Based on how the issue is often framed in the media, you might assume that people of higher intelligence would be more likely to take the ‘alarmist’ position on climate change: that climate change is a serious problem and it’s caused mostly by human activity.
After all, it is said that there’s an overwhelming scientific consensus supporting the ‘alarmist’ position.
And you’d expect that people of higher intelligence would be more likely to share the views of scientists. [emphasis, links added]
However, that’s not what a recent study found.
Two psychologists – Adrian Furnham and Charlotte Robinson – gave the ‘Climate Change Attitude Survey’ to a sample of 500 European adults, selected through the platform Prolific.
This is a 15-item questionnaire, measuring people’s beliefs about climate change:
As you can see, some of the items (e.g., 1, 2, and 3) deal with whether climate change is happening, while other items (e.g., 10, 11, 12) deal with whether individual actions can make a difference.
In order to disentangle these two aspects of the survey, the researchers factor-analyzed respondents’ answers. They identified a factor that was strongly associated with the answers to items 1–7 and 8.
Which is a fancy way of saying they created a variable that gave substantial weight to these items.
Note that the items all deal with whether climate change is happening, whether it’s a serious problem, and whether it’s caused by human activity.
Hence the corresponding variable can be seen as an overall measure of agreement with the ‘alarmist’ position on climate change.
Aside from the ‘Climate Change Attitude Survey’, respondents were given an intelligence test and asked about their religious and political views.
The intelligence test was a 16-item version of the ‘Wonderlic Personnel Test’ – a well-known and respected instrument.
So what did the researchers find? Overall, there was no correlation between intelligence and attitudes to climate change. People with higher intelligence were neither more nor less likely to take the ‘alarmist’ position.
On the other hand, political views were strongly associated with people’s attitudes: those who identified as “liberal” were much more likely to take the ‘alarmist’ position than those who identified as “conservative”.
When the researchers carried out a multivariate analysis of people’s attitudes (by including many different predictors in the same model), they found that political views were the only statistically significant predictor.
This is shown in the table below:
Overall, Furnham and Robinson found no evidence that people of higher intelligence were likely to take the ‘alarmist’ position on climate change – a result they described as “surprising.”
Contrary to what many would have us believe, climate change ‘skeptics’ are not deficient in cognitive ability.
Read more at Daily Sceptic
I see a lot of evidence that ignorant and stupid people are prone to climate alarmism.
Lots of useful idiots blocking roads and streets pouring milk out at the stores wasting Tomato Soup and Mashed Potatoes on works of art carrying around stupid signs and banners with stupid slogans on them or flying around the Earth lecturing the rest of us we must stay at home over a totally fake crisis. Yes lots and lots of useful idiots
I was once accused of having low intelligence because I’m a climate realist. I have degrees in electrical engineering, biology, and chemistry. As an aerospace engineer I solved some technical problems that were beyond the ability of some other engineers. Yet, based on nothing more than disagreement on climate change, I was said to have low intelligence.
I do have one intelligence test in mind. Some climate alarmists also believe in massive immigration. Such immigration significantly increases the emissions of a nation. It also increases world wide emissions if they immigration is from a third world country to developed country because once they arrive they generate greater emissions. Supporting both this immigration and action on climate change is an extreme contradiction. Such people should be considered mentally retarded at least as far as common sense.
A possible response would be climate realists lack common sense because just about all governments, universities, and research support the climate fraud. The flaw in this line of thinking is it puts faith in consensus. Liberals put a lot of value in it. Here is one example. I’m lacking one course for a degree but do have an education in public health. One professor told me I should support socialized medicine because virtually everyone writing articles in public hearth journals supported it.
The common support of the climate fraud is easy to understand. Liberals have taken over most western government, universities, and funding is lop sighted in favor of those who support the climate change narrative. One article said the ratio of funding between supporting the narrative and opposing it was one thousand to one. Even the governments in Europe that are considered conservative are liberal by US standards. When conservatives are in power such as President Trump or the newel elected US Congress, support for climate change is considerably less. In one Ivy League university, students have a seventeen times greater chance of getting a Marxist as a professor than a republican. Liberals have a vested interest in the climate change movement since it supports so many of their agendas that can’t make it on their own. Not every liberal supports every item, but these include new and higher taxes, forcing the middle class into a lower standard of living, forcing de-industrialization, larger and more domineering government, forcing people out of their cars, transfer of wealth from the industrial nations to the developing nations, and encouraging people to become vegans.
Consensus has no place in science. Common sense means looking at the facts. The earth is on track to warm between 1.2 and 1.8 degrees by 2100 compared to pre-industrial times. The extreme climate model RCP 8.5 that the “emergency” was based on has fallen out of favor even with many alarmists. Extreme weather evens are not increasing. However, I can’t say that everyone buying into the climate fraud lacks common sense. The facts that I just mentioned are highly censored so many lack such knowledge. That is way censorship is so critical to the climate change movement.