EXCERPTS FROM GALLUP – complete poll story here
PRINCETON, NJ — Although a majority of Americans believe the seriousness of global warming is either correctly portrayed in the news or underestimated, a record-high 41% now say it is exaggerated. This represents the highest level of public skepticism about mainstream reporting on global warming seen in more than a decade of Gallup polling on the subject.
As recently as 2006, significantly more Americans thought the news underestimated the seriousness of global warming than said it exaggerated it, 38% vs. 30%. Now, according to Gallup’s 2009 Environment survey, more Americans say the problem is exaggerated rather than underestimated, 41% vs. 28%.
The trend in the “exaggerated” response has been somewhat volatile since 2001, and the previous high point, 38%, came in 2004. Over the next two years, “exaggerated” sentiment fell to 31% and 30%. Still, as noted, the current 41% is the highest since Gallup’s trend on this measure began in 1997.
…
Notably, all of the past year’s uptick in cynicism about the seriousness of global warming coverage occurred among Americans 30 and older. The views of 18- to 29-year-olds, the age group generally most concerned about global warming and most likely to say the problem is underestimated, didn’t change.
Paul Schnurr (07:26:33) : Generally, can you use computer model results to test a scientific hypothesis in the classical sense? What is the role of computer models in science?
Model and Hypothesis are synonymous words although Model carries a mathematical connotation. The only genuine test is to collect more data and show how accurately the model/hypothesis predicts them. A computer model is nothing more than a mathematical model on steroids.
Ryan C (08:06:50) : … they have posters all over the walls here about the WWF Climate Change Earth Hour, made me instantly angry. Shall I risk my job and tear all these things down?
Absolutely not. If they were Heartland posters would it be OK if they were torn down? Why not go and see if you can make a difference? Good luck.
Suzanne Goldenberg’s description of the ICCC demographics would also be equally accurate for the IPCC.
The demographic would include Hansen, Gore and even Obama to some extent.
Suzanne deliberately used language that subliminally conjures up images of aged imperialists like King George and the archetypal Hollywood villains like the Smoking Man from The X Files. She basically performed racial stereotyping – all aged white men are villains.
Michael Moore has attempted the same thing often, as we know. Stupid White Men was his blatantly racist view of corporate America. Then look at the shameful way he attempted to make Charlton Heston (who walked side by side with Martin Luther King to Capitol Hill) out to be a racist.
Maybe in the movies all villains are old white men but in real life that same demographic has been the most inventive, forward thinking, modernist, created more prosperity and spread more wealth around the world than any other demographic in the history of humanity. Think of the Founding Fathers of the United States, Edison, Watt, Newton, Dawkins, Hawking, etc.
The Enlightenment the Industrial Revolution were movements that old white men began and now there are people using faux-science, racism, subversion and ad hominem attacks to end it. The Guardian is one of the main purveyors of that.
At the heart of this attack on aged white men is the belief that they represent capitalism and an advancement away from Mother Nature. That’s why environmentalists romanticise African peasant life (poor, subject to disease, high child mortality) and seek to keep black people poor. They don’t want Africans to live like an Einstein or a Heston. They don’t want democracy or capitalism for Africans. They don’t want Africans to use their coal or oil.
For more foolery from the Guardian, today they have an article about how a whole region of the Sahara can be covered with solar panels to provide electricity for Europe. Yes, you read right – Europe. Forget about Africans doing it for themselves! The article fails to mention how much it would cost to install and maintain (the Sahara’s sands would render the panels useless every two days and you can’t expect people to run around in that kind of heat cleaning panels!).
Another example of how crude the Guardian is, a couple of weeks ago they ran an article during the trial of the four owners of The Pirate Bay. The Guardian journalist ended by saying something like ‘this trial is about four young punks sticking it to the big guy!’.
Again the journalist was female and the target was male. The ‘big guy’ in question was supposed to mean a grey haired, suited old white man in an office of some major corporation. What the Guardian writer failed to work out is that The Pirate Bay is financed by an old man (not young punk) so far to the right that he was kicked out of Sweden’s most Far-Right party for being too extreme. The same man is a multi-millionaire anti-Semite whose motive for spreading piracy was to “bring down Jewish businesses”, by which he meant film and record companies.
That’s the Guardian – quality journalism. Written by schmucks for gullible twenty somethings.
Reply: Ok, can we get away from tangential politics and get back to topic please? ~ charles the moderator
OT:
“Sunshade’ global-cooling plan would ruin solar power
And then we’d never beat global warming! Hold on…”
The Register
cheers
Ed MacAulay (08:29:44) :
Tallbloke said
Try this
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1970/to:2001/mean:12/plot/esrl-co2/from:1971/to:2001/mean:12/detrend:40/offset:-326.5/scale:0.16
That might show the lag, but….
OK what if we change the final year to 2008? Have a look
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1970/to:2008/mean:12/plot/esrl-co2/from:1971/to:2008/mean:12/detrend:40/offset:-326.5/scale:0.16
Or even try a few in between years.
