From the: University of Michigan
It’s all in a name: ‘Global warming’ vs. ‘climate change’
ANN ARBOR, Mich.—Many Americans are skeptical about whether the world’s weather is changing, but apparently the degree of skepticism varies systematically depending on what that change is called.
According to a University of Michigan study published in the forthcoming issue of Public Opinion Quarterly, more people believe in “climate change” than in “global warming.”
“Wording matters,” said Jonathon Schuldt, the lead author of the article about the study and a doctoral candidate in the U-M Department of Psychology.
Schuldt co-authored the study with U-M psychologists Sara Konrath and Norbert Schwarz. For the research, they conducted a question wording experiment in the American Life Panel, an online survey conducted by RAND, with a national sample of 2,267 U.S. adults. Participants were asked to report their level of certainty about whether global climate change is a serious problem. In the following question, half the participants heard one version, half heard the other:
“You may have heard about the idea that the world’s temperature may have been going up [changing] over the past 100 years, a phenomenon sometimes called ‘global warming’ [‘climate change’]. What is your personal opinion regarding whether or not this has been happening?
Overall, 74 percent of people thought the problem was real when it was referred to as climate change, while about 68 percent thought it was real when it was referred to as global warming.
These different levels of belief may stem from the different associations carried by the two terms, Schuldt said. “While global warming focuses attention on temperature increases, climate change focuses attention on more general changes,” he said. “Thus, an unusually cold day may increase doubts about global warming more so than about climate change. Given these different associations and the partisan nature of this issue, climate change believers and skeptics might be expected to vary in their use of these terms.”
As part of the study, the researchers also analyzed the use of these two terms on political think tank websites, finding that liberals and conservatives used different terms. Conservative think tanks tend to call the phenomenon global warming, while liberal think tanks call it climate change.
And when the researchers analyzed responses to the survey by political orientation, they found that the different overall levels in belief were driven almost entirely by participants who identified themselves as Republicans. While 60 percent of Republicans reported that they thought climate change was real, for example, only 44 percent said they believed in the reality of global warming.
In contrast, about 86 percent of Democrats thought climate change was a serious problem, no matter what it was called. Why weren’t they influenced by question wording? “It might be a ceiling effect, given their high level of belief,” Konrath said. “Or it could be that Democrats’ beliefs about global climate change might be more crystallized, and as a result, more protected from subtle manipulations.”
The good news is that Americans may not be as polarized on the issue as previously thought. “The extent of the partisan divide on this issue depends heavily on question wording,” said Schwarz, who is also affiliated with the U-M Ross Business School and the Institute of Social Research (ISR). “When the issue is framed as global warming, the partisan divide is nearly 42 percentage points. But when the frame is climate change, the partisan divide drops to about 26 percentage points.”
For a free reprint from the journal’s online depository: http://poq.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/nfq073?ijkey=YcGpwzhzykOYkl7&keytype=ref
U-M Sustainability fosters a more sustainable world through collaborations across campus and beyond aimed at educating students, generating new knowledge, and minimizing our environmental footprint. Learn more at sustainability.umich.edu
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From that reprint, the results in Table 2, proving once again that the people belive the climate has changed and will continue to do so. It is a rather obvious result. – Anthony
CO2 Hypochondria.
What the study does point out is that many Democrats are more suggestible to CO2 hypochondria.
Simple hypnotic suggestion.
People accept hypnotic suggestions from ‘supposed authority’ only when they don’t believe in themselves.
The weak minded.
And it really is a hypochondria. It’s all imagined.
Classic hypochondria where all other information is completely denied, or blocked from consciousness. Then the imagined problem is focused upon and blown way out of proportion.
The medical sciences recognize the reality and existence of hypochondria, they are the ones who defined it.
Why haven’t they been looking into the extent of CO2 hypochondria??
Didn’t ya’ll hear?
Al Gore announces the new name of global warming to be an unpronounceable symbol: “The Phenomenon Formerly Known as Global Warming” (with apologies to Prince (or rather, The Artist Formerly Known as Prince)
http://algorelied.com/?p=2824
You forgot to list, “Climate Chaos.”
Why not ask if those polled believe in gravity? It’s as equally meaningful or equally useless. How many people really believe the climate is not supposed to change? As others pointed out, there were no questions about whether global warming or climate change is a problem or whether either was natural or man-made.
Are the pollsters that stupid or are they being deliberately misleading about their results?
Shameful.
It should be called Prediction Change because that’s the one thing we can expect to happen.
ShrNfr says:
March 9, 2011 at 7:28 am
Intriguing! I wont put away the snow shovels just yet.
