Meanwhile, the press intends to double down on its climate hysteria.
Posted by Leslie Eastman
CNN Analyst Shocked Americans Aren’t Afraid of Media-Created ‘Climate Crisis’
Meanwhile, the press intends to double down on its climate hysteria.
Posted by Leslie Eastman
I have noted on a few occasions that Americans’ trust in scientists has eroded. One reason for this is related to high-profile claims about weather and climate that have not materialized as predicted.
For example, there have been warnings of snowless winters, rapidly vanishing glaciers, and an ice-free Arctic.
Additionally, the monsoon rains of the American Southwest are now being repackaged as yet another reason to attack fossil fuels in the name of man-made global warming — despite the fact that the region’s monsoon season has long been officially recognized as occurring between mid-June and late-September.
However, the mainstream media’s constant doom-and-gloom reporting is not having the desired effect. CNN’s chief data analyst, Harry Enten, recently reported on a poll showing that Americans remain largely unmoved by the histrionics surrounding climate change.
Polling from Gallup found that 40% of Americans are “greatly worried about climate change” currently, which has decreased by six percentage points from 2020. These new numbers emerged as many liberals, including Democrat members of Congress, have attempted to blame climate change and President Donald Trump for the devastating flood in Central Texas.
“Are Americans concerned of climate change, and the answer is, Americans aren’t afraid of climate change,” Enten said. “Climate activists have not successfully made the case to the American people. I want you to take a look here. ‘Greatly worried about climate change.’
We have data going all the way back since 1989, and look at it then, it was 39%. In 2000, it was 40%. 2020, 46%. In 2025, 40%, which is the exact same percentage as in 2000, despite all of these horrible weather events. The percentage of Americans that are greatly worried about climate change has stayed pretty gosh darned consistent.”
The press is a little unhappy that its fearmongering isn’t working, so it’s clearly going to double down. For example, a piece published by NBC News pushes the narrative that people aren’t afraid enough of “extreme weather events” — as evidenced by an Associated Press article quoting preferred “experts” on the subject.
Climate change is making extreme weather events more frequent and intense, according to climate scientists and government data. But people and governments are generally living in the past and haven’t embraced that extreme weather is now the norm, to say nothing about preparing for the nastier future that’s in store, experts in meteorology, disasters and health told The Associated Press.
“What happens with climate change is that what used to be extreme becomes average, typical, and what used to never occur in a human lifetime or maybe even in a thousand years becomes the new extreme,” Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer said. “We start to experience things that just basically never happened before.”
Meteorologist Chris Mertz points out what the “extreme weather event” narrative is in a recent interview.
Life expectancy has more than doubled since the mid-19th century. The number of deaths from weather-related natural disasters has decreased by over 96% since the 1920s. Also, if you look at the number of hurricanes, they are not increasing on a global scale. The number of tornadoes has remained about steady in the United States since real-time data collection began in 1954. Similarly, the number of floods and droughts is not increasing globally, and wildfires have gone down.
The media minions constantly conflating severe weather with a climate apocalypse at the behest of climate cultists with policy agendas will continue to lose audience as those with more sensible and realistic perspectives, who are no longer silenced, are proven to be scientifically correct.
I am very grateful Americans recognize climate hysteria for what it is.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I cancelled two online newspaper subscriptions last week. I had to phone them to cancel. They got both barrels. I cited one headline ‘Killer heatwave to hit the UK’. Plus other woke and eco crap. It feels good.
If I had a subscription I’d do the same.
I wonder how much they made out of you? I have given the BBC and the Guardian both barrels in the past, it’s probably the lowly grunt that has to suffer it. And then it’s over.
Manbearpig describes Al Gore very well. I wonder if he took cartel funds like other democrats have for their support of undocumented minors working their marijuana farms.
the press intends to double down on its climate hysteria.
Take today’s Guardian
“Extreme heat could lead to 30,000 deaths a year in England and Wales by 2070s, say scientists”
Not only, but…
“…also modelled the ageing population”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jul/10/extreme-heat-death-rate-england-wales-by-2070-climate-change
Summer has become the alarmist’s worst nightmare. Killjoy is a feature of any religion.
well the % of fools running round in hot black sacks…might increase death toll somewhat?
but thats NOT climate thats rank stupidity
If they’re panicking, you can bet they will be scrolling. They have been suitably dumbed down, after all.