Hi Ed,
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1970/to:2008/mean:12/plot/esrl-co2/from:1971/to:2008/mean:12/detrend:50/offset:-326.5/scale:0.16
runs to 2008 and still shows the lag. It also shows co2 doesn’t actually correlate with temperature very well, even when you detrend it to get a best fit.
If we look at the last decade it still shows the lag:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1998/to:2009/mean:12/plot/esrl-co2/from:1998/to:2009/mean:12/detrend:20/offset:-363.5/scale:0.16
Global Warming is currently politically correct.
But it will not be politically correct forever.
It will get chilled out in the same manner that Ice Age Coming was cooked out.
Climate has a way of scouring trashy beliefs, and it makes victims out of the mistaken.
annav (23:36:26):
Yes, I know he does. What we want is often what we end up believing because it will give us what we want. That is one common characterization of invented religions. In his case, is so common with the Greens, they want a quick and easy global solution. Nevermind that any such tax system will massively distort markets, increase prices, and further oppress every level of society but particularly the poor who will have to be compensated by welfare systems thus increasing taxes on the wealthier. It is a feedback loop once certain perameters, like cap-and-trade or a direct carbon tax, are erected. As I keep up with European politics rather well – yes, something I know you would not expect from an American – I understand the whole cap-and-trade scheme. It is as much fool’s dream as much as anything Gore, Hansen, et al. will dream up to impose on this side of the Atlantic. And it favors those with wealth and power, which certainly is not the spirit of democracy.
[snip]
Reply: I’m sorry, I had to ponder that one, but that last paragraph just went too far. This is not Townhall or Daily Kos and we don’t want it to be. ~ charles the moderator
DAV (08:33:03) :
Thanks. Yes, I think I see what you are saying. I’m going to think that over.
No, computer model results are not facts and aren’t even data. A model does not really test an hypothesis.
As DAV noted, a model is an hypothesis. A model represents how the model creator believes a natural process works. Models have many purposes, such as learning how a system may or may not work and how parts of the system interact.
Computer climate models have many limitations. Perhaps the biggest limitation is our actual understanding of the climate system. Other limitations are computing power, lack of reliable data (including reliance upon estimates for much of the data used) and lack of ability to test the models against the real world, just to name a few.
I wonder what the results would be if warming was presented as a natural phenomenon instead of the hysterically presented human-caused problem?
Really? Have you looked at the latest global mean sea level graphs? http://sealevel.colorado.edu/
That chart shows that there has been no rise in the sea level from 2006 – 2009. There has been no rise in global warming either. In fact, temps have fallen.
Who are you and Al trying to fool?
A reply comment to thefordprefect (05:25:33) who said : “So it is OK for you to consume without thought for the future. ‘i’m all right, jack – let the future look after itself, they’ll think of something’. Oil is a limited resource. If Europeans can get 60mpg out of a modern standard family petrol/deisel car and get comfortably from A to B why cannot you Americans? We own a 7 seater petrol vehicle built 13 years ago. Even this gets 38mpg mixed driving. To drive drive a SUV (10mpg?) to work is just pain nuts.”
My reply: I did’t say we shouldn’t conserve. Those of us in California with brains are pretty anal when it comes to conservation. I have driven small cars for 30 years (mostly Hondas and Mazdas at 20-30 MPG)…mostly to save money… I also have CFL lighting in me ENTIRE house…mostly to save money. And my kids haul all the bottles and cans to the recycling place every couple months…mostly to get back money on the deposit.
I am all for keeping the planet clean and green. But I think what most of the skeptics in this blog are so tenacious about is the fact that as engineers and scientists we need to be as unbiased as possible. It is the entire reason we went to school, kept our lab notebooks full of documented findings and tested our theories …only to be peer reviewed time after time. It is when people like Gore, and Hansen and the politically motivated IPCC act like megalomaniacs to get their names in the newspaper over fear mongering is what we resent vehemently.
As for all those people who bought the large SUVs at 10 MPG with their monster tires…ha! I agree with you, it’s nuts unless they haul boats or do contracting work with large equipment. But that has nothing to do with the cyclic Artic icecap melting in 2007.
Groundhog day again Mary?
I’m sorry Charles (the moderator) but there is the issue of demographics in this whole debate about global warming and that also plays a part in Gallup polls. There shouldn’t be any mention of racial backgrounds, political alignment or any use of Holocaust imagery, but radical environmentalists have made it so that if you ever doubt anything they say or their actions then you must be crazy, or old, or Rightwing, or equal to a Holocaust denier, or religiously backwards, a criminal, and so on. The Guardian has been ramping up their hate campaign and it must be noted that this whole debate is not just about science.
Lucy Skywalker (06:23:23)
Great primer! Thanks.
RE: Computer models
Programmers have been trying for years to simulate the experience of driving a car and still aren’t able to do so. Yet the simulation of a car is far simpler that a non-linear chaotic system such as the Earth’s climate which has innumerable influences (subterranean, terrestrial, and extra-terrestrial) bearing upon it that are largely not understood yet.
