Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Newsweek is worried that Republicans are becoming more climate skeptic.
UNDER TRUMP, FEWER REPUBLICANS THINK GLOBAL WARMING IS CAUSED BY HUMANS
BY TIM MARCIN ON 3/28/18 AT 2:06 PM
More than a full year into the Donald Trump experience, Republicans have grown more skeptical about climate change compared with the year prior, according to new polling data from Gallup released on Wednesday.
Just 35 percent of Republicans believed global warming was caused by humans, compared with 40 percent at about this time in 2017 when Trump had barely taken office. A full 89 percent of Democrats, meanwhile, believed humans caused global warming.
…
There was, however, one area where GOP respondents were more concerned about global warming. Eighteen percent felt they would see effects from global warming in their lifetime, a 4 percentage point rise from 2017, according to Gallup.
…
The Gallup Poll is available here.
What I find most fascinating about this polarisation of opinion is the fact that people who claim to believe the world is facing a climate emergency are not making a serious effort to solve the alleged emergency. For example there seems to be no real effort by Democrats to embrace zero carbon nuclear power, despite the very real likelihood that a Democrat policy of nuclear advocacy would be supported by Republicans. The possibility that a few nuclear plants would suffer meltdowns is somehow a greater problem than the alleged imminent end of the world.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I think the objection to more nuclear power now is because the renewables are considered the perfect replacement of fossil fuels long term. Building more nuclear, in this view, merely delays the best action, as well as having both the accident potential AND the waste disposal problem.
I disagree with this view. Renewables are not sufficently effective, economically good, reliable and geographically applicable for the purported use. But I agree we shouldn’t place expediency ahead of better solutions for the longterm. The refusal to provide adequate disposal sited for nuclear wastes – by citizens as well as politicians – alarms me. I’d like that situation resolved before we had more being pumped out.
Besides, we know the end-of-the-world scenario is not seriously believed except by fringe players. The rest won’t admit this, as it is a useful fiction, but their behavior – like DiCaprio’s – demonstrates it.
Doug: Disposal of nuclear waste is a political problem, not a practical one. We know how to glassify the waste and know of stable formations where the cylinders can be stored forever. Uneducated people fear the radiation potential, which is nil.
It’s not certain there is a climate problem, but assuming there is, the surefire solution would be to develop advanced nuclear such as fusion, LFTR or LENR, This will likely happen in due course anyway.
The reason the Greens are trying to create a panic over GW is so as to push governments to implement those solutions which are available right now, even though they are not very satisfactory, instead of waiting for better ones.They are doing this because they have backers in those industries.
We’ve seen this before with the CFL lightbulb – Promoted at massive public expense, only to be made obsolete by the development of bright LEDs. The same scenario threatens to arise with battery cars. After the industry has been forced by Green legislation to switch to manufacturing them en masse, a better solution will come along. For example, fuel cells. There will then be another monster junkpile to pollute the planet. If they’d waited… but then they don’t want to wait because again, vested interests are funding them to push this agenda hard. It’s called wastemaking, and the Greens should be ashamed of what they’re doing.
Unfortunately, the problem is that there is no time for these processes. The only viable route is LENR.
Here in the Northeast, a plan to bring down hydro power from Canada, called “Northern Pass” was killed, after several years of wrangling, and one of the “concerns” was that it would hurt renewables. If it isn’t wind, solar, unicorn farts or pixie dust, the carbonastrophists aren’t interested.
Nuclear waste doesn’t need to be sited, it needs to be reprocessed.
The renewables aren’t and will never be the perfect replacement for fossil fuels EVER. Only idiots believe this, or “useful idiots” that have the intelligence to determine the truth but don’t engage it because they’re too busy virtue signaling. The amount of land use necessary to meet electric power generation needs would be staggering, and “renewables” are not reliable or consistent and will never produce power on demand, as needed. They are therefore only useful in small scale, not as fossil fuel replacements – and even then need fossil fuel “backup.”
