Steep Decline In Americans' Belief In Global Warming

[kristopher]

WASHINGTON — Americans seem to be cooling toward global warming. Just 57 percent think there is solid evidence the world is getting warmer, down 20 points in just three years, a new poll says. And the share of people who believe pollution caused by humans is causing temperatures to rise has also taken a dip, even as the U.S. and world forums gear up for possible action against climate change.

In a poll of 1,500 adults by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, released Thursday, the number of people saying there is strong scientific evidence that the Earth has gotten warmer over the past few decades is down from 71 percent in April of last year and from 77 percent when Pew started asking the question in 2006. The number of people who see the situation as a serious problem also has declined.

The steepest drop has occurred during the past year, as Congress and the Obama administration have taken steps to control heat-trapping emissions for the first time and international negotiations for a new treaty to slow global warming have been under way. At the same time, there has been mounting scientific evidence of climate change – from melting ice caps to the world's oceans hitting the highest monthly recorded temperatures this summer.

The poll was released a day after 18 scientific organizations...


Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/22/steep-decline-in-american_n_330315.html


57% also happens to be where Obama's job approval rating is at right now. Considering the degree of drop in the past year I attribute the decline to politics related to the anti-Obama movement.

[Chemisse]

1. Why on earth do people feel compelled to politicize this problem?

I just cannot understand how something like this can be a political stance. Rivers are pouring off the ice cap in Greenland, more so each summer. It's not something that requires 'belief'.

What kind of person would pretend that is not happening for some obscure political purpose?

[opihimoimoi]

2. Mostly brain addled Republicans

[kestrel91316]

7. People who believe, deep down inside, that the world was put here

specifically and exclusively for us to rape, pillage, and pollute as much as our little hearts desire, so that we can accumulate as many cheap Chinese plastic gewgaws and crackerbox houses and penis extensions as we can before the whole house of cards comes down.

IOW, RWers.

[paulsby]

13. look at the larry summers flap

science and politics have always been conjoined, and always will. show me a society where it doesn't happen. NONE exist.

[excess_3]

20. nobody wants to suffer economically, applies double to greenies

greenies (or self-claimed greenies)
want to make money off the deal.

which tends to put people off

[Nihil]

23. F.O.A.D.

[fascisthunter]

3. there's nothing to "believe", it's based on science, not science fiction

or religious belief. It's based on proven facts...

[Zoeisright]

8. THANK you!

That's what I keep saying too. I don't know where people get the idea that you 'believe' in science. You either understand it or you don't.

[bhikkhu]

21. or: "Reality" is what persists whether it is believed in or not.

That's what I tell my kids, and I get a little annoyed by the focus on "believing in" something or other that our culture has.

[raynjulsks]

24. Actually, critical review of scientific theory is KEY to science

The question is not whether there is climate change, but whether it is anthropogenic in nature. That is decidedly not a "proven fact", and it is certainly reasonable for people to critically question whether this portion of the climate change picture is accurate if we are on the cusp of enacting legislation in response to it...

[Viking12]

27. Yawn.

[kristopher]

28. Bullshit.

[raynjulsks]

31. Nothing like a well reasoned and rational response....

[kristopher]

35. Bullshit.

[joshcryer]

29. The IR absorbtion and emissivity of CO2 is a proven fact.

Feel free to read your CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics.

[raynjulsks]

30. True...but

Not sure if that is the only applicable mechanism at play in the climatology models...

[NickB79]

34. Of course it isn't the only applicable mechanism at play

But that argument is a strawman. Every study so far has concluded that the PRIMARY driving force behind climate change is the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. All other possible sources of climate change, such as solar variance, have been found to contribute no more than a few percent to the observed changes in global temps. When you factor out all known naturally occurring phenomena that might be responsible, you are still left with a very large percentage remaining that can only be explained by human action.

Because human activity is "only" responsible for 90% of observed climate change rather than 100% is no excuse to claim we aren't at fault and that we should take no action to slow CO2 emissions.

[texastoast]

4. Maybe because Valero is advertising on their gas pumps

that acknowledging global is going to cost them money at the pumps?

:shrug:

[Mike Nelson]

5. It challenges the belief that ...

...God alone controls such things.

[joshcryer]

6. Political reality in the US tends to work this way, unfortunately.

The reality is that the people who matter know something is up even if their outspoken beliefs are not in line with their day to day observations.

[hatrack]

9. I had to brush snow off my car this morning, thus disproving the existence of summer. . .

:eyes:

[Laelth]

10. Our 1st Amendment gets us into trouble, occasionally.

It is very hard for us to control the spread of dangerous lies.

:dem:

-Laelth

[wuvuj]

11. Especially when the MSM...

...is used to spread them?

[Laelth]

12. Yes, especially then.

But it doesn't really matter who is doing the spreading, it's almost always protected by the 1st Amendment if its political speech.

:dem:

-Laelth

[NecklyTyler]

15. Right wing hate radio monopolizing the public air waves is all political

With Limbaugh, Beck, Boortz, Hanninty, and Lebin spewing indoctrination to their followers, the right wingers have found a political enemy to rally around. They have convinced quite a few people that global warming is an invention of the left to control the world

[fascisthunter]

16. whata bizarre conspiracy theory

[unblock]

14. our belief in global warming changes like the weather.