I know this is merely’Weather’ but I wonder if Gallup should’ve asked the
folks in Meacham, Oregon,their low this am was-9F. yeaterday it was -11F.
previous lows were 2&3 F respectivley-in 2006! We are not warming….
Mary Hinge (09:15:22)
Hmm… about a 3.2 millimeter rise per year. And the trend since 2005 is flat or falling. Let’s see… Newport Beach, CA is 5 feet above sea level, so at current rates the town will need to be evacuated in say, 476 years or the year 2456. Looks like we’ll have time to evacuate.
And if you look at the trend since 1870, the rise has been slow and nearly constant.
Temperature + Sea Level for NYC
Fernando (16:04:29) :
Global warming and Galileo:
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/03/global_warming_and_galileo.html
While Mr. Duke apologizes for the Church and attempts to portray Galileo as an irascible bully – he was not. Nor could he have bullied a Church that used the Inquisition as an instrument of social order. What Duke fails to mention is the fact that Pope Urban himself had given Galileo permission to publish his book “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.” He was urged to portray heliocentricity as a theory.
All things of science in the 1600s were far from mainstream or common knowledge. Certainly the astronomical theory of heliocentricity cannot be likened to a raving bandwagon such as global warming today. While Mr. Duke’s defense of the Church is admirable – it was the Church that forced a good scientist to sign an onerous recantation. And it was the Church that locked him in prison even after doing so. To the vast credit of the present Church is the Pope’s comment that global warming is little more than a political agenda. And John Paul II did apologize to Galileo some 400 years after the fact.
timetochooseagain (07:06:41) :
First off, it is not “criticizing other’s research” which I was referring to (though there is a lot of garbage out there) but in fact presenting arguments that the evidence of claim AGW is weak and based on nothing more than an absence of alternative explanation,
I can present you with the Central England Temperature going back to 1600s(?) which shows the temp rise starting in 20th Cent. I can show you Grape harvest times that correlate well with CET that extend this back to 1300s. I can show you many temperatures going back to 1700s that correlate with CET
The CET is adjusted for UHI and other changes. But of course the grape harvest is a proxy and the other temperatures do not have UHI removed as far as I know.
This is the limit of available knowledge – there is no other way of going back beyond 1600s without proxies and you know what you say about proxies.
There is ice-on ice-off dates. There is snow dates. There are greening dates. there are glacier volume and length measurements. Most show the effects of a warming planet. Would you agree that these are indicators of GW?
I have plots of sea levels from 1800s (Brest,France) and many from the rest of the world 1900s that show a similar sea level increase starting in 1920s and slowing in 2000s. Is this another example of GW?
Arctic ice IS disappearing. Is this GW?
Most people agree that 1.3degC is a temperature rise that will occur if CO2 doubles. Do you disagree with this figure? Will you tell me why scientifically this is incorrect?
I.3C is not much but then this causes methane clathrates to be released and the air to become more humid. All adding to this temperature.
I do not see how this AGW can be prooved until it happens. Thus it will be too late.
perhaps you could present one policy-just one-that would make a dent in AGW while still allowing society to meet growing energy demand? Oh, you can’t, because no such policy exists. Tough luck for you.
I will at least be able to face my children when they struggle with a planet very different to today’s and say, “I tried”.
And if I am wrong I will be again able to say to my children that the world is a cleaner place because of the actions we unecessarily took.
This is much better than burying my head in the sand and hoping it will all go away.
Mike
The reason “politicians” love climate change is the opportunity to tax.
Proposed AB 32 Administrative Fee Regulation
Draft Regulatory Language Workshop
Office of Climate Change,
California Air Resources Board
February 25, 2009
Statesmen recognize the devastating impact this will have on the poor, especially in developing countries.
AKD (17:54:20)
“The meme is building: even the stupid child that is the average American can see that the “science” is “correct,” but he/she is too selfish/greedy/sinful to do the right thing.”
Hey AKD, I’m working on my 70’s activist street cred. Can you help me out with the correct use of “meme” vs “canard”? What exactly is the difference? Are comments by “shills” always considered to be canards or could they also be called memes?
This just in:
Source: http://www.examiner.com/x-3420-Cleveland-Weather-Examiner~y2009m3d11-Global-warming-is-Americas-lowest-priority-recent-poll-says
I haven’t been able to determine the date of the poll. The article was published March 11, 2009.
Taken together with this poll, it means even the people who believe AGW is real don’t believe it to be a serious problem.
Now follow my logic, or lack thereof. AGW is real, deal with it. However AGC is also real. First we were burning fossil fuels and polluting the atmosphere with CO2 causing a horrific warming of the planet, raising of the seas, catastrophic storms, earthquakes and talk radio. However there has been a pause in AGW over the past decade. The reason for this is Athropogenic Global Cooling. This new competing plague upon Mother Earth is being caused by the rapid increase in space junk circling the planet outside the atmosphere. Space junk is simply reflecting energy that would have otherwise reached and warmed the planet. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Hey where’s the spell Czech??