From MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY:
Climate-change foes winning public opinion war
EAST LANSING, Mich. — As world leaders meet this week and next at a historic climate change summit in Paris, a new study by Michigan State University environmental scientists suggests opponents of climate change appear to be winning the war of words.
The research, funded by the National Science Foundation, finds that climate-change advocates are largely failing to influence public opinion. Climate-change foes, on the other hand, are successfully changing people’s minds — Republicans and Democrats alike — with messages denying the existence of global warming.
“This is the first experiment of its kind to examine the influence of the denial messages on American adults,” said Aaron M. McCright, a sociologist and lead investigator on the study. “Until now, most people just assumed climate change deniers were having an influence on public opinion. Our experiment confirms this.”
The findings come as leaders from 150 nations attempt to forge a treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. During a speech Monday at the Paris summit, President Barack Obama said the “growing threat of climate change could define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other.”
Nearly 1,600 U.S. adults took part in the MSU study. Participants read fabricated news articles about climate change and then completed a survey gauging their beliefs on the issue. The articles contained either positive or negative real-world messages about climate change, or both.
The positive messages framed the topic of climate change around one of four major issues: economic opportunity, national security, Christian stewardship and public health. According to the article addressing public health, for example:
“Medical experts argue that dealing with climate change will improve our public health by reducing the likelihood of extreme weather events, reducing air quality and allergen problems, and limiting the spread of pests that carry infectious diseases.”
In half of the articles, participants were presented a negative message that read, in part: “However, most conservative leaders and Republican politicians believe that so-called climate change is vastly exaggerated by environmentalists, liberal scientists seeking government funding for their research and Democratic politicians who want to regulate business.”
Surprisingly, none of the four major positive messages changed participants’ core beliefs about climate change. Further, when the negative messages were presented, people were more apt to doubt the existence of climate change – and this was true of both conservatives and liberals.
“That’s the power of the denial message,” said McCright, associate professor in MSU’s Lyman Briggs College and Department of Sociology. “It’s extremely difficult to change people’s minds on climate change, in part because they are entrenched in their views.”
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The study appears online in the journal Topics in Cognitive Science. McCright’s co-authors are fellow MSU researchers Meghan Charters, Katherine Dentzman and Thomas Dietz.
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Thanks Arron for your research into this matter.
It shows that there is certainly no consensus about global warming in the minds of the public. Having read literally hundreds of articles on the subject my conclusions are: the climate has always been changing; people are trying to raise alarm over quite ordinary weather events, seeking to blame human behaviours and influences as their cause; there is no truly scientific, validated manner in which to separate weather events that are not exceptional in recorded history from a ‘human influenced’ weather event.
Models projecting global temperatures have manifestly failed to produce results close to observed temperatures over the past 25 year period. The possibility that other members or the public are aware of this cannot be ignored in such a survey. The survey questions implicitly assume that anyone who has researched the facts of the matter in depth, is a ‘denier’ of facts not in existence. An alarming claim repeated in the New Work Times is not a ‘fact’. The motivations of beneficiaries of proposed changes in public policy should be examined critically to ensure the public interest is served.
Creating a fund to assist the under-developed nations is a noble goal. I am all for it. Basing it on whimsical stories about ‘climate damage’ is both unnecessary and in fact, morally tainted for it requires a lot of people to present a lot of stretched truths as facts. Misrepresenting reality is not a path to progress or development.
Abe, this is a little more coherent than your previous posts in this thread that occasioned joking about how much you liked MJ. You raise the interesting question, usually dodged by all sides of the debate, of how any component of the atmosphere can be said to warm the Earth.
With no atmosphere and, say, one-year rotation (so one side always faced the sun), the sunny side ground would be comparable to the Moon in its day (123º C) and the dark side close to absolute zero (with some heating from within). Add an atmosphere and the 24-hour rotation and the surface will cool down some in the day and warm up in the dark, but your point that the surface retains heat more than the atmosphere (which is blowing all over and is open to space) should be well-taken. I’m not sure that it is. Could the tiny percentage of CO2 have any ‘blanketing’ effect? And even water vapor, said to be a ‘greenhouse gas’, keeps changing state, so it probably has multiple effects, all temporary.
