Who's smarter? global warming deniers or believers?

Question

consider the thumbs up and thumbs down in the following question.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AtNClEGpQ4SdiSNnk5erUdMFxgt.;_ylv=3?qid=20080705093308AAY4hiq

at this point #2, RKO has 6 up and 2 down.

#3, lunatic has 2 up and 4 down.

but they both say the same thing.

so, who just doesn't understand what they're reading?

Answer 1

Time will tell. There are a lot of highly intelligent scientists on both sides of the argument, but neither has undeniable proof that man is or is not responsible for most of the warming in the last century. Both sides have a limited understanding of all the climate interactions and many more studies will be necessary to form a comprehensive conclusion.

Lin, I buy insurance because the likelihood of being involved in an accident is enough to cause me concern. The GW scare is of no concern to me financially, other than taxes, nor do I fear it to be a concern for my children, grandchildren and so on.

I think it is naive to think that "both sides understand the process fairly well". There is much to learn.

Answer 2

No one side can say they are smarter.  Only time will tell who was right or wrong, however if global warming is hype, that would not be a basis to call the proponents stupid or the skeptics smart.  I would say both side have their share of intelligence, stupidity, and stubbornness.

Answer 3

There are smart people and dumb people on both sides of the fence. It just comes down to what you believe.

Personally, I believe we don't have enough data built up on the subject, and we don't have the know-how to determine if it is more natural or caused by the industry.

I mean, really, they still haven't proved the theory of fossil fuels!

Answer 4

I believe in the believers.

Don't pay any attention to the thumbs up or downs in any question.  You're assuming that a single person will go through and thumbs up/down  every single answer for the question.  That isn't necessarily the case.  Some people will skip answers when giving thumbs up/down and may not vote on some answers at all.

Answer 5

Here?  I obviously shouldn't open my mouth.

But, in the real world, among conservatives (Richard has already covered scientists), the smart ones are the believers.  Examples:

"Former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich challenged fellow conservatives to stop resisting scientific evidence of global warming"

"National Review (the most prestigious conservative magazine) published a cover story calling on conservatives to shake off denial and get into the climate policy debate"

"I believe there is now more than enough evidence of climate change to warrant an immediate and comprehensive - but considered - response. Anyone who disagrees is, in my view, still in denial."

Ford Motor Company CEO William Clay Ford, Jr.

"The science of global warming is clear. We know enough to act now. We must act now."

James Rogers, CEO of Charlotte-based Duke Energy.

Answer 6

believers.

In current years, people who deny it just simply don't believe of a "bad planet" full of pollution harmful to anyone and anything.

Believers are simply ones who do believer and are "planning" things for the future.

When that time comes, when the Earth becomes the "bad planet", Believers will be prepared and will survive, while deniers aren't ready and simply fail to cope with the environments setting.

Answer 7

You are making an assumption that people read all of the questions.

Answer 8

id say that the deniers just like monster trucks and fossil fuels.

go believers!

Answer 9

Whether or not one believes in AGW or not, has nothing to do with intelligence or lack thereof.  People with high I.Q's are on both sides of the fence and both sides can come up with reasons and data to support what they say.  The question is, who wins?  What political affiliation are they?  Believers most likely will be Liberals while Deniers; me, will most likely be Conservative.

Edit:  Linlyons, I won't give your the satisfaction. You obviously haven't read my response, or read into it the way you wanted it to read.   Since neither side has the winning information, and highly intelligent people are on both sides of the issue, just like every other political issue, the debate will continue.

Answer 10

I don't think I'd read too into how the thumbs-up and down get distributed on here as a judge of intelligence. As for who is smarter, it really isn't proper decorum to label a group as smarter or dumber.  I do think the denier average is brought down by some people that are both quite dumb and quite vocal, though.

EDIT: You're right, but I think ours are less vocal.

Answer 11

the earth is getting warmer. as the sun runs out of fuel it gets hotter. in 100 million years earth will be to hot for life. the sun has 2 billion years before it goes nova.

Answer 12

My thumbs were the same for both of them.  Neither answer is right.  

