Science literacy and comprehension has long been valued as a way to provide information to the public in order to encourage rational choice and decision making in democratic systems. Scientists and civil society actors working on the issue of climate change have promoted this deficit model, suggesting that people need more information, more science and more literacy in order to understand the issue better. A new piece in Nature Climate Change tells a different story. Research from Yale University uses a large representative sample of US adults to determine to what extent greater scientific literacy determines concern over climate change. Contradicting what one would expect, they find that the higher the scientific literacy, the less concern people have about climate change. When compared with worldviews, they found that those with a more communitarian orientation to the world had slightly increased concern with greater scientific literacy. In contrast, among more individual-minded people concern decreased with scientific literacy. The relevance of this finding is that, as scientific literacy increases, polarization increases between people with divergent worldviews. This may partially explain increasing polarization on the issue in North America and contributes enormously to the understanding that strategic climate communication must be tailored and targeted to diverse audiences. The research suggests that individuals may not be guided by the truth of their beliefs but rather by whether and how scientific information fits with their personal cultural commitments. Rather than ignorance about climate change that requires greater literacy, the authors argue there may be a rational ignorance to how individuals interpret scientific information that is guided by alignments with social networks and pre-existing commitments.