While Waxman and Markey continue to try to salvage the EPA in hearings on the hill, the public shift clearly says “we aren’t buying it anymore”. This quote from Gallup last year pretty much sums it up
“In a sharp turnaround from what Gallup found as recently as three years ago, Americans are now almost evenly split in their views of the cause of increases in the Earth’s temperature over the last century.”
Last year:
Americans’ Global Warming Concerns Continue to Drop
Multiple indicators show less concern, more feelings that global warming is exaggerated
PRINCETON, NJ — Gallup’s annual update on Americans’ attitudes toward the environment shows a public that over the last two years has become less worried about the threat of global warming, less convinced that its effects are already happening, and more likely to believe that scientists themselves are uncertain about its occurrence. In response to one key question, 48% of Americans now believe that the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated, up from 41% in 2009 and 31% in 1997, when Gallup first asked the question.
These results are based on the annual Gallup Social Series Environment poll, conducted March 4-7 of this year. The survey results show that the reversal in Americans’ concerns about global warming that began last year has continued in 2010 — in some cases reverting to the levels recorded when Gallup began tracking global warming measures more than a decade ago.
This year:
More Than 4 in 10 Say Seriousness of Global Warming Is Exaggerated
The plurality of Americans continue to believe the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated in the news (43%) rather than generally correct (26%) or generally underestimated (29%). This is the third year in a row that a substantial plurality has believed global warming’s effects are not as bad as they are portrayed, a departure from prior years, when Americans were about evenly split between the three points of view. The percentage who think global warming’s effects are exaggerated is down a bit from last year.
=================================================================
Last year:
For example, the percentage of Americans who now say reports of global warming are generally exaggerated is by a significant margin the highest such reading in the 13-year history of asking the question. In 1997, 31% said global warming’s effects had been exaggerated; last year, 41% said the same, and this year the number is 48%.
Fewer Americans Think Effects of Global Warming Are Occurring
“In a sharp turnaround from what Gallup found as recently as three years ago, Americans are now almost evenly split in their views of the cause of increases in the Earth’s temperature over the last century.”
Many global warming activists have used film and photos of melting ice caps and glaciers, and the expanding reach of deserts, to drive home their point that global warming is already having alarming effects on the earth. While these efforts may have borne fruit over much of the 2000s, during the last two years, Americans’ convictions about global warming’s effects have waned.
A majority of Americans still agree that global warming is real, as 53% say the effects of the problem have already begun or will do so in a few years. That percentage is dwindling, however. The average American is now less convinced than at any time since 1997 that global warming’s effects have already begun or will begin shortly.
Meanwhile, 35% say that the effects of global warming either will never happen (19%) or will not happen in their lifetimes (16%).
The 19% figure is more than double the number who held this view in 1997.
This year:
While Americans’ self-professed understanding of global warming has increased over time — from 69% saying they understand the issue “very well” or “fairly well” in 2001, to 74% in 2006 and 80% in the current poll — their concern about global warming across several measures is generally in the lower range of what Gallup has found historically.
For example, 49% currently believe the effects of global warming have already begun to happen, similar to last year’s estimate and one point above the historical low from 1997. Just three years ago, 61% thought the effects were already occurring. Over the same time, the percentage doubting global warming’s effects will ever happen has increased, from 11% to nearly 20%, including 18% this year.
==================================================================
Last year:
Americans Divided on Causes of Global Warming
In a sharp turnaround from what Gallup found as recently as three years ago, Americans are now almost evenly split in their views of the cause of increases in the Earth’s temperature over the last century.
This year:
Read the entire poll story from 2010 here
…and from 2011 here
======================================================
NOTE: The first published version of this article was incomplete and did not have comparisons from last year’s poll to this year as was intended. This was a consequence of have two browser windows open with editing capabilities, side by side, so I could do comparisons and then cut and paste portions, and the wrong one got published accidentally. My apologies for any confusion this may have caused in the 45 minutes or so the incomplete story was up. – Anthony
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
great
This means when I go out in public…
……half the people I see are crackers
REPLY: I’m sure they look at you the same way- Anthony
That’s a helluva of hockey stick. Me like.
Anthony,
If they only knew how much “uncertainty” has been manipulated into a “sure thing”.
Climate science has absolutely no desire to look at this planets actual physical mechanics to understand how climate has a great deal of mechanical processes happening.