Improving the human life span can actually result in a (temporary) apparent increase in the death rate. As the life span starts to increase, the death rate will drop a bit as the elderly will live longer. When they finally do start to die, the death rate will rise for a bit in order to compensate. One wonders if this was included in their ‘models’.
In evolutionary/natural selection terms they cannot explain why so many species have homosexuality, from whales to humans.
But they do have numerous evolutionary mechanisms that might explain…
“It is still not clear”
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13674-evolution-myths-natural-selection-cannot-explain-homosexuality/
Indeed it isn’t.
The first rule of biology is Propagation of the Species. Any factor not operating with this rule is a defect, incidental or temporary or whatever.
That doesn’t explain the advantage it brings, unless it relates to familial female fecundity in some way, perhaps?
See, nobody knows. But it’s a fascinating subject, nonetheless. The ones we cannot answer usually are, though.
I always thought propagation, or leading up to it, was the fun part.
There are also social mechanisms at play.
Homosexuality is not just about sex. It is also about relationships. It is also about emotions. Social constructs.
Masters and Johnsons in the 60s found there is a spectrum, a normalized (aka bell) distribution. It is not binary.
A purely heterosexual male would tend to ignore raising his son and devote his attentions to the daughter. The roles of hunter/gatherer shift to the point where clan survival is at risk. After all, a pregnant female is not an effective hunter and hunting is a dangerous occupation so the future member of the clan is at risk.
All of us have both. There are no “pure” at either end of the spectrum.
An old saying: The population explosion would not be so great if lighting the fuse were not so much fun.
“Killjoy is a feature of any religion.”
In Puritanachusetts, it was a law in the early colonial days that sex on Sunday was forbidden. I’m sure many men said to their wives, “no, not tonight honey, it’s Sunday”. 🙂
It’s a classic case of “redefining”. Heatwaves are more common since the definition of a “heatwave” became “3 days over 25 deg C (77F). In my youth, that was “summer”
They have gone quite bonkers. How many of them can remember 1976 or, implausibly, 1955? Very few if any. The 60s and up to the mid 70s were cold – why did so many jet away on holiday? They have no idea.
1959 was a hot one. Did you mean 1959?
Been pretty warm there as of late. So now that they’ve had some actual summer days, the end times are near… I love summer…I live in the northern tier of US and if it gets hot, it will sometimes last several days, but you always got that nice little cold front to temper things a bit.
Net Zero will cause the death of FAR MORE elderly people.
Not just elderly.
“The percentage of Americans that are greatly worried about climate change has stayed pretty gosh darned consistent”.
I’m actually surprised that it’s been steady at such a high percentage. But we see consistently in this country, in election after election, and poll after poll, that there’s a hard floor of around 40% of people who will buy any of the garbage promulgated by the Left.
I think it is not so much buying the Left garbage, but refusing to buy the Right garbage and thinking the Left garbage looks good by comparison. When government intrudes so much into daily life, it is impossible to not buy garbage, and even in politics, markets work to balance them out.
Forgetting any other subject, and just sticking to the climate issue-
The Left would have us relying on more expensive, less reliable, and intermittent energy sources that are known to be harmful to wildlife, and rely on rare earth materials sourced from foreign countries with questionable human rights records and environmentally harmful practices. .
The Right says that we have plentiful, relatively inexpensive proven sources of energy right here, right now, that are clean. Not sure how that’s “garbage”, or makes the alternative look good.
I took the 40% Left comment more generically, because that’s how it was written.
I’m surprised it’s not higher. As George Carlin noted: “Think of of stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are more stupid than that.”
We grew tried of the Al Gore Bogey Man.
Inconvenient Truth came out in 2006. Most kids in HS at that time saw it more than once. People said it should be mandatory. I wish they’d succeeded. The film would sound ridiculous in 2025. After almost 20 years I can’t forget AG standing on a lift cart tracking a linear projection of the 1997 temperature spike upward off the screen.