So, like children who are timid and cowardly, the Republicans only stand up if they have a human shield in from of them?
since liberals have a bad habit of hunting them down, threatening them, etc etc
The libs can stand up because they have the MSM as their shield.
The movement of Republicans was very small compared to Independents. Fake News Week buried the lead.
Look.
We are in an interglacial period. If the earth were not warming I would be very concerned that we were about to enter another cooling period with resultant ice age.
Can we agree that even skeptics believe in “global warming”? We just do not believe that CO2 is the driver.
We do believe that CO2 is a proven significant driver.
That should cover anyone who’s studied the science.
You can believe what you like. I want to see some hard facts and evidence.
I meant the opposite, “We do not believe that CO2 is a proven significant driver.”
I was trying to add nuance and missed the critical word.
Whew, you had me worried for a minute.
The paradox of why today’s socialist progressive Democrats don’t support nuclear energy to “Save the Planet” from their claim of imminent fossil fuel calamity can easily be solved.
One simply must realize that saving the planet from climate change isn’t their true goal — it’s just a Trojan Horse carrying inside it their poison pill of neo-Marxism.
Once realizing that, then understanding why the neo-Marxists don’twant inexpensive, reliable energy for the masses resolves the apparent paradox.
“For example there seems to be no real effort by Democrats to embrace zero carbon nuclear power, despite the very real likelihood that a Democrat policy of nuclear advocacy would be supported by Republicans. The possibility that a few nuclear plants would suffer meltdowns is somehow a greater problem than the alleged imminent end of the world.”
Not completely true. Mike Shellenberger is running for the Democratic nomination for governor of California as an environmentalist who believes in anthropogenic global warming, and nuclear power as the only realistic way of stopping it without wrecking modern civilization. You may not agree with his premise, but he’s consistent.
We have done this already
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/03/28/gallup-left-became-more-militant-about-global-warming-under-trump/
Maybe time and more scrutiny caused it instead. But polling groups don’t even recognize that dimension.
The people who promote the global warming hoax are basically the same group who opposed nuclear power and weapons even before global warming became a prominent issue. They are the modern-day Luddites who believe most humans should live as impoverished peasants subject to the nomenklatura
Note how the label-makers are putting equal signs between ‘conservative’ and ‘skeptic’.
I swear, you could change the Democrat mascot to ‘Zebra’.
With, of course, the obvious irony that you CAN put equal signs between ‘progressive’ and ‘warmist’.
This is how the left lost independents.
I think we will see effects of global warming my lifetime, I think we will see less global warming then we have seen lately. Which means the lefties will have to find another end of the world theme for their religion.
Since progressive are anti-progress, I would guess the overpopulation worry will switch to the doom of future under population. Surely a government program can cause more human breeding.
And after the inevitable government failure, it will require a lot more effort to be a lefty.
To be a climate change skeptic has labeled us as ultra-conservative even if you are like myself, usually straddling the fence. I put that into a song back when Obummer was still king.
Science, Politics and Fear
Our President (Obama) just called me a denier,
He told his followers to put my “feet to the fire”!
Engaging in ridicule, spin and vicious mirth,
Proposing that “doubters live on a flat earth”.
Claiming that “To wind and solar power we must turn”-
Preaching that we’re doomed by all the fossil fuel we burn.
Refrain:
Science, politics and fear…
They tell us “hell on earth” will soon be here
So get out your ‘Humboldt County grown’ and I’ll go get some beer;
Here comes science, politics and fear.
While telling this, I wonder just how long it might be,
Before those “men in black” come sneaking ‘round to visit me.
While I accept the theory of that “greenhouse effect”,
The common sense my daddy taught me’s making me suspect…
There’s much more to climate change than carbon trapping infrared
And the people have by “new progressive science” been misled.
Refrain:
Science, politics and fear…
The end of all free nations could be near.
