From the University of British Columbia , and the “weather is not climate, except when we say it is” department comes the reason why alarmists are trying to make people fear “extreme weather” events – it helps their cause. Paid political operative Brad Johnson of “forecast the facts” has long been big on this line of propaganda, as has his buddy, Joe Romm of Climate Progress, and Bill McKibben of 350.org. But Dr. James Hansen of NASA GISS was the original practitioner of the concept, when he and his sponsor increased the temperature in the Senate hearing room in June 1988 for the effect it brought.
Blowing hot and cold: US belief in climate change shifts with weather
A University of British Columbia study of American attitudes toward climate change finds that local weather – temperature, in particular – is a major influence on public and media opinions on the reality of global warming.
The study, published today by the journal Climatic Change, finds a strong connection between U.S. weather trends and public and media attitudes towards climate science over the past 20 years – with skepticism about global warming increasing during cold snaps and concern about climate change growing during hot spells.
“Our findings help to explain some of the significant fluctuations and inconsistencies in U.S. public opinion on climate change,” says UBC Geography Prof. Simon Donner who conducted the study with former student Jeremy McDaniels (now at Oxford University).
The researchers used 1990-2010 data from U.S. public opinion polls and media coverage by major U.S. newspapers, including The New York Times, Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today. They evaluated the relationship between average national temperatures and opinion polls on climate change, along with the quantity and nature of media editorials and opinion pieces related to climate change.
While many factors affect climate change attitudes – political views, media coverage, personal experience and values – the researchers suggest that headline-making weather can strongly influence climate beliefs, especially for individuals without strong convictions for or against climate change.
“Our study demonstrates just how much local weather can influence people’s opinions on global warming,” says Donner. “We find that, unfortunately, a cold winter is enough to make some people, including many newspaper editors and opinion leaders, doubt the overwhelming scientific consensus on the issue.”
What, no mention of how hot summers work in the opposite direction?
Wow, both my alma maters trashed in the same day. I feel so….. inadequate…
Matthew 7:3 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
UBC and SFU are hot bed of global warming alarmism. Universities environmental law departments are bankrolled by the same US foundations that are supporting green activism in Canada and there is a tight connection between civic politicians and probably provincial politicians who listened to SFU Jaccard the Carbon Tax monger. There also seems to be an alliance between developers, greens and their academic friends to spew and of course benefit from alarmist claims about everything, rain, sea level, drought etc… One of the funniest claim was the absence of snow at Cypress Mountain during the 2010 Olympics that was attributed to global warming by Suzuki and some Landscaping Professor at UBC… Since then of course, the local mountain has seen its earliest opening ever, its longest season and about everything else and plenty of snow for the enjoyment of many!
Let’s not forget Andrew Weaver, the declared NDP who supported the unsuccessful leadership candidate Brian Topp -now the campaign manager for NDP Adrian Dix-, who is now a green candidate. It is likely that under any party, British Columbia will become a deeper eco-state the same way there are narco-states. Beware…
Unimaginative sods. “the overwhelming consensus”….c’mon, can’t you trot something more effusive out of your bag of gags? Or are you so overwhelmed by the consensus as to be unable to question it? Don’t you researchers actually do any research into the creaking, tired terminology in use? Crickets……
That consensus says that:
It doesn’t say that that future warming will be dangerous. That’s contentious. (See the George Mason survey of the AGU & the AMU.) That’s what contrarians dispute.
Too bad they left out the fact that it is mostly “Independent voters” who change their mind, dependent on the temperature. See the article here, from a few days ago.
http://www.unh.edu/news/releases/2013/jan/lw24climate.cfm
Here is the graph of their data
http://www.unh.edu/news/img/hamilton_stampone_2013.jpg
60 years ago almost to the day in the UK.
3 February 1953,
Hurricane winds combined with high tides to bring disaster to Britain’s east coast. As sea defenses collapsed from Lincolnshire in the north to Kent in the south, at least 280 people are known to have been drowned and thousands more made homeless. A major rescue operation is under way to save hundreds of people trapped on roof tops by an eight foot wall of water, some in villages more than five miles inland. Damage is estimated in the hundreds of millions of pounds. In Essex, Canvey Island is said to be devastated, with 125 people drowned and 500 missing. Thirteen thousand inhabitants have been evacuated and 150 taken to hospital. Near Clacton, holiday Chalets were under12 feet of water and people were falling of rooftops into the floods from exhaustion. Heavy causalities are reported from Norfolk where the death toll is know to number 60, including 12 American service men drowned near Hunstanton. Mapplethorpe and Sutton-on-Sea have been evacuated, with hundreds still awaiting rescue; in Suffolk, boats were rowed into a church to rescue 40 trapped children. The flooding has come hard on the heels of another recent natural disaster – the January storms in Scotland which destroyed trees worth more than £3 million.
By the 9th of February 1953, 283 are known to have died in the East Coast floods and 50 were still missing. By the19th of February 1953, The Home secretary Maxwell-Fyfe puts flood damage at £40 million.
