Climate Change and Well-Informed Denial  Tue, 2011-05-03
08:52Chris Mooney Chris Mooney's picture  Climate Change and
Well-Informed Denial    Across all these regions, he
consistently found the following phenomenon: Democrats and
Republicans who claimed to know less about the climate issue
were more like one another in terms of whether they accepted the
science. Democrats and Republicans who claimed to know a lot
about the issue, by contrast, were vastly polarized—with
knowledgeable Democrats overwhelmingly accepting the science,
and knowledgeable Republicans overwhelmingly denying it.
Political polarization is greatest among the Republicans and
Democrats who are most confident that they understand this
issue,” writes Hamilton. “Republicans and Democrats less sure
about their understanding also tend to be less far apart in
their beliefs.”    Thus it really makes a lot of sense that
those who are paying less attention to the climate issue,
whether nominally Democrat or Republican, are less polarized and
less