From the get-go of that pathetic film which I would not waste 1 ounce of time watching, I deemed it, ‘An Inconvenient Spoof’.
If CNN wants to be shocked, ask them first how much has been spent to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. (The number is at least $ 2 trillion but hard to pin down.) Then second, ask how much have greenhouse gas emissions have fallen in that time? It was about 22 billion metric tons in 1988 when Hanson gave his speech to the senate and estimated to be 37 billion metric tons last year and still rising. https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-co2-emissions/
Then third, ask them if they recall what the definition of insanity is? It’s doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
Perhaps an old recreational sailing cliche (powered by the wind of course) best describes the state of the climate struggle, “going nowhere very slowly at great expense”.
CNN, before Trump (47) won the election, had more than 2 million viewers in prime time. Now they have less than 400,000. I just watched CNN present a climate change report on the Texas flood, sliding into the damnation of Trump as the underling culprit.
Warning: if you shout at the TV, don’t act like you’re expecting an answer, or they will haul you off for re-education.
O/T – How thick is George Monbiot?
There is an intense and consuming stupidity within almost everything George Monbiot writes, the lumpen prose devoid of both doubt and humour. Doubt and humour are blood brothers, of course – and enemies of the kind of bovine certitude which Monbiot peddles, a cacophony of privately educated green tinged nepo leftism to which the majority of the country is rightly averse.
I mention the chauve souris de la lune [moon bat] because he wrote a piece in the only publication which can stomach his idiocies, the Guardian, suggesting that my article about Glastonbury last week was – I think I’ve got this right – the beginning of a process to actually nuke Glasto and all the people at the festival. And that I was hiding behind humour.
The real point of the piece, which Monbiot, being thick, missed was to contrast the two opposing views of ‘Glasto’ – the BBC’s view, which is that it is the country ‘coming together’ and the widespread views of recusants who believe it to be a convocation of hugely irritating people whose views are not shared by the majority. For Monbiot, though, it was simply an opportunity to peddle a lie that I thought nuking Glasto might not be a bad idea, all things considered. But then, of course, if you are unable to respond like a normal being to humour, you are unlikely to understand very much at all.”
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-intense-and-consuming-stupidity-of-george-monbiot/
But chauve souris de la lune is not alone…
“Brighton council leader reports Rod Liddle to the police
This weekend, the Labour leader of Brighton and Hove county council, Bella Sankey (who clearly has too much time on her hands) tweeted that she was reporting both Rod and the Spectator’s editor, Michael Gove, to Sussex police for ‘incitement to terrorism’.”
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/brighton-council-leader-reports-rod-to-the-police/
One for the Duchess – when she has a moment?
There is a reason why Skeptics call him “Moonbat”. His latest screed is a perfect example
I thought I would beat the University of Colorado to it and fit a quadratic to the 4 results shown in the photo. Extrapolating, like all well trained climate experts, I reach zero greatly worried by Climate Change in about 2063!! That’s a deceleration of 0.035 “greatly worried” / year2.
“The worst curve fitting scenarios involve models that either don’t fit the data well or, worse, are completely inappropriate for the data and lead to misleading conclusions. This can stem from a variety of issues, including poorly chosen models, incorrect constraints, or even using techniques like high-order polynomials on data ill-suited for them.”
I’d describe how to fill an Excel column with pseudo-random numbers, add the first half of the series to a line chart, curve fit the first half with a polynomial that looks good except at the end, and project forward where the second half of the series would go, then add a second chart with the whole series for comparison- all of which I’m guessing AW knows how to do, maybe even has done -so that people who have never tried it can see just how bad polynomial fits usually look outside the range used during the fitting process. The mere effort to explain what could be done has turned this comment into TLDR. Either you’ve done it or not. If not, trust me, polynomial fits are most often garbage.
Perhaps if Al spoke with just a bit more faux anger he could tick that worry percentage up to 41.
“We have data going all the way back since 1989….”
Like, as if that was a long time- seems like yesterday to we geezers. 🙂
A thousand perfectly distributed thermometers producing perfectly accurate temperature measurements for 1000 years would not be enough.
