Improving the public's understanding of anthropogenic climate change is vital to cultivating the political will to do something about it. However, a lot of research has shown that simply improving people’s understanding won’t necessarily do much to change their stance. This is because people’s opinions on many topics rest largely on their political affiliation, rather than how well they understand the science.

That leaves us with a thorny state of affairs. If improving science education isn’t going to shift public opinion, what can? A recent paper in Nature Climate Change suggests that education might not be as hopeless a cause as previously thought—but the work has some important limitations that may not give us much cause for optimism.

A problem with previous research on the topic is that “knowledge about climate change” was treated as a monolith, the authors of the new paper argue. Past studies didn't take into account that there are different kinds of knowledge about climate change. While knowledge in one area might be influenced by ideology, knowledge in other areas might not be.

So, for this study, the researchers divided their survey questions into three different categories of knowledge: physical knowledge, causes knowledge, and consequences knowledge. Recognizing that burning oil produces CO 2 fell into "physical knowledge." Understanding of the human influence on climate change went under “causes knowledge,” while knowledge about the predicted outcomes of climate change was “consequences knowledge”.

Researchers surveyed 2,495 people across six countries: the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, Switzerland, and China. In addition to asking knowledge-focused questions, they also asked participants how concerned they were about climate change. Other questions involved how much the participants valued looking after themselves, looking after others, and looking after nature and the environment.

Unsurprisingly, concern about nature and the environment was strongly related to concern about climate change. What was surprising was that, in all the countries, a higher degree of knowledge about the causes of climate change was related to higher concern. Greater “consequences” knowledge was linked to more concern everywhere except Canada and China.

Greater physical knowledge—basic climate literacy—was actually linked to lower concern. This finding gels with previous research suggesting that scientifically better-informed people might be better at finding ways to disregard research they don't like.

There are a couple of important limitations in this study. First, the survey is static: it doesn’t look at whether people’s opinions change as they gain more knowledge. The authors could be correct that certain types of knowledge make people more concerned. But it could also be the case that people who are more concerned are more likely to seek out information about climate change, and become better-informed in the process.

There’s also a problem with how the “causes” questions were phrased. These questions might not really be testing people's knowledge, but rather whether they agreed with a particular statement. For instance, someone who answers “no” to the statement “Climate change is mainly caused by human activities” could either be in denial and think the statement is untrue, or they could just be unaware of it.

If this section of the questionnaire essentially tested people’s opinions about the cause of climate change, rather than their knowledge, it’s not surprising that the answers strongly correlated with concern about climate change. It doesn’t, however, mean that people will change their minds if they’re just told that humans are causing climate change.

The one possibility for hope is the section on "consequences," which included statements about what climate scientists think—for instance, "For the next decade, the majority of climate scientists expect an increase in extreme events such as droughts, floods, and storms." It's harder to say "no" to this just because you don't think we should expect droughts, floods, and storms. The question is about what climate scientists think.

People's answers in this section also correlated with their levels of concern, and it's harder to make the case that this section of questions was just assessing people's existing opinions about climate change. So it could be that education about the dire consequences we can expect will have an effect on people's opinions. But we'd need a lot more research, including studies looking at changes in opinions over time, to find out.

Nature Climate Change, 2016. DOI: 10.1038/NCLIMATE2997 (About DOIs).