Maybe it's some people voting but not answering?  Who knows.

Answer 13

I am smarter than all of them.

Answer 14

really it doesnt matter to much to me

i am a strong believer but i dont care if people disagree with me

because when it really happens and the changes start affecting people

it is not going to matter whether you believed or not

everyone will be affected.

Unfortuatly everyone is set in their ways. and you cant force anyone to stop using countless world resources.

and even if you do it doesnt mean that you will be spared in the end

we all just need to work together and stop destroying our home.

At 14 i know that our world is doomed.

we have caused far to many problems for our selves and people would rather they dont exist than sacrafice in order to fix them

i wrote a paper on global hunger and in doing my research i realized that almost all of our problems are connected.

when we uses corn in order to produce ethanol we cause food prices to rise and there for the staple foods that are given such as rice and wheat cant be bought because the prices are too high.

in that situation the rich people prosper because our gas is cheaper and we might have to pay 50 cents more for a loaf of bread

but we can afford it

the people who suffer will die as a result of our greed and denial to what is really happening

i am a child

the world that has been left for me is a sh*tty one.

full of spoiled kids with SUV's

i do care i care plenty

but i think that at the age of 14

with millions of non believers its a project for way more than me.

i am extremely cynical for just a "kid" and people may think that i dont get it.

but i do think i know more than most people.

because i think i need to this is the world that my generation has been left to deal with

it does not matter to mean whether a bunch of old farts who hopefully will die before they continue to destroy the planet i hope to live on and raise children for the next 70 years.

if they choose to be purposefully ignorant to what is really going on in our world then i have no control of it.

i would rather set other restrictions so that we all must really think and be responsible for our actions

Answer 15

if you just want to find out who's smarter by counting the thumbs up, then what was the need to post this question?

Perhaps waiting till it gets resolved and counting them yourself would have done it just fine

Answer 16

With the National Academy of Sciences, the API, NASA, NOAA, AGU and so on within the "all the data points to AGW" camp, I say believers!

Answer 17

People caused global warming? What an ignorant answer. It is a cycle in a proven cyclic environment. People may contribute to the rate of increase in warming but it stops there.

This really is not a credible forum for an intelligent discussion on any topic-global warming included.

Answer 18

And that's where you start stereotyping which is a very bad thing at times.

Personally, I'm a non-believer because australia is currently getting colder and colder. Their temperatures aren't normally as low as they are right now in winter.

The north caps may be melting, but Antarctica is becoming more frozen.

If there isn't evidence that can completely say that something is real, no one is an idiot if they don't believe.

It's like God. There may be evidence and if someone believes they're not an idiot. If they don't believe, there just wasn't enough evidence for them.

Answer 19

i think global warming is something really serious that everyone needs to pitch in to start slowing the process down. People are a direct cause of global warming. We should help fix it. The weather will only continue to get crazier if we dont do something and then soon our beautiful planet will completely deteriorate because we dont know how to take care of it. We need to save the planet and if not for the planet then for the future of our kids and their kids and so on.

Answer 20

Despite the overwhelming weight of evidence on the believer side, objectively there is little difference in the average IQ's of deniers and believers.  As Richard and Bob have pointed out, virtually all of the academic elites are on the believer side, but they comprise less than 1% of the population as a whole.  More than 70% of the US population are on the believer side and the majority is stronger in every other advanced nation.  Adding  0.3 of a bright person to a group of 70 or more average people does not increase the average IQ of that group very much.  Nor does subtracting 0.3 of a  bright person from a group of 30 or less decrease the IQ of that group very much. The difference between the groups is less than 1 IQ point, on average.  I don't think that labeling one side or the other dumb is productive.  It would be more productive to focus on solutions to the real problem of global warming and to offer the other side a face saving path to accepting the evidence.

As for the remaining few skeptics, their fate will be the same as plate tectonic denier Sir Harold Jeffreys'  As Naomi Oreskes put it:

"Yet Jeffreys, by then Sir Harold, stubbornly refused to accept the new evidence, repeating his old arguments about the impossibility of the thing. He was a great man, but he had become a scientific mule. For a while, journals continued to publish Jeffreys’ arguments, but after a while he had nothing new to say. He died denying plate tectonics. The scientific debate was over."