To stay on-topic, it may be that the best way to counter the Climatistas, aside from touting the manifest benefits to the biosphere of CO2, is to point out that on net the atmosphere is always conducting heat away from the surface of the Earth; the exceptions where warmer air blows in somewhere are inevitably transitory.
Perhaps this could be made into a bumper sticker: “We do NOT live in a Greenhouse!”
/Mr Lynn
Mr. Lynn,
That was a gracious attempt to try to rehabilitate Witness Abe whose testimony was unravelling as he spoke it. Like your “bumper sticker” (nicely states a powerful argument against AGW).
But…. unfortunately…. I think Abe does live in a greenhouse… .
Heh.
Janice
Abe’s observations are interesting. I don’t remember any discussion of the role of ‘greenhouse gases’ (water vapor, CO2, methane) blocking a large portion of solar energy from reaching the surface of the Earth. But to the extent a portion of the Sun’s energy is in the infrared, they must.
I think Abe is worth listening to. His style of writing leads me to wonder if perhaps English is not his native tongue. I’d like to see more of his thoughts on the Earth’s energy budget. Is there a paper, or website?
/Mr Lynn
L.E. Joiner-
“I don’t remember any discussion of the role of ‘greenhouse gases’ (water vapor, CO2, methane) blocking a large portion of solar energy from reaching the surface of the Earth. But to the extent a portion of the Sun’s energy is in the infrared, they must.”
When you say you don’t remember any discussion…does that mean any discussion on WUWT, or in your own personal experience? Because the fact that some GHG’s’ do absorb some of the incoming solar energy, and some do not, is basic scientific knowledge to pretty much anyone, and is not under dispute. Even NASA will tell you that.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/EnergyBalance/page6.php
But the energy from the Sun, enters our atmosphere as short wave radiation, and some GHG’s only absorb and re-emit long wave thermal radiation. The ones that don’t absorb and emit short wave infared radiation don’t affect or block the incoming energy from the sun, they only SLOW the return of that energy to space after it’s been absorbed (as short wave radiation) by the surface and re-emitted by the surface as long wave radiation.
Aphan:
But Abe says:
That’s what I hadn’t heard before, here or anywhere—not that I read or remember everything on the subject, not by a long shot. Is it not true?
/Mr Lynn
Mr Lynn, I think that there are many, MANY things being posted by Abe that you’ll never hear here, or anywhere else on the internet where intelligent, logical conversations take place. Trying to engage with someone so clearly entrenched in “the crazy” is noble, but inevitably futile. I wish you luck. I’m turning the name calling, hostile, repetitive, vulgar, off topic posts to me from him over to the mods to deal with. 🙂
Aphan December 5, 2015 at 4:21 pm: Guess I don’t spend enough time on these Comment threads to pick up on all the bickering. Can’t even say I’ve seen Abe’s comments before, or paid any mind to them.
So what percentage of the Sun’s incoming radiation is in the infrared spectra? A quick search suggests it does look like a fair percentage:
This from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight
/Mr Lynn
https://ag.tennessee.edu/solar/Pages/What%20Is%20Solar%20Energy/Sunlight.aspx
“Much of the energy from the Sun arrives on Earth in the form of infrared radiation. Sunlight in space at the top of Earth’s atmosphere at a power of 1366 watts/m2 is composed (by total energy) of about 50% infrared light, 40% visible light, and 10% ultraviolet light[1]”
50% of the Sun’s incoming energy is in the form of infared, but 100% of the Sun’s energy is in SHORT WAVE form, including it’s infrared. If that sunlight gets absorbed by something else-the ground, the ocean, a tree etc…it gets absorbed and then re-emitted as LONG WAVE radiation. If that sunlight gets reflected back (by clouds, ice etc) it returns to space as shortwave radiation.
http://www.indiana.edu/~geog109/topics/04_radiation/4c-RadiationBalance_nf.pdf
Wow, where’d this guy get his degrees, K-Mart? The only thing worthy of being studied here is this guy’s soft mind and how it was so easily molded by “the message.”
