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For example, one on GM foods:
"Consuming foods with ingredients derived from GM crops is no riskier than consuming foods modified by conventional plant improvement techniques."
The primary conclusion is that for a number of claims that are generally held to be true by consensus, opposition to those results show interesting correlations: opposition correlates negatively with objective knowledge (what the final test indicated that the subject knew about the field), and positively with subjective knowledge (what the subject thought they knew about the field). Those who were most opposed tended to exhibit a large gap between what they knew and what they thought they knew.
Here's the list of subjects and then I'll get to the punch line:
- GM foods
- Vaccination
- Homeopathic medicine
- Nuclear power
- Climate change
- Big bang
- Evolution
Which one wasn't like the others?
Climate change!
The question was in the same vein as the rest:Most of the warming of Earth’s average global temperature over the second half of the 20th century has been caused by human activities.
Unlike every other field listed in this research, there was a slight positive correlation between opposition to the claim and objective knowledge of the subject (see figure 2).
What other consensus viewpoints are out there where agreement with the consensus correlations with greater ignorance of the subject? Economics maybe?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 21 2022, @12:09PM
In other words, you don't actually have any evidence to support your position, so you're making something up and hoping that nobody challenges it. Unfortunately for you, I am challenging your baseless conjecture.
Even in the absence of instrumentation, a drought of this severity would have serious impacts. People have been living in the British Isles for thousands of years. The effects of a heat wave and drought of this severity probably would be written down in some form. The impacts on agriculture would be notable, for example. If there was a food shortage because the crops died due to heat and lack of rain, someone would probably write that down. Do you have any evidence for this in other historical records?
Here's an example of what I'm talking about. Sunspot observations go back only a few centuries. While instrumentation was quite limited compared to today, there are observations of the Carrington Event of 1859. But what if you want to know if there really was a massive solar event in 774? There are no direct observations, and proxy data is somewhat ambiguous. To get supporting evidence, you could look at texts from that time period to see if anyone recorded unusual lights in the sky at night in low-latitude regions. That would suggest that the aurora were visible in areas where that is highly unusual, providing support that there might have been an unusual solar event. In this case, there are records to support this, indicating that unusual proxy data (e.g., a spike in carbon-14) from that time is the result of a solar event. This is called the Miyake Event, and although there isn't direct evidence that there was a huge solar storm, there is growing consensus that there was.
Do you have anything similar to support your claim about drought in the UK? Again, people have lived in the British Isles and elsewhere in Europe for many thousands of years. If this has happened before, surely someone would have written about it.