posted February 19, 2015 02:14 PM            

The difference isn't huge, but the findings of a study show that global warming skeptics score better on climate science questions than those who believe man is causing the planet to warm through the combustion of fossil fuels.

A paper that will appear in the journal Advances in Political Psychology says that, on average, skeptics got 4.5 questions right while the followers of the faith averaged four correct answers. This doesn't mean skeptics are more informed; it just means they're not poorly informed, which is what alarmists want us all to believe.

The paper was written by Yale Law School professor Dan Kahan, not a skeptic looking for a particular outcome. He quizzed about 2,000 people with nine questions, asking about such issues as melting North Pole ice and skin cancer risk in a supposedly warming world.

Some warm-mongers won't like what Kahan found. They like to ridicule those who don't buy into the popular narrative, portraying them as unscientific rubes. Or as Kahan told Fox News, the believers are often "screaming" in skeptics' faces and telling them that they and everyone they identify with "rejects science."

He followed that Wednesday with a blog post saying "I don't think it is useful at all to characterize as 'anti-science' the 50% of U.S. general population who, using exactly the same forms of reasoning as those who conclude that best evidence supports belief in AGW, conclude that the best evidence doesn't support it."

The skeptic in us marvels that the publication of Kahan's study comes about the same time as the postponement of a fossil fuel protest at his school. Seems it was too cold and snowy for members of Fossil Free Yale to leave the comfort of their homes — homes, by the way, that are almost certainly warmed by fossil fuel.

The alarmists tell us that global warming is, well, not actually warming but "climate change," and it will bring the extreme weather we've seen this winter.

We get the rebranding effort. When reality refuted the notion that man was warming the planet, when the cold and snow never stopped, and as winter kept coming each year, something had to be done or the movement was finished.