But if I may return to the topic… What is abundantly clear to virtually everyone–with the exception of the “True Believers®” still peddling AGW BS like nothing has happened–is that without acknowledgement and contrition for having misled everyone, and pledging to change the entire process in an open and transparent manner, they will never be able to convince anyone of anything! No matter how trivial. These folks need look no further than the celebrities they use to push their propaganda to see what happens when one falls from grace in the public eye due to some flagrant indiscretion. The fools have convinced themselves that to even acknowledge a minor error or mistake would bring the whole house down, and odds are this hunch will prove correct. But continuing as they are in a “nothing has happened, never mind the man behind the curtain” sort of way will ultimately lead to a vivid and spectacular demise. I have come to believe that the damage to their “industry” is irreparable, and nothing short of a full scale retreat will come close to saving even a shell of the Global Warming and Climate Change Pandemonium Medicine Show™.
Cheers!
I just noticed Steven Goddard coined the term ‘climochondria’ on his blog:
https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2010/09/12/climochondria/
That was great insight, but it needs to be probed more.
All ‘hypochondria’ is the result of persistent ‘hypnotic suggestion’ that over rides the natural physical stance of the body and mind.
For people who do not trust their own primary experience, their own sense of self, of their own self worth…they will too easily accept the suggestions of those whom they ‘think’ know more than they do.
That’s why placebos work. In the case of placebos, they are usually used to help people heal.
But, medically, there are also ‘nocebos’. They are the opposite of ‘placebos’.
They are meant to harm.
Fear mongering is an example of the ‘nocebo’ effect.
They did not properly identify peoples’ politics. It’s not Rep/Dem, it’s more like leftist, liberal, libertarian, conservative, agnostic. If you use those categories, it’s mostly leftists that believe CAGW.
I thought this was settled:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/19/after-global-climate-disruption-next-name/
and
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/014900.html
and
http://poll.pollcode.com/DD0R_result?v
Where . . .
Irritable Climate Syndrome
. . . Wins with 23% of the vote, with ‘Climageddon’ (13%) and ‘Climate Derangement’ (12%) as runners-up out of 2,734 votes.
Sweet Jesus! Will this silly crap never end? Surely there is some way to drive a stake in the heart of this monster and kill it once and for all!
Reply: Ok, but I’m not going near chunck or headace. ~ ctm
Thanks, i needed a good laff this morning.
The more you qualify something – take away its firm bits because they do not withstand direct challenge – the less you command attention and motivate your fans. If you change “The End of the World is Near!” to “Some Parts of the World Will Have Possible Shortened Histories Sometime Within Your Lifetime or that of your Children!”, don’t expect to be compared to Jesus.
“Doug Proctor says:
March 9, 2011 at 9:04 am”
At least Jesus could build a boat. Not sure about the carpentry abilities of Al Gore however, I am also not sure of his floating capacity.
The man is correct, words do matter. That’s why this whole matter of ” climate ” has become a ‘belief’ system. The wording in all these surveys and discussions appears to start with ” do you believe…”. I don’t believe 2+2 = 4, I accept it. Once an idea is pushed to be a belief, then all level-headed thinking disappears as a belief suggests faith that something is so and should not be challenged. This is why climate sceptics, agnostics or what you will, will always be branded heretical as they “don’t believe” and therefore reasoned debate is seen as anti-orthodoxy. Until the wording is changed this will always be the case.
It is OK to ask which use of words produce the most affirmative and negative answers on climate, in my opinion they should first establish how much knowledge each individual has on the climate considering there are varying differences in interest among the public and learning among the participants and take it from there. It would be interesting to know how the number influenced by the change in words shake out between those with knowledge and those who responded off the cuff.
Reading the comments it seems the change in words used don’t mean that much to WUWT readers.
The results of the study seems to depend on belief and the ability to be influenced or not by a small change in words.
The fact they broke it down between republicans and democrats points to the political interest in climate.
If you ask me and no one has the study is an advisement for global warming and all the other names they wish to change it to keep it alive in the minds of a more disbelieving public.
Orwell’s 1984 is their manual.
You’ll note that this question says nothing (all-caps underlined, bold, italics) about there being a problem. Stating that 74% of people thought there was an actual problem is just plain lying.
Mike.
It’s implied, Mike. If it weren’t considered a problem, why would they even ask about it?
No one would care.
As soon as they rename it to Barely Measurable Warming Mostly Caused By Solar Influences (BMWMCBSI or short BMW) i’ll agree.
As a scientist, I would rather explore whether there is a better term for AGW than “hoax.”
That people like Hugh Pepper above cannot logically comprehend the difference between natural variability and the propaganda that they are told is the real tragedy.
“climate change” last fall I looked up the IPCC’s founding documents. Unfortunately I lost the stuff I downloaded in a hard drive crash, but I would swear that the docs said that the mission of the ipcc was to “summarize the effects of increased temperatures caused by human emissions of green house gases on the world’s climate” or something to that effect. Now the missions statement only talks about “effects of man-made climate change”.