REPLY: I’m sure they look at you the same way- Anthony
=======================================
I doubt it
They don’t seem to be that aware………………
REPLY: But not delusional.
Did not Lincoln say something about not being able to fool all of the people all of the time?
Looks like he was on the money.
Joe Romm has a slightly different spin on this Poll!
REPLY: Well, that’s what the Center for American Progress pays him for, “spin”. – Anthony
That last question is very poorly worded. Most scientists clearly accept that the world has warmed, the question is the attributed cause. They should be asking the public:
Just your impression, which one of the following statements do you think is most accurate — most scientists agree that humans are the primary cause or the largest cause for global warming, or most scientists do not agree on what the primary cause is, or most scientists agree that human emissions are not the primary cause.
People recognize rationizations when they see them. First it was heavy snow was caused by global warming then it was earthquakes that could be related to global warming. By tieing every big event to a single cause with some sort of “scientific justification” credibility goes out the window. The conformists are shooting themselves in the foot with a machine gun.
The truth will out.
Do the politicians absorb these opinion poll figures and mark them?
The day is dawning, when the public will say: “enough, I do not want my hard earned taxes spent on worse than useless; biofuel subsidies, wind turbines [and the rest].”
And that, “I do not want to have my company skewered [put out of business] by carbon emissions taxes in order, to support a political scam and supposedly prevent what is an: environmentalist inspired supposition – of an atmospherically impossible fiction.”
It’s all in the [or not] the feedback man….. .
It appears that `All of the people, some of the time` will be the alarmists epitaph.
REPLY: But not delusional.
============================
rotfl yep
Have fun I have to go to work and herd liberals for the rest of the day………
I’m not sure I understand the question – when I read “do you believe most scientists believe global warming is occurring”, I’m inclined to reply ‘you’ve only asked half a question’. Anybody can look at temperature records from the last 100 years and see that there is a warming trend. That does nothing to answer the question of whether human activity has anything to do with the warming. Even if Gallup had asked whether the person being polled believed that ‘most scientists’ believe that the warming trend is largely anthropogenic in nature, that does nothing to answer the question of degree.
I usually trust Gallup, but it surely looks like even they are prone to asking questions that they themselves don’t really understand.
[sarc] Maybe if The Hockey Team, et al. could just figure out how to reframe their talking points, they would get their message across better… [/sarc]
The believers like to brandish their hockey stick – perhaps the skeptics should wield this as a boomerang.
Given the press coverage in the 90’s or rather how one sided it was a balancing of opinions as new information comes into the open is almost inevitable. The issues surrounding the science and the way it was used have also caught peoples attention.
Perhaps now we can have a rational discussion and determine a method of finding out what is actually happening
I don’t understand why this blogpost is about a Gallup Poll taken 1 year ago, when there are results from this years poll are available!
ttp://www.gallup.com/poll/146606/Concerns-Global-Warming-Stable-Lower-Levels.aspx
The percentage who believe human activity is responsible for global warming actually increased from 50 a year ago to 52%, while the percent who believe that global warming is caused by natural environment decreased from 46% to 43%.
The poll shows that political party affiliation is driving the people’s beliefs about what is a scientific issue.
Two different polls of climate scientists on a similar question get 97% of scientists believe global warming is a result of human activity. One would think that responsible political leaders would go with the opinions of the scientists who study the subject, but it appears that the Republicans don’t want to accept what for them is ideologically and “Inconvenient Truth”.
Well, you can probably expect that if the human experience is no warming in close to 14 years!
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1997.5/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1997.5/trend
For those whining about cherry picking, yes, yes, I did. But it doesn’t change the fact that its there. Oh, you want to see the warming without the 98 El Nino? Sure! Here’s the latest decadal trend.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2001/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2001/trend
The reason why the faith is slipping is because reality is slapping humanity in the face.
They forgot what I believe to be an important question: “Do you even give a rats rump anymore?”
Perhaps I am still just a tad bit angry at Climate
ScienceLying after my latest barrage of climate readings. Fortunately for me, I work in a scientific field where it is very difficult to lie. It either works or it doesn’t, you can’t fudge it.I have become one very bitter individual at all the damage to real science that this climate con game has caused. Something that I don’t think I will soon be able to put aside, and I’m angry about that.
