Study shows, skeptics know more about climate science than believers

Cannuck

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Okay I'll bite. What's the relevancy of the study? Most people in our society are omnivores. I'm sure if you asked 100 vegetarians and 100 omnivores questions about nutrition the vegetarians would score higher in terms of nutritional science.
 

mentalfloss

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Okay I'll bite. What's the relevancy of the study? Most people in our society are omnivores. I'm sure if you asked 100 vegetarians and 100 omnivores questions about nutrition the vegetarians would score higher in terms of nutritional science.

Too much reason for a thread like this.

You need to put on your Sean Hanity boots and go wit da flow.
 

Cannuck

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Salty Alarmists.

Who?

Too much reason for a thread like this.

My reasoned outlook on things does tend to upset the nutters.

As for AGW, the coming ice age, carbon capture, armageddon, warming, cooling....I have one thing to say....don't know, don't care. It's one of those subjects (like cricket) where I understand that its important to some people but as soon as somebody starts talking about it I just gloss over. The climate scientists tend to agree that there is a warming. I can't be bothered to question it. If it is occurring, it will continue because there isn't significant desire to do anything about it. If it isn't occurring, then why worry. I think I'm like the majority of the population that way. I know when I'm out at social events, there never is a serious climate science discussion. People just don't care. So if somebody asked me on a street corner about climate science I would probably say that it'll get warmer as we near summer and colder again next winter.

That's why I seriously question the relevance of the study. It's so obvious that people that are interested in climate science would know more about climate change just like people that care about what they put in their bodies (vegetarians) would know more about nutrition. Most of the population pound back Quarter Pounders without any thought at all. That doesn't mean the vegetarians are right in their views.
 

Tonington

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Oct 27, 2006
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I'm about to get salty...

Skeptics were also more likely to correctly say that if the North Pole icecap melted, global sea levels would not rise. One can test this with a glass of water and an ice cube – the water level will not change after the ice melts.

That's not correct at all. The brine is rejected from the seawater as it approaches the freezing point. But when it melts, it's not as salty, it has a lower density than the sea water it was displacing. That means an equivalent mass of freshwater takes up more volume than the saltwater. So when the sea ice melts, it increases the volume of water. It's not as great a contribution as thermal expansion of water, or the volume of water that can be contributed from ice sheets on land that are thousands of kilometers across and kilometers thick. But to say it adds nothing to global sea levels is incorrect.

Try the kitchen experiment with salt water and ice, then see what happens. Scientists have even quantified the value with satellite measurements:
Recent loss of floating ice and the consequent sea level contribution - Shepherd - 2010 - Geophysical Research Letters - Wiley Online Library

Eureka!

Whomever was grading these questions isn't really up to date on their basic grade 10 physics...at a minimum. And considering the above? Fox reported that skeptics scored on average 4.5 correct versus 4 for the 'believers'. This one question above invalidates the findings. :lol:

That said, I'm not really surprised that people with an active interest in a subject have more knowledge than the general public. Why is that shocking? I don't think that's a particularly high bar to clear. However, they haven't scored higher than the scientists they say are full of crap, nor are they up to date such as with the findings of Shepherd et al. 2010 that I linked to above. That's not such an easy bar to clear if you only visit 'skeptical' blogs. ;-)
 

MHz

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That's not correct at all. The brine is rejected from the seawater as it approaches the freezing point. But when it melts, it's not as salty, it has a lower density than the sea water it was displacing. That means an equivalent mass of freshwater takes up more volume than the saltwater. So when the sea ice melts, it increases the volume of water. It's not as great a contribution as thermal expansion of water, or the volume of water that can be contributed from ice sheets on land that are thousands of kilometers across and kilometers thick. But to say it adds nothing to global sea levels is incorrect.
The melted water eventually mixes with the other water so it ends up being as salty as it was or Hudson Bay would always have a layer of fresh water laying on top.