Can anyone find a cached version of the orginal ipcc documents. The actually were in the minutes of various UNEP sessions, not on the IPCC website.
Although the people pushing the notion of a human caused climate crisis have been cycling through nomenclature variations at an accelerating pace, if you examine the deluge of PR science that has been produced to suggest that there really is impending doom in our future, which provides the only actual justification for the clearly destructive solutions they propose to solve this “crisis”, you will in most cases find that they are premised on assumptions of future warming. And not just warming, but warming at the upper bounds of projections that barely capture present trends at their lower limits.
If the illusion of crisis is to be maintained, continued and accelerating warming of the climate must be demonstrated, which of course it is not. Thus the clever lads have engaged in another “trick” to conceal the fundamental weakness of their hypothesis. At this point the evidence continues to mount that, even if they are proved to be correct about CO2’s role in the atmospheric effect, the net result will be much less damaging than any of their current and proposed solutions have been and will be. The “hide the decline” necessary at present is the decline in the likelihood of truly catastrophic consequences from whatever our climate future presents. Without impending doom there is no justification to invoke the “precautionary principle”. The ongoing resort to the linguistic fascism of endlessly renaming the problem has the same intent as the original Mann version. It’s a 3 card monte move to distract the eye and the mind of the gullible from the all to obvious flaws.
I can see why they were eager to move away from “climate change” as the preferred meme. It points to what I have always thought was the major flaw in their intellectual edifice and argument. The implicit assumption that the climate is fundamentally static and requires the action of anthropogenic CO2 to move it out of stasis. Though never explicitly stated as such, this notion is at the heart of all the model based arguments that are the core of their hypothesis. It seems to me fairly obvious that change is the fundamental mode of the climate and that it would require a fairly massive “forcing” to stop it from changing. Certainly larger than any present prospect and well beyond anything humanity, even with our high tech toys, could hope to achieve.
I would never suggest that we should be doing nothing to mitigate our effect on our environment, but if the choice comes down to the current and planned actions based on the demonization of carbon and nothing, I think the evidence is mounting that doing nothing would lead to a much more livable future.
Over a period of time, we will learn to handle the delicate matter of naming this in a more sensive way for people who are most prone to worrying about it. It needs a polite and sensitive phrase such as “Climate Special Needs”.
There is a veritable treasure trove of research to be carried out in classifying and describing a range of consequential climate behavioural phenomena. More technically minded folk will call these “Climatic Behavioural Spectrum Disorders”.
Such as the alarming and unpredictable “Episodic Climatic Apnea Disorder”. Characterised by periods with little or no significant weather disasters to report in the media, it will result in worries that climate variability might have ceased permanently. A particularly difficult aspect of epsisodic climatic apnia disorder is that it can persist for surprsingly short periods before the worry sets in.
Equally alarming is the phenomenon of “Sporadic Climatic Attention Deficit Disorder”. This is likely to be the underlying cause of significant disruption due to bad weather. It must be properly diagnosed and expert climatologer opinion should be sought on each occasion.
Winter weather will be renamed to “Seasonal Affective Climatic Disorder”. Expect next year to be worse than last. Sigh!
The use of the term “anticyclone” will be abandoned in favour of a “Depressive Spectrum Weather Event”. It’s gonna be gloomy.
About half an hour ago I was watching “The One Show” on BBC1. The main guest on the show was a stand up comic who makes jokes about climate change to raise awareness. I’m afraid I wasn’t aware of his existence and have already forgotten his name. A lot of publicity was also given to “Climate Week” which will be 21-27 March. As part of that week there will be a Climate Week Challenge for school children.
The Climate Week website says:
“The Climate Week Challenge is the biggest single activity of Climate Week. It will involve tens of thousands of people in schools, colleges and workplaces all over the country tackling the same task.”
http://www.climateweek.com/
An information pack for schools in the form of a PDF file can be downloaded from the website. At the top of the first page it says:
One Task – One Country – One Day
I hope I am not being too tactless in saying that those words remind me of another slogan:
“Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer.”
Coming to your local Community College and/or online degree mill, the new “hot” degree for the 21st Century, a BS in Climate Science Marketing! Aren’t good with numbers? All those equations make you go woozy? No worries! As long as you can grimmace earnestly, and speak with urgency, you too can become a “Climate Expert” and haul in massive wads of cash in Climate Claptrap Fundraising and personal appearence fees! Please note if you are a Hollywood Celebrity, failed politician, or a particularly angst riddled leftist gurrrl or minory, you may have already earned pre-enrollement credits!
Roy (March 9, 2011 at 11:52 am )
Great to see the UK indoctrination system following their heroes:
“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” – Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
“Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.” – Josef Stalin
“The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother’s care, shall be in state institutions at state expense.” – Karl Marx