So, let’s protect the sovereignties we all hold dear
From science, politics and fear.
Instrumental verse & refrain
The panicked fight on climate is a challenge to surmise,
After decades now with just El Nino temperature rise.
Those models, they get further from reality each year
Yet, consensus of opinion of the future mongers fear!
But, I fear global governmental centralization:
U.N. bureaucrat controllers of a world enslaving nation.
Refrain:
Science, politics and fear…
Hey, ‘1984’ is almost here!
An unholy trinity’s replaced the Holy one, its clear-
Science, politics and fear!
Climate science, politics and fear
Nicely put.
Although “just El Nino temperature rise” assumes that El Nino is unaffected by CO2. There’s no reason to think that’s untrue. But if you reverse the null hypothesis then it can be evidence for the end of the world.
The poem begs the question of whether we should abandon the scientific method to save the planet or instead be sceptical.
And as for mislabelling, just try being a ‘newsworthy climate change’ sceptic at the Guardian and also a Socialist here.
The labels are entirely inconsistent, except with respect to their opprobrium.
Same old same old. Correlation is not causation. Maybe we have just got a year more data
They don’t make money polling and extolling with such talk.
I wonder how many folks in Russia agreed with Kruschev and came out from under the rug to help depose Lysenkoism.
Many of us Republicans have never believed in Climate Catastrophe .
We just wish the leaders of our party would not believe if either .
I was shocked, yes shocked to find Newsweek selling in my CVS store for $10. Huh? Last time I bought one (or Time Magazine, forget which) it cost $1.25.
I thought the magazine had gone digital only. Maybe the expensive item you saw was a “special” of some sort.
There’s a wild book (by a now-dead wild author) about Newsweek ten-plus years ago, called The Last Magazine.
What about the skepticism of the ability of the NSA to protect its hacking tools?
What about the skepticism about the counter intelligence of the US? The analysis for (alleged) hacking attacks?
What about the skepticism of the ability of the fed agencies to protect critical databases?
When the raw data is available, at what point does all of the averaging, baseline, and anomaly-generating, and then more averaging, and so on and so forth, become detrimental to understanding what the data is saying? I’ve been looking at and analyzing the USCRN station data, which is supposed to be the best raw data we have. With time resolution of 5 minutes, these state-of-the-art stations are supposed to be well-sited recorders of multiple lines of temperature, precip, and various other measurements. Their only downfall is that they only have 18 years of dtata at the best.
Plotting the raw daily data for the KS Manhattan 6 SSW station is revealing. First, I did the most basic analysis; I plotted in Excel the TMAX, TAVG, and TMIN values for the entire 18 years of the station record, plus the trends of the plots. The TAVG trend was positive at 1.1°C/ decade, while the TMAX and TMIN trends were at 0.38°C/ decade and 0.22°C/ decade. Those seem pretty steep trends to me, as that TAVG trend works out to 11°C/ century if it lasts. These are straight plots of the raw data, with nothing done to them at all. It seems impossible to have such quickly increasing average temps with nearly flat max and min temps over the years.
I worked some numbers I hadn’t seen before, using this station’s data, wherein I calculated the maximum monthly average for each year. I also calculated the minimum monthly average temp for each year of the range. What I ended up with was a plot of the warmest and coolest monthly averages in each year of the entire station record. Some of those had very steep trends as well, both negative and positive. These trends are what I had plotted on the Google Maps plot here.
https://www.sandbistro.com/uscrn/desktop/index.html
Finally, I did some additional calculations to attempt to come up with more traditional-looking anomaly plots. None of the data plot are longer than 18 years, which makes finding an AGW signal hiding within problematic. I did what I could using 10-year baselines to get averages, but I know it’s not correct. Here’s the link to the plot, which has a slider so that you can easily move from one plot to the other.
https://www.sandbistro.com/uscrn/KS_Manhattan_6_SSW.html
It’s late, and the graphics aren’t as clean as they could be. The left axis is always in degrees C. I got the trends by multiplying the slope in the equation by 365.25 days to get the yearly rate, then multiplying by ten to get the decadal. You can see how a running average would smooth the curves, but it seems to me to be throwing away information about the natural variability of the temperature. And that brings me back to my original question: at what point does the blending, homogenizing, averaging, etc, really begin to hide the real information in the raw data?