In the US that August 1953, Hurricane Barbara- Struck the North Carolina coast between Morehead City and Ocracoke Island on August 13th, 1953 as a Category One Hurricane with gusts up to 110 mph (175 km/h), and left 9 dead and damages over $1 million in 1953 U.S. dollars.
Italy, October 1953, Heavy flooding wreaks at least 12 villages in the south of the country.
The year before that in the UK it was reported on the 16th of August 1952,
With warning a large part of north Devon was hit by a disastrous flood earlier today. Thirty-six people are feared dead and thousands have been made homeless in the resort of Lynmouth, which was devastated when rivers burst their banks and swept down surrounding hills. The torrent swamped the area so quickly that the victims had no time to flee as their houses were buried beneath the unremitting flow of mud, rocks and debris. About 250 square miles were flooded by freak storms. Nine inches of rain fell yesterday. Three boy scouts were among the first to drown when their camp was hit by a mud river. A postman on his rounds also died. The list of missing includes two girl hikers.
by the 22nd of August 1952, 22 people were known to have died in the Lynmouth disaster; 11 were still missing. The Housing minister Harold Macmillan says flood stricken Lynmouth like “the road to Ypres”
Meanwhile in the US it was reported on 22th of March 1952, Over 200 are reported killed and 2,500 hurt as a tornado sweeps six mid-west states.
Sparks, thanks for that. The parallel with 3 February 1953 (England) and 29 Oct 2012 (New York City) is striking and should not be forgotten. Do you have links handy?
Donner (says), “We find that, unfortunately, a cold winter is enough to make some people, including many newspaper editors and opinion leaders, doubt the overwhelming scientific consensus on the issue.”
With all due respect, Professor, allow me to complete your above thought…”…likewise, a warm summer is enough to make other people, including those with a strong financial interest and a weak case, double down on their efforts to convince the public that the earth is just one coal-fired power station away from complete annihilation.”
Donna sitting in her little ivory tower throws another insulting crumb to the huddled masses!
“Our study demonstrates just how much local weather can influence people’s opinions on global warming,” says Donner. “We find that, UNFORTUNATELY, a cold winter is enough to make some people, including many newspaper editors and opinion leaders, doubt the overwhelming scientific consensus on the issue.”
Donner isn’t that what warmist like you do all the time, it’s called cherry picking with a little data fudging to ram your alarmist view down the throat’s of the public, Don’t worry Donna the Vancouver Sun a Warmist rag will rush a full page spread just for you.
UNFORTUNATELY FOR DONNA WE DON’T BUY IT!
DaveG says: February 5, 2013 at 11:20 am
“Donna sitting in her little ivory tower throws another insulting crumb to the huddled masses!”
Even more despairing is the huddled masses eagerly scooping those discarded insults thinking them cake. Alas they consent to their own demise.
Sparks, alarmists rely on indifference to the past. Indeed, most of them are uneasy with history, and are more than happy to pretend that an absence of data on the past is somehow equivalent to an absence of past. If the past exists, it’s a faded sepia photo where not much is happening or moving. Hence hipsterism and warmism are a great pair. Recent studies have shown that 98.3% of plummy-voiced hipsters with silly hats are climate alarmists (Me et al. 2013).
There is a simple question we can put to climate alarmists. Can you point with precision to that decade or extended period in the past when things were less “extreme”? Rest assured, they will not nominate this historical period of stable, moderate climate. Even the daffiest alarmist knows it doesn’t exist. They’re just hoping we haven’t noticed.
I can’t even watch the weather channel anymore, every other word out of the mouths of Roker and Abrams is EXTREME! WILD! CAN YOU BELIEVE IT! UNPRECEDENTED! NBC has turned the channel into looney bin of hysteria.
Al Gore the other night in a classic example of “not interfering in domestic Australian politics” but at the same time doing his bit for Julia Gillard and the carbon tax by promoting the new mantra of extreme events as opposed perhaps by having to explain the pause in global warming:
http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2013/s3683160.htm?
Note: The written transcript does not include everything that is in the televised video. It is really worth listening to the whole thing.
“We saw in my country Superstorm Sandy this past year and 60 per cent of the US has been in drought in the hottest year ever measured in the history of the US. Huge fires in the American West. And of course, Australia has always been a continent of extreme weather, but the extremes have appeared to get worse there as well. Last week’s downpours and deluges in Queensland continue a pattern. The fires just not too many weeks before are of the kind that have led Australian fire fighters to say, as they’ve said to me, that they have never experienced the kinds of fires that they have been called upon to fight in recent years. So these changes are gathering momentum.
The extreme weather events connected to the climate crisis are becoming more intense and more frequent. Most scientists do believe that even though these changes are now unfolding and will continue to unfold, no matter what we do, the worst changes – the worst of it can still be prevented and must be prevented.”
And a little credit for leftist Emma Alberici and the ABC. She does question him on Al Jazeera and the conflict of crusader versus businessman although I have a feeling he had prepared answers before he went on the show.
I am finding it increasingly difficult to find that “overwhelming scientific consensus on the issue.”
I am now looking under all the rocks that I can find.
