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It’s well known that Democrats and political independents are more likely than Republicans to believe that global warming is mainly due to human activity. But here’s something from the latest Pew poll on climate change: College has a significantly larger effect on Democrats’ understanding of the issue than on Republicans’.

From the Pew summary:

Among Democrats, there are sizable educational differences over the main cause of global warming. Fully 86% of Democrats with college degrees say that the earth is warming and this is mostly due to human activity. Among Democrats with less education, 57% express this view. By contrast, similar percentages of Republican college graduates (28%) and those who do not have a college degree (23%) say that human activity is mostly responsible for global warming.



So that’s a 29 percentage point shift for Democrats, and a measly 5 percentage point shift for Republicans.

In a recent interview, Michael Dimock, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, offered one way of understanding what’s happening here.

When someone goes to college, she’s exposed to more scientific literature, or at least more reporting about that scientific literature, as well as more ideological messaging from political elites.

A Democrat in that situation experiences something of a tailwind effect: Democratic Party leaders and scientific literature both convey the message that anthropogenic global warming is a reality. In contrast, a Republican receives contradictory information: Textbooks say one thing and G.O.P. leaders say another. The countervailing force of the standard right-wing take on global warming (it’s not happening, or it’s not attributable to human activity) holds down the percentage of college-educated Republicans who accept the scientific consensus.

Partisanship even affects whether someone knows that there is, in fact, a consensus. For the record, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences has found that 97 percent of climate scientists believe in manmade climate change. But according to the Pew poll, only 41 percent of Republicans (versus 71 percent of Democrats) think “scientists generally agree that human activity causes warming.”