Because it's religion for the Left and mere science for the Right

Study: Global warming skeptics know more about climate science

Are global warming skeptics simply ignorant about climate science?

Not so, says a forthcoming paper in the journal Advances in Political Psychology by Yale Professor Dan Kahan. He finds that skeptics score about the same (in fact slightly better) on climate science questions.

The study asked 2,000 respondents nine questions about where they thought scientists stand on climate science.

On average, skeptics got about 4.5 questions correct, whereas manmade warming believers got about 4 questions right. ...

 The study’s author, Kahan, also says that the global warming debate has become so politically polarized that people pick their side based on politics rather than what they know about science.   

And all this, especially that last excerpted paragraph,  will make a lot more sense once you read my 2008 essay, "Environmentalist religion explained," in which I pointed out that,

[Physicist Freeman] Dyson wrote that, "Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion." I demur. Environmentalism has not replaced socialism at all. Instead, the old-line socialists, faced with decades of the failure of political socialism, have jumped on the environmentalist bandwagon to keep socialism alive. 

Environmentalism has become a much better vehicle to achieve a rigid regulation of people's lives than political socialism ever was. After all, the fate of the entire planet is at stake! Environmentalism has already led some British members of Parliament to propose that the government regulate almost every aspect of buying and selling by private individuals. If this is not socialism, it is a distinction without a difference.

And now, just this week, voila! "U.N. Official Reveals Real Reason Behind Warming Scare"

The alarmists keep telling us their concern about global warming is all about man's stewardship of the environment. But we know that's not true. A United Nations official has now confirmed this.

At a news conference last week in Brussels, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.'s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism. 

"This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution," she said.

This seems an apt time to quote the old liberals' bumper sticker: "If you're not outraged, you are not paying attention."

Update: Thomas Sowell, "Global Warming Hysteria Has Problem: It Doesn't Fit With Facts"

And here is a prime example of such hysteria: "Animated map of what Earth would look like if all the ice melted." "Gloom! Depair! And agony on me! Deep dark depression! Excessive misery!"

Understand that absolutely no one of the global-warming hysteria movement, nay not even them, has ever said that all the ice on the earth will melt. There is not one climatology study that makes such a prediction, even at their funding-grubbing alarmist worst.

Why not, "What the earth would look like if all the liquid water froze?" After all, only 40 years ago were were supposed to be headed for a new ice age.