Long ago I noticed that belief in global warming seemed to be directly coralated to the weather conditions in Los Angles. Hot and dry in LA, lots of global warming. Not so hot year, AGW not spoken of much. Sometimes for several years at a time. I also noted that the results of AGW usually tracked with the weather in LA from the stand point that hot (AGW) meant dry. , AGW meant drouth, and cooler weather meant rain. In LA it never rains when it is hot. No PM thunderstorms in the summer. I moved to Colorado from S Cal about 35 years ago. before I moved here I didn’t realize that in a lot of places, like Co. warm tempts mean more precep. we get very little snow for example on the winter months. Spring and Fall are our big months for snow. Summer means lots of afternoon thunderstorms. Non of these things do they get in LA.
It’s alot like overpopulation. if you live in LA or other big cities you think its a problem. If you get on an airliner and fly to say Chicago from LA you notice that there is not much of anything below between the two. it’s literally hundreds of miles between cities with vacant land in between.
I guess most of us don’t really think globally as much as we think we do.
Stephen Rasey says:
February 5, 2013 at 11:16 am
Sparks, thanks for that. The parallel with 3 February 1953 (England) and 29 Oct 2012 (New York City) is striking and should not be forgotten. Do you have links handy?
Sorry I don’t have links, it was researched from history books on the 20th century.
To this very day I continue to hear that we can’t find the “missing link.” To which I may be heard to offer “Are you sure you are looking in the right place? Have you tried cemeteries?”
Let us all hope that the ability to come to the exact wrong conclusion will be selected out in the next ice age. Being that they are something like ~90kyrs long, the attention span of a gnat might not get one too far.
It says a lot about the environmental movement that many of its adherents will be devastated when climate sensitivity is shown to be low and that the planet doesn’t need saving after all.
What true environmentalist would actually want to see climate catastrophe? The Green movement wants to see death and disaster just so they can say “I told you so” and feel morally superior.
Hilariously enough, the Guardian has done some heavy coverage of the 1953 disaster in their environment pages. The message from the Guardian is that this is future climate. To us non-nuanced rednecks, however, it’s past climate. Since it happened sixty years ago.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/interactive/2013/jan/31/uk-great-storm-flood-1953-interactive
Call me shallow, call me literal…just don’t call me a Guardian reader!
Pull My Finger says:
February 5, 2013 at 11:44 am
I can’t even watch the weather channel anymore, every other word out of the mouths of Roker and Abrams is EXTREME! WILD! CAN YOU BELIEVE IT! UNPRECEDENTED! NBC has turned the channel into looney bin of hysteria.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Of course NBC is going to push the propaganda!
NBCUniversal – and the interlocking influence behind it. (Follow the Money)
GE’s stake in CAGW
So there is GE’s vested interest in CAGW. (Note Jeff Immelt, the CEO of GE is Obummer’s Jobs Czar )
Stephen B. Burke is the Comcast Corporation President
And just as a refresher on why the bankers and financiers are backing CAGW:
Well, that’s the institution that picks pockets via the force of taxation to promote “post-normal science”: http://c21.phas.ubc.ca/article/true-false-or-not-sure-philosophy-science-21st-century, which is using emotions instead of facts.
Such scumbags won’t stop until voters stop their gravy train.
Well, yes, as I say to anyone who’ll listen about my experiences of shivering in my favourite pub and in my apartment here in Mexico (generally no central heating) for the last few winters, ‘I blame it on global warming.’
Peter Hannan says:
February 6, 2013 at 1:35 am
Well, yes, as I say to anyone who’ll listen about my experiences of shivering in my favourite pub and in my apartment here in Mexico (generally no central heating) for the last few winters, ‘I blame it on global warming.’
That highlights one of the dangers of mass scares, when some people begin promoting that it would be warm during winters and that temperatures will continue to rise, people will become complacent about the possibility of having much colder winters, which they may other wise have prepared for.
Also, this situation has been made more dangerous in the UK by the unlawful blocking of people with opposing views to deny them the right to debate/discuss on tax payer funded public broadcasting, by blocking these views, there is a danger that people have become badly informed about the issue to make the correct judgements for them selves.
For example, the one sided promotion of man made global warming has already influenced ‘climate change’ policy that has left the elderly unable to afford the rise in energy bills and many of the poorest families are now struggling to heat their homes through these bitterly cold winters. The influence on these policies by outside unelected groups are increasing poverty and reducing much needed economic growth and prosperity.
Jus a min here…
“with skepticism about global warming increasing during cold snaps and concern about climate change growing during hot spells.”
Isn’t that slightly more rational than believing that every perceived extreme of weather is evidence of global warming?
(Whoever wrote that sentence uses mixed terms: “global warming” versus ”climate change” (instead of “global cooling”). While the latter may be favoured by alarmists now, my impression is they still talk warming the details.
Yup. That’s why CO2 levels have continued their (slightly) exponential rise, and there’s been no warming for a decade or two. And there was equal warming before CO2, much less Man’s contribution, began rising. Makes consensual sense. Not.