From Nick's source:
If there really was a North Pole icecap, they would.
An ice cap is an ice mass that covers less than 50,000 km² of land area (usually covering a highland area). Masses of ice covering more than 50,000 km² are termed an ice sheet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_cap
Arctic Sea ice is too big to be an ice cap and doesn't lie over land. Something's wrong here...
(Barbarian checks)
Ah... here's Kahan's actual opinion on the subject:
The more one knows about the subject, the more likely one is to accept the evidence for warming. Unless one is religious, in which case the opposite applies.
Doesn't fit Nick's claim at all. Here's what Kahan wrote:
Actually, on what others' intuitions might be, I feel fairly confident that people who believe in climate change are likely to believe both that science comprehension correlates positively with climate change risk perceptions and that religiosity correlates negatively.
They are wrong to believe the first point (just as people who are skpetical of climate change are wrong to believe that science literacy negatively correlates with perceived climate change risks).
But if they were right, they'd be making a good guess to think that religiosity is negatively correlated with climate change risk perceptions, because in fact (as is pretty well known) there is modest negative correlation between religiosity and various measures of science literacy & critical reasoning.
And:
In this dataset, I found that there is a small correlation (r = -0.05, p = 0.03) between the science comprehension measure and a left-right political outlook measure, Conservrepub, which aggregates liberal-conservative ideology and party self-identification. The sign of the correlation indicates that science comprehension decreases as political outlooks move in the rightward direction--i.e., the more "liberal" and "Democrat," the more science comprehending.
So his data show that conservatives and highly religious people are somewhat less scientifically-informed than liberals or those who are not religious, but not by all that much. But exactly the opposite of what Nick was trying to show with his faked story.
If there really was a North Pole icecap, they would.
An ice cap is an ice mass that covers less than 50,000 km² of land area (usually covering a highland area). Masses of ice covering more than 50,000 km² are termed an ice sheet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_cap
Arctic Sea ice is too big to be an ice cap and doesn't lie over land. Something's wrong here...
(Barbarian checks)
Ah... here's Kahan's actual opinion on the subject:
The more one knows about the subject, the more likely one is to accept the evidence for warming. Unless one is religious, in which case the opposite applies.
Doesn't fit Nick's claim at all. Here's what Kahan wrote:
Actually, on what others' intuitions might be, I feel fairly confident that people who believe in climate change are likely to believe both that science comprehension correlates positively with climate change risk perceptions and that religiosity correlates negatively.
They are wrong to believe the first point (just as people who are skpetical of climate change are wrong to believe that science literacy negatively correlates with perceived climate change risks).
But if they were right, they'd be making a good guess to think that religiosity is negatively correlated with climate change risk perceptions, because in fact (as is pretty well known) there is modest negative correlation between religiosity and various measures of science literacy & critical reasoning.
And:
In this dataset, I found that there is a small correlation (r = -0.05, p = 0.03) between the science comprehension measure and a left-right political outlook measure, Conservrepub, which aggregates liberal-conservative ideology and party self-identification. The sign of the correlation indicates that science comprehension decreases as political outlooks move in the rightward direction--i.e., the more "liberal" and "Democrat," the more science comprehending.
So his data show that conservatives and highly religious people are somewhat less scientifically-informed than liberals or those who are not religious, but not by all that much. But exactly the opposite of what Nick was trying to show with his faked story.
