Fritz Scheuren, vice president for statistics at the National Opinion Research Center, told the reporters.

Bad as the study’s methodological defects were, its political taint was worse:

• Much of the funding for the study came from the Open Society Institute of leftist billionaire George Soros, a strident critic of the Iraq war who, as Munro and Cannon point out, “spent $30 million trying to defeat Bush in 2004.”
• Coauthors Burnham and Roberts were avowed opponents of the Iraq war, and submitted their report to The Lancet on the condition that it be published before the election. Roberts, a self-described “advocate” committed to “ending the war,” even sought the Democratic nomination for New York’s 24th Congressional District. “It was a combination of Iraq and Katrina that just put me over the top,” he told National Journal.
• Lancet editor Richard Horton “also makes no secret of his leftist politics,” Munro and Cannon write. At a September 2006 rally, he publicly denounced “this axis of Anglo-American imperialism” for causing “millions of people . . . to die in poverty and disease.” Under Horton, The Lancet has increasingly been accused of shoddiness and sensationalism. In 2005, 30 leading British scientists blasted Horton’s “desperate headline-seeking” and charged him with running “badly conducted and poorly refereed scare stories.”

The claim that the US-led invasion of Iraq had triggered a slaughter of almost Rwandan proportions was a gross and outlandish exaggeration; it should have been greeted with extreme skepticism. But because it served the interests of those eager to discredit the war as a moral catastrophe, common-sense standards were ignored. “In our view,” the Baltimore Sun editorialized, “the Hopkins study stands until someone knocks it down.”

Now someone has, devastatingly. But will the debunking be trumpeted as loudly and clearly as the original report? Don’t hold your breath.