As much as I love a good destruction of a fake news or bad journalism article, rags like Newsweek and the Guardian, probably get thousands of ad hits from WUWT articles, these rags are dying, I would think we’d like to speed up their demise by never ever clicking on a link to their sites.
I never ever click Guardian links for example. Hate clicks still generate ad revenue 😀
Agreed. I do sometimes click on links to The Grauniad, but am sparing for that reason.
There are someplaces I will never go, such as the website that cannot be named, because I regard them simply as outright liars, or fake news as it is called in modern parlance. But even WUWT leaves them alone much of the time now, so it is less of an issue.
I am now adopting similar policies now with BBC articles if they don’t allow comments. There are plenty of those, but the BBC also often doesn’t initially allow comments on some of these articles, enabling comments later at some undisclosed point. Sneaky. If that doesn’t reflect a political approach to their comment sections then I don’t know what does. Apart, that is, from the multitude of no-comment-macht-frei inflammatory articles that might otherwise allow licence-fee payers to give their opinions on, say, immigration, Trumpthe alleged gender pay gap, or the religious affiliations of terrorists. You probably get the picture by now, even if you don’t live in the UK. They do allow occasional comments on Brexit, probably because they know there are simply too many politicians who would be on their case if they didn’t.
Interestingly, as an aside, the BBC seem to have largely abandoned reporting many things from Israel/Palestine. Someone has had a word or two in their ear. But that doesn’t mean politics and those who regard it as their primary focus disapperared from the BBC. They just go elsewhere, into subjects they can pretend are apolitical, like environmentalism, and then they spout the same neo-Marxist ‘solutions’ from a differnt pulpit.
They failed to headline the fact that independents had become even more sceptical than Reps but it is still a great shame this has become mainly a partisan issue. Science should not be partisan. Perhaps the only way forward is to debate the effectiveness (or not) of climate policy and just what are we getting for all the money spent. Maybe we can reach common ground there. Liberals though really have to explicitly consider which is the lesser evil; nuclear power or fossil fuels and then act on that consideration because wind and solar are just not up to the job and we are collectively in real danger of doing more harm than good through bad policy.
Of the 6 questions in the poll, I would describe three of them as “lazy” at best. That is you don’t really learn much from them because they are phrased in a way that doesn’t really address people’s feelings about the matter or could be interpreted in different ways.
Who cares what I think most scientists think? Why not ask me what I think, and if I think it is significant warming, either on a basis of statistical significance or physical significance?
Like the effect called “warming” such as was nearly asked in the last question? You’d like to talk about some other effects? Then ask me about them, not some vague question, dimwit.
Like 1%, or 100%, of the “warming” such as was nearly asked in the question before last? Stoopid.
Only six questions, and they seriously bungled three of them. I also note that 5 of the 6 questions all started from the basic postulate that global warming is worth discussing at all.
They also make a statement about Trump possibly having an effect, but there were no questions about Trump. So, just Galloping political opinion, right?
But I do find a few interesting points: One of the worst ‘performances’ among self-identified Democrats was still “Think global warming will pose a serious threat in their lifetime”. Yet their highest ‘performance’ was still in the first question, where only 4% of them thought that they “Think the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated”.
Perhaps they should have had a seventh question, “How often do you think you think you contradict yourself on Gallup surveys”.
And maybe an eighth question, “Do you think Gallop can tell the difference between their arse and a hole in the ground?”
OK, I now see there is more to this “survey” because Gallup didn’t list all the questions before they started commenting on their own survey.