New study shows that global warming skeptics know more about climate science than believers.

"study" on foxnews.com?

"a forthcoming paper in the journal Advances in Political Psychology by Yale Professor Dan Kahan"

That actually makes sense.

Most that fully believe that we have global warming created by man are just agreeing with what they have heard without looking into themselves.

Skeptics may be more likely to look into researching it.

It doesn't make the skeptics right.

nice trolling attempt 2/10

Investigative journalism has really taken a dive over the last few years. Everyone knows it's always a great idea to poll the public about a topic that requires advanced knowledge (far beyond that of the public IQ)...really, Fox News? The truth is that the American public is grossly illiterate when it comes to the sciences. And that news organization is gonna suggest that, due to public opinion, any scientific endeavor should be thrown out the window? Get real.

I'm more interested in finding out if the average American can even operate a four-function calculator without his/her brain exploding.

The polar ice cap question is a bit of a set up for deniers. If the polar ice caps melt, the albedo effect would be lost and result in a warmer planet. A warmer planet would mean melting of land based ice sheets and sea level rise. Thus, the answer that polar ice melt would not cause sea level rise is not correct without further clarification that the melted ice in and of itself would not cause sea level rise, but other ramifications of the loss of sea ice would.

TL;DR - what L.L said, but from a preprint of Kahan's paper (

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2459057

):

The source of the public conflict over climate change is not too little rationality but in a sense too much.Ordinary members of the public are too good at extracting from information the significance it has in their everyday lives.What an ordinary person does—as consumer, voter, or participant in public discussions—is too inconsequential to affect either the climate or climate-change policymaking. Accordingly, if her actions in one of those capacities reflects a misunderstanding of the basic facts on global

warming, neither she nor anyone she cares about will face any greater risk. But because positions on climate change have become such a readily identifiable indicator of ones’ cultural commitments, adopting a stance toward climate change that deviates from the one that prevails among her closest associates could have devastating consequences, psychic and material. Thus, it is perfectly rational—perfectly in line with using information appropriately to achieve an important personal end—for that individual to

attend to information in a manner that more reliably connects her beliefs about climate change to the ones that predominate among her peers than to the best available scientific evidence (Kahan, 2012).

If that person happens to enjoy greater proficiency in the skills and dispositions necessary to make sense of such evidence, then she can simply use those capacities to do an even better job at forming identity-protective beliefs. That people high in numeracy, cognitive reflection and like dispositions use these abilities to find and credit evidence supportive of the position that predominates in their cultural group and to explain away the rest has been demonstrated experimentally (Kahan, 2013b; Kahan et al., 2013). Proficiency in the sort of reasoning that is indeed indispensable for genuine science comprehension does not bring the beliefs of individuals on climate change into greater conformity with those of scientists; it merely makes those individuals’ beliefs even more indicators or measures of the relationship between those beliefs and the identities of those who share their defining commitments.

When “what do you believe” about a societal risk validly measures “who are you?” or “whose side are you on?,” identity-protective cognition is not a breakdown in individual reason but a form of it. Without question, this style of reasoning is collectively disastrous: the more proficiently it is exercised by the citizens of a culturally diverse democratic society, the less likely they are to converge on scientific evidence essential to protecting them from harm. But the predictable tragedy of this outcome does not counteract the incentive individuals face to use their reason for identity protection. Only changing what that question measures—and what answers to it express about people—can.

L L wrote:

That actually makes sense.

Most that fully believe that we have global warming created by man are just agreeing with what they have heard without looking into themselves.

Skeptics may be more likely to look into researching it.

It doesn't make the skeptics right.

This ^

Another study shows that watching Fox News makes you less informed than watching no news at all.

http://www.businessinsider.com/study-watching-fox-news-makes-you-less-informed-than-watching-no-news-at-all-2012-5

Both studies are equally irrelevant to global warming.

Here's a new study for you:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/13/us-megadroughts-study_n_6671812.html

Eighty seconds of sense: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Z_muoyOeBY