Hey now…I find that to be an offensive inference towards K-Mart! Even if they DID sell degrees, they might very well refuse to sell one to him. 🙂
Have you seen the man’s resume?
http://sociology.msu.edu/uploads/documents/McCright_CV_new.pdf
The word “Conservative” appears 21 times
The word “Climate” appears over 120 times
The phase “Climate Change” appears over 100 times
I’m betting when he writes “…liberal scientists seeking government funding for their research…” he’s speaking from personal experience?
Thanks for reading!
Fancy calling us the D-word for not believing their garbage models. There is only one group using the d-word, which actually represent themselves, against the people with different views because they actually use science with scientific observations. The alarmist are the d-word when it comes to anything else other than garbage models and especially anti-scientific regarding observations. What else will the alarmist government scientist lot call the skeptics that they already do, but skeptics actually don’t?
In the end, it won’t matter if skeptics have truth and respect for the scientific method on their side. Obama, and the EPA, and the U.N., will simply deem and do.
just plant some more trees. how frick’in simple can it be. the arsewipe from down under planted trees after he got stuck and pulled out of the ice in Antactic last year. remember. that was his get out of jail free card.
If sceptics are right then there can only be one outcome, the public will see the light. The truth always comes out in the end. Here is an example of utter bafflement. Belief in something DOES NOT MAKE IT TRUE. When you see right wing AND left wing newspapers agreeing, then you have a problem.
Saturated fats will give you a heart attack or what???? Butter is bad??? So many decades of belief did not stop the facts, or lack of facts being exposed.
http://tinyurl.com/q3hqfvc (study)
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29616418
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/oct/22/butter-cheese-saturated-fat-hear
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2946617/Butter-ISN-T-bad-Major-study-says-80s-advice-dairy-fats-flawed.html
Global warming is real, but what has caused most of the global warming since the end of the Little Ice Age? This is the debate. Don’t get sidelined about ‘denying’ global warming as the above post mentions. There was a warming spike from 1910 to 1940, (and one in the late 19th century) this is a problem for the warmist folks.
A few example of what this talks about
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/12/03/on-cop21-and-the-madness-of-crowds/
We will never controls the crowds.
But the more individuals that are informed, the smaller the crowd gets.
plant trees. move to higher ground. we are human beings not elephants. but to steal and take money from people just ain’t goin’a fix it. the world has a destiny and we are just little pests, to paraphrase George Carlin. we will atapt and or evolve. deal with it.
From one of his sites:
“His intellectual agenda is to enhance our sociological understanding of how interrelationships among scientific developments, political processes, and social dynamics influence society’s capacity for recognizing and dealing with environmental degradation and technological risks.
Dr. McCright is most well-known for his work analyzing the political dynamics and public understanding of climate science and policy in the United States—especially organized climate change denial and political polarization on climate change. Integrating insights from scholarship on power, social movements, and reflexive modernization, he has developed the Anti-Reflexivity Thesis to explain how and why certain industries, political organizations, and members of the general public deny the reality and seriousness of climate change.”
He has spent most of his life doing what he is doing. What will he do once he realizes it was all crap … .
Why do I deny the “reality AND seriousness of climate change” as the “reality AND seriousness of climate change” is defined by people like McCright? Same reason that I deny the Boogyman as it defined by scared small children; not to say that there aren’t real folks that are just as (or even more so) scary than the fictional Boogyman. Just scroll up to the top and see the photo at the right.
Good grief!
Clearly to McCright and his ilk “climate change,” by which we must assume he means the idea of Anthropogenic Global Warming, is not a theory, nor even an hypothesis, but a dogma, a Received Truth, to which any objection is nothing less than heresy. This is the surest sign of a religious orthodoxy, that welcomes only True Believers.
Should he be surprised, then, that some people who value freedom of thought and the scientific method, object to being told to accept the dogma of “Climate Change” on faith, just because the elite High Priests have proclaimed it?
Worse, should we be surprised that our taxpayer dollars have gone to support this academic charlatan, enabling him to earn a living by studying why rational people refuse to pay proper obeisance to the gods of Climate Change?