Man-made climate Change is a complete hoax perpetrated by a group of corrupt and biased political activists acting as researchers. AGW is the greatest scientific hoax in history, and it is nothing different than Russiagate, Hunter Laptop, Lab Leak, etc, etc. Same cast of corrupt characters.
https://app.screencast.com/nXfZcUyGR4QlR
https://app.screencast.com/DFd1viHxsRjq7
https://app.screencast.com/ZMpNTvkLD7DDJ
“Man-made climate Change is…”
A [fictitious and very effective political] tool.
We go out in the world and take our chances
Fate is just the weight of circumstances
That’s the way that lady luck dances
Roll the bones
Why are we here?
Because we’re here.
Roll the bones
Why does it happen?
Because it happens.
Roll the bones
Read about witch trials: Witch trials in the early modern period – Wikipedia
I think if you equate Carbon Dioxide to a witch, the similarity is amazing. Related questions: How did it start? How will it end?
If my New England folk education is correct, it started with some excited little girls making excited little accusations and ended when the wrong people got crushed under piles of stones.
By analogy I think Gore is a good fit for “excited little girls” and middle class democratic voters are a good fit for “the wrong people”.
New England, like the planet, survived just fine and developed a high end college reputation. The residents have found things to complain about other than witches – but with all those stones that push up every winter… I mean they have to stone _something_.
another CNN Anal cyst …..
😉
All those greatly worried about CC keep on using FF every day, so what they do and what they say are different. That says a lot to me.
Isn’t the shock that 40% of the population are such mindless blobs they are still worried about it?
I do not recall people being concerned about climate change in 1989. If it were so they were simply a fringe group that were hardly noticed, the small IPCC crowd that few even followed.
I first read articles advocating CO2 emissions reductions starting around 1975. That was also when the OPEC oil embargo was a big issue and there was lots of stuff pushing alternative energy. Magazines like Mother Earth News, New Shelter, Rolling Stone, Alternative Energy, and others where full of articles on wind turbine design, passive and active solar energy systems, wood heating and off grid living. Hundreds of wind, solar and wood stove companies sprang up almost overnight and vanished almost as quickly. Some good stuff came out of that period including much more energy efficient buildings, cars and appliances. But that was low hanging fruit and the law of diminishing returns has turned the activist push for massive investment in ever more expensive and complex alternative energy into an economic disaster. Wind, solar and EV companies are failing in spite of getting big subsides.
Meanwhile, the seemingly plausible concern about CO2 emissions causing climate to change for the worse has clearly been overblown. 50 years later our weather and climate are no more or less variable than they have ever been even though all the alternative energy investment has had no impact on the rate of CO2 increase.
I’ve been a meteorologist now for going on 40yrs. I knew this was a scam (the AGW part especially) from the beginning and do to this day. I love it when people at parties, gatherings that I meet who ask me (after they find out I am a Met) about ‘globalwarmingclimatechangecatastrophe’. I think I have changed or at least swayed many minds over the years.
I live in a “tradie” type town.. people who work hard and build things…
Basically everyone I talk to thinks its a load of hogwash.
Canada’s CBC is as bad as the rest of the climate alarmist media outlets. It’s always throwing one climate threat after the other at its viewers/listeners but never will it point out the positive effects of fossil fuel consumption or the incidences of greater global longevity, increased agricultural production, rising populations, higher national GDPs, lowered poverty levels and infant mortality, among others. Particularly irritating is the fact that the network is public funded; yet it attracts a remarkably small national audience. There’s a considerable degree of public suspicion that it accepts generous contributions from environmental groups like Greenpeace, the Suzuki Foundation, and Greenpeace, to name a few, to accentuate all negative climate occurrences while downplaying or ignoring the positive ones.
It is sad that it has taken CNN’s chief data analyst this long to see the obvious. We have all grown up with children’s stories about what happens when you don’t tell the truth or deceive people. You know like Chicken Little and The Boy Who Cried Wolf? This is not hard to understand.
So, Al Gore is also a projectionist. He is multi-talented. I bet he has a forked tongue.
Maybe all the news (ad placements) and retracted science (more ad placements) were not as effective as the marketing consultants (climate communicators) promised.