"They already got the memo" part 2: More data on the *public consensus* on what "climate scientists think" about human-caused global warming - Cultural Cognition of Health

So as I said, CCP/Annenberg PPC has just conducted a humongous study on climate science literacy.

Yesterday I shared some data on the extent to which ordinary members of the public are politically polarized both on human-caused global warming and on the nature of scientific consensus relating to the same.

I said I was surprised b/c  there was less division over whether “expert climate scientists” agree that human behavior is causing the earth’s temperature to rise.

Because Americans– particularly those who display the greatest proficiency in science comprehension– are less likely to disagree on whether there’s scientific consensus than on whether human beings are causing global warming, it’s not very compelling to think confusion about the former proposition is the “cause” of the latter.

But there is still a huge amount of polarization on whether there is scientific consensus on human-caused climate change.

Answers to these two questions — are humans causing climate change? do scientists believe that? — are still most plausibly viewed as being caused by a single, unobserved or latent disposition: namvely, a general pro- or con- affective orientation toward “climate change” that reflects the social meaning positions on this issue has within a person’s identity-defining affinity groups.

Or in other words, the questions “is human climate change happening” and “is there scientific consensus on human-caused climate change” both measure who a person is , politically speaking.

That’s a different thing from what members of the public know about climate science . To measure that requires a valid climate-science comprehension instrument.

The study in which we collected these data was a follow up of an earlier CCP-APPC one that featured the “Ordinary Climate Science Intelligence” assessment, or OCSI_1.0.

The goal of OCSI_1.0 was to disentangle the measurement of “who people are”—the responses toward climate change that evince the affective stance toward climate change characteristic of their cultural group—from “what they know” about climate science.

The current study is part of the effort to develop OSI_2.0, the aim of which is to discern differences across a larger portion of the range of knowledge levels within the general population.

Here is how 600 subjects U.S. adults drawn from a nationally representative panel) responded to some of the OSI_2.0 candidate items.

For me, these are the key points:

First, there’s barely any partisan disagreement over what climate scientists believe about the specific causes and consequences of human-caused climate change .

Sure, there’s some daylight between the response of the left-leaning and right-leaning respondents. But the differences are trivial compared to the ones in these same respondents’ beliefs about both the existence of climate change and the nature of scientific consensus.

There is “bipartisan” public consensus in perceptions of what climate scientists “know,” with minor differences only in the intensity with which respondents of opposing outlooks hold those particular impressions.

Second, ordinary members of the public, regardless of what they “believe” about human-caused climate change, know pitifully little about the basic causes and consequences of global warming.

Yes, a substantial majority of respondents, of diverse political views, know that climate scientists understand fossil-fuel CO 2 emissions to be warming the planet, and that climate scientists expect rising temperatures to result in flooding in many regions.

But they also mistakenly believe that, “according to climate scientists, the increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide associated with the burning of fossil fuels will increase the risk of leukemia” and “skin cancer in human beings, and “reduce photosynthesis by plants.”

They think, incorrectly, that climate scientists have determined that “a warmer climate over the next few decades will increase water evaporation, which will lead to an overall decrease of global sea levels.”