No, we should not. One thing about a big fraud: it breeds lots of little ones, in service to the Master Hoax. The High Priests must have their lesser acolytes, of which this McCright is clearly one.
/Mr Lynn
“It’s extremely difficult to change people’s minds on climate change, in part because they are entrenched in their views,” says Aaron M. McCright, a Michigan State University environmental scientist.
According to this recent piece from the arch-warmist BBC, it would seem McCright is in fact highly mistaken.
COP21: Public support for tough climate deal ‘declines’
Public support for a strong global deal on climate change has declined, according to a poll carried out in 20 countries.
Only four now have majorities in favour of their governments setting ambitious targets at a global conference in Paris.
In a similar poll before the Copenhagen meeting in 2009, eight countries had majorities favouring tough action.
The poll has been provided to the BBC by research group GlobeScan.
Just under half of all those surveyed viewed climate change as a “very serious” problem this year, compared with 63% in 2009.
The findings will make sober reading for global political leaders, who will gather in Paris next week for the start of the United Nations climate conference, known as COP21.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-34900474
But not in the way McCright would prefer…
Seems us “climate change deniers” are winning – big style.
Perhaps it has something to do with that old fable about the boy who cried “WOLF!”.
catweazel666 (I adore your nickname!)
Be very careful about analogies. In the end of that fable, there really WAS a wolf and skeptics ignore alarmists for totally different reasons than the reasons the villagers finally stopped listening to the boy in the story. 🙂
“In the end of that fable, there really WAS a wolf…”
And that of course is the real danger of the way the alarmists have managed to drag science and scientists into disrepute, and not just in the field of climate either.
Interesting use of words. I would say that the alarmists are the _opposers_ of climate change and sceptics are the advocates. I think most skeptics think we should let it happen because it is either not harmful or not happening.
I think they mean advocates and opposers of _action_ on climate change. But I’d have expected an academic to see the difference.
Sorry, If this has been addressed up thread. I normally and dutifully read every post before commenting but I’m in the middle of proceedings that are taking up most of my available RAM. However, I can’t let go of the purulent and pejorative use of the d-word. This dismissive term used in any situation, really means game over, in terms of debate. Any argument presented by a d-worder is a priori an irrational position. But arguments and ideas, have a life of their own and the truth or otherwise of a notion is independent of the vehicle that conveys it. Truth, despite current propaganda, is utterly and absolutely independent. I don’t care how confronting anybodies opinion is, I could never honestly contest it by dismissing them. I would have to make a case and argue it. Everything else is slander.
All the seasons are exactly the same as when I was a very small child with the same old usual random weather. For that alone I cannot believe in this climate change BS. Nothing has changed.
Mods- Abe’s comments here, while prior to this have just been random and odd, have become very insulting both personally and socially. Not to mention completely off topic.
Abe December 4, 2015 at 2:18 pm: “When you start admitting you don’t have the slightest idea about the nature of reality it’s not making everyone else look like uneducable dolts, it makes YOU look like one.”
Your posts appear to epitomise your not having the slightest idea about the nature of reality yourself.
Was it the 1976 black microdot?
I heard it could do that to some people.
Ah….ABE…initials referring to Allen B. Eltor! Just a quick internet search revealed so much about you. Sadly, your internet postings reveal not only that you make wild insinuations about people with absolutely no evidence to back them up, but that you’re also not very creative because everything you’ve posted here is pretty much the same thing you’ve posted elsewhere, right down to the insults.
You claim (elsewhere) to have spent 20 years in “aircraft instrumentation” and calibrating “atmospheric sensing equipment on commercial airlines”. I wonder if you show the same disturbing personality disorders at work or is your online persona and advocacy against all things “Gubbmit” just something you do to amuse yourself?
Wouldn’t it be the ultimate of ironies if the greatest political (w help from bad science) hoax of modern times, CAGW, blinded us from seeing the rather cold climate that’s coming by 2020 ?
Molten salt reactor tech won’t be off the shelf ready by then.
Fossils might be shuttered in and facilities to convert them to energy mothballed.
Snow and ice can’t be the friend of solar and wind work.
We could have a real threat to the food supply.
That would be very bad.
2020 .. 5 years.