:groan:

[jimlup]

17. Sorry to say it but ...

A large portion of the population is just plane stupid.

[NNadir]

18. Well, it's not like YOU take it seriously...

You actively oppose the world's largest, by far, source of climate change gas primary energy while offering unproved fantasies as an alternative not to dangerous fossil fuels - about which you couldn't care less as you hawk bullshit "clean coal" schemes - but to, um, the world's largest form of climate change gas free primary energy.

If there was ever a case of the coal soot encrusted pot calling the kettle black, this would be it.

[kristopher]

33. No I don't.

I oppose spending money on the least effective solutions to climate change and energy security.

http://www.rsc.org/publishing/journals/EE/article.asp?doi=b809990c

Energy Environ. Sci., 2009, 2, 148 - 173, DOI: 10.1039/b809990c
Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security

Mark Z. Jacobson

This paper reviews and ranks major proposed energy-related solutions to global warming, air pollution mortality, and energy security while considering other impacts of the proposed solutions, such as on water supply, land use, wildlife, resource availability, thermal pollution, water chemical pollution, nuclear proliferation, and undernutrition.

Nine electric power sources and two liquid fuel options are considered. The electricity sources include solar-photovoltaics (PV), concentrated solar power (CSP), wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, wave, tidal, nuclear, and coal with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. The liquid fuel options include corn-ethanol (E85) and cellulosic-E85. To place the electric and liquid fuel sources on an equal footing, we examine their comparative abilities to address the problems mentioned by powering new-technology vehicles, including battery-electric vehicles (BEVs), hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (HFCVs), and flex-fuel vehicles run on E85.

Twelve combinations of energy source-vehicle type are considered. Upon ranking and weighting each combination with respect to each of 11 impact categories, four clear divisions of ranking, or tiers, emerge.

Tier 1 (highest-ranked) includes wind-BEVs and wind-HFCVs.
Tier 2 includes CSP-BEVs, geothermal-BEVs, PV-BEVs, tidal-BEVs, and wave-BEVs.
Tier 3 includes hydro-BEVs, nuclear-BEVs, and CCS-BEVs.
Tier 4 includes corn- and cellulosic-E85.

Wind-BEVs ranked first in seven out of 11 categories, including the two most important, mortality and climate damage reduction. Although HFCVs are much less efficient than BEVs, wind-HFCVs are still very clean and were ranked second among all combinations.

Tier 2 options provide significant benefits and are recommended.

Tier 3 options are less desirable. However, hydroelectricity, which was ranked ahead of coal-CCS and nuclear with respect to climate and health, is an excellent load balancer, thus recommended.

The Tier 4 combinations (cellulosic- and corn-E85) were ranked lowest overall and with respect to climate, air pollution, land use, wildlife damage, and chemical waste. Cellulosic-E85 ranked lower than corn-E85 overall, primarily due to its potentially larger land footprint based on new data and its higher upstream air pollution emissions than corn-E85.

Whereas cellulosic-E85 may cause the greatest average human mortality, nuclear-BEVs cause the greatest upper-limit mortality risk due to the expansion of plutonium separation and uranium enrichment in nuclear energy facilities worldwide. Wind-BEVs and CSP-BEVs cause the least mortality.

The footprint area of wind-BEVs is 2–6 orders of magnitude less than that of any other option. Because of their low footprint and pollution, wind-BEVs cause the least wildlife loss.

The largest consumer of water is corn-E85. The smallest are wind-, tidal-, and wave-BEVs.

The US could theoretically replace all 2007 onroad vehicles with BEVs powered by 73000–144000 5 MW wind turbines, less than the 300000 airplanes the US produced during World War II, reducing US CO2 by 32.5–32.7% and nearly eliminating 15000/yr vehicle-related air pollution deaths in 2020.

In sum, use of wind, CSP, geothermal, tidal, PV, wave, and hydro to provide electricity for BEVs and HFCVs and, by extension, electricity for the residential, industrial, and commercial sectors, will result in the most benefit among the options considered. The combination of these technologies should be advanced as a solution to global warming, air pollution, and energy security. Coal-CCS and nuclear offer less benefit thus represent an opportunity cost loss, and the biofuel options provide no certain benefit and the greatest negative impacts.

[Kablooie]

19. Seems people believe it during the summer and stop believing in fall and winter.

[raynjulsks]

25. or maybe not even in the summer

when you have the coolest July in 115 years... at least in parts of the US.

[muriel_volestrangler]

32. This is about GLOBAL warming

They don't call it "parts of the US warming", do they?

Global figures: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt

June 2009: 2nd warmest June on record
July 2009: 2nd warmest July on record
August 2009: 6th warmest August on record

Try not to be so parochial.

[tinrobot]

22. Belief is a religious term, this is about science.

[The2ndWheel]

26. That 57% can't even agree on what to do about it

"gear up for possible action against climate change."

They may or may not agree on anything(who knows what), which they might start doing a few years from now(very urgent), so that we might be able to get to this or that point(business-as-usual #'s), relative to what we were doing 20 years ago(because it was somