Data collected in ongoing work to probe, refine, extend, make sense of, demolish the “ordinary climate science intelligence” assessment featured in The Measurement Problem paper.
You tell me what it means …
Eagle-eyed commentator @EricFairfield wondered whether the 0.95 CIs were smaller than they should be. Sure enough, I had mistakenly used standard-error CIs in my graph. That 0.95 CIs will be about 2x wider.
Here’s a correction:
In my own view, the precision of the differences in means (& whether they are or are not “different from zero at p < 0.05” ) is less important, practically speaking, than that (a) the differences are all much smaller than one would expect if one had the impression that “believing” & “not believing” in human-caused climate change could be explained by differences in what the two groups of people believe about what the weight of expert opinion is on that issue; and that (b) for both “believers” & “disbelievers” people were very likely to get the “correct” answer when they attributed a “human-caused risk” conclusion to climate scientists that climate scientists in fact hold (according to NASA & NOAA, the sources of all the q’s), and very likely to get the “wrong” answer when they attributed a “human-caused risk” conclusion to scientists that in fact scientists don’t hold (same sources).
But that’s just my opinion! Offer your own in the interesting discussion.
An exchange on twitter brought to my attention that this Figure also incorrectly identifies one of the items.
The tally reported for
“if human beings stopped emitting carbon dioxide tomorrow? [Global temperatures would immediately begin to drop; Global temperatures would continue to rise; Global temperatures would stop rising, flatten out, and then drop,”
is in fact the tally for an item worded
“nuclear power generation contributes to global warming [True or false].”
Here are results from same survey with correction, plus some additonal items (not all of which were administered to full sample; tallies here also reflect survey weighting to match general population demographics):
These data were collected as part of CCP’s ongoing Southeast Florida Evidence-based Science Communication Initiative.