Answer 21

Who knows??? But scan through the past few questions and you’ll see that many of the deniers on Yahoo! Answers are incredibly immature.

Examples:

1) An actual question on manbearpig(???) http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;...

2) A question that calls the entire field of climatology a “hoax” http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;...

3) A question on Fred Flintstone's relationship to the beginning and end of ice ages http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;...

4)  One that confuses the rotation of Earth with anthropogenic global warming http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;...

5) And even a question on the relationship between global warming and same s*x marriages http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;...

Don't these guys have anything better to do than to spam Yahoo! Answers?

Answer 22

Funny that RKO has so many thumbs-up.  A few deniers probably saw that he mentioned Hansen and assumed he was insulting him, since Hansen is one of the deniers' favorite ad hominem attack targets (along with Gore).

There's really no question about it.  Just look at the quality of answers from deniers vs. proponents here.  Just look at the number of peer-reviewed studies from each side, and the quality of the few 'skeptical' studies that make it through peer review.

For example, the Douglass Singer Christy et. al paper which concluded that the discrepancy between models and data with regards to the tropical troposphere undermined the AGW theory.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;...

In reality, they ignored the uncertainty in the radiosonde data, which as it turns out, was the actual problem.  The models are accurate.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/arc...

I'm sorry, but generally speaking, it's abundantly clear that AGW proponents are smarter than deniers.

Answer 23

In any reactionary coup, why is it that the intellectual elites are the first to be rounded up? According to varying estimates, 50-90% of the population are followers. The remainder make up the rest of the personality types. I believe we are all born geniuses, capable of independent thought and greatness, but after suffering varying degrees of (damage) only some of us emerge unscathed. I am not an optimist. If we cannot transcend ourselves we deserve our fate. This is not a moral judgment, it is just what is.

Answer 24

There are idiots on both sides, but the deniers have considerably less scientific evidence to back their arguments up.

Answer 25

I'll give the same answer I gave a friend when asked about the religious argument between Dawkins and McGrath:

"Once people understand both sides of an issue, those who argue one side at  the exclusion of the other, even though they may present themselves as experts, are not seen in my eyes as such.  Since they refuse to accept half the data they only know half as much as they think they do."

It doesn't matter which side of the debate you are on if you argue a half truth.  If both sides used the principles of Epistemology and Po (provocative operation) Thinking they might achieve a better understanding & find a center ground closer to the truth.

There is an old saying: "Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst!".  I see the debate over Global Warming in those terms.  In a way the 'deniers' are the optimists and the 'believers' are the pessimists.  IRONICALLY, one side "believing" this can't possibly be happening and the other side "denying" that people might actually be afraid of the consequences if it is.

Two sides of the same coin.

Answer 26

Not all fuels are from Corn..........

Take a Look at Algae Fuel...Made from Pond Scum !

It's the Future !

http://algaefuelmaking.com

Answer 27

AGW is about trust.  People believe in AGW not because of how smart they are, but because of who they trust.

Answer 28

Thumbs up and thumbs down as an indication of anything?

Jeez Bob, are you ever going to stop copying and pasting your same tired c**p over and over: "only the smart conservatives believe", "Admiral truly said this", "AGW is fact". All of these are either irrelevant or wrong.

Dana said:

"For example, the Douglass Singer Christy et. al paper which concluded that the discrepancy between models and data with regards to the tropical troposphere undermined the AGW theory.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;...

In reality, they ignored the uncertainty in the radiosonde data, which as it turns out, was the actual problem. The models are accurate.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/arc...

Oh fantastic, a realclimate post.

Christy, Singer, and Douglass did not ignore the uncertainty in the radiosonde data, and if you had actually read the paper and their addendum you would have known that (and you would have known why they chose the dataset they did, and it was perfectly reasonable explanation).

And the models were not that accurate. They weren't inconsistent with the observation as Douglass and Christy put it (in the statistical sense), but they were still very biased (in the statistical sense).