The questions they should have been asking are:
1. Do you believe burning carbon based fuels is contributing to global warming?
2. If so, to what extent?
a. less than 5%
b. 5 to 20%
c. greater than 20%
3. What amount are you willing to pay to reduce the burning of carbon based fuels.
a. less than $100/year
b. between $100/year and $1000/year
c. more than $1000/year
These are questions elected representitives would like to know.
The Stanford polls, of US public opinion of global warming, indicates that a larger fraction the public accepts the existence of AGW and supports action to fix it than the Gallup poll.
http://woods.stanford.edu/docs/surveys/Global-Warming-Survey-Selected-Results-June2010.pdf
Based on this poll, 76% of Americans believe that the government should regulate greenhouse gases.
You have to wonder, do the politicians actually look at these polls? Or if they look at them do they somehow convince themselves that they don’t count? There’s no other explanation for the disconnect between policy makers and the public.
In the UK, you have all three main parties pushing for anti-co2 policies as if they were talking about a ‘flags for orphans’ program (to borrow a Simpson’s example of a ‘too popular to fail’ bill). I think politicians spend too much time surrounded by lobbyists from Greenpeace and WWF and have allowed themselves to be indoctrinated that what people want is the government to ‘tackle climate change’. In the end there will be a quantum shift in perception, sort of like the quantum shift in market perception that suddenly happens at the onset of a bear market.
We live in hope.
I think the point of this poll very important. It shows that a large portion of the US people have recognized that CAGW is highly unlikely and that the effects of CO2 and other GHG have been overstated. Add to that the fact that GAT hasn’t continued to increase for the last 10-15 years and the AGW hypothesis I think Dr. Pielke Sr.’s take on AGW is pretty reasonable- people do many things that affect the climate, we don’t really know by how much, the focus on CO2 is way overdone, and climate modelling doesn’t do a useful job of predicting anything and use the wrong metric. How much heat( in joules, deltaT*heat capacity) in the climate system is much more important and very poorly known.
I wonder if the wording of the questions has changed over the years. I am, as always, extremely cautious and perhaps skeptical when reading about polls.
Good point by Squidly as to just how much damage has been done to real science by this chicanery. This entire scam has been perpetrated by a group of fringe academics with political connections, and they chose to pursue their own aggrandizement at the expense of all else. Since they never cared for actual “Science” they had no inhibitions about pursuing a path that would burn the reputation of the entire field to the ground if they were wrong.
In effect, they chose to risk the credibility of science itself on their own pet project, and threatened to drag everyone else down with them if things didn’t work out their way. Perversely, this added pressure on reputable scientists to go along, because they could be accused of damaging the credibility of “science” if they didn’t.
Now their ship has hit the proverbial Iceberg, and everyone else has got to scramble to the few lifeboats left. Tossing the clowns who started this mess overboard is a very good first step.
also – interesting to note in the first graph that the segment that believes that “Warming already has happened or is happening now” (ie, Hansen groupies) is down to a constant 10%, a pretty good estimation of the fringe/crank segment on any given issue today. That’s who the warmists represent.
Squidly says:
March 16, 2011 at 6:27 am
They forgot what I believe to be an important question: “Do you even give a rats rump anymore?”
=================================================
Well that’s just about it, no one does much anymore. Oh sure, there’s still plenty of us to fill blog roles and whatnot, but for the average citizen, the alarmist bs is all they’ve heard their entire lives. And nothing has happened. So much so, that now alarmists are stretching for any event to be tied to CAGW.(or whatever). They’ve invalidated themselves with their dire predictions. They’ve screamed it so much for so long, the average person has simply tuned them out. They’re little more than background noise. And when the shrill becomes loud enough for the average person to notice, they find the noise of full of fabrication, double talk, omission of facts….etc…
Squidly, as to your profession, you should be angry. The leaders in real scientific fields sat idly by and let these charlatans incessantly blather their pseudo-science. They are as much to blame as the charlatans. And that makes me angry, too.
Maybe climate change policy is like Hadacol, the cure for aches and pain sold in a bottle. It was very popular, eased pain and was 12 percent alcohol.
Of course it was also a headache sold off the drug store shelf and only cured the desire for booze without going to the tavern where the booze was properly manufactured and legally advertised, taxed and sold for what it was, an intoxicating drink.
Eventually people quit buying it and Hadacol went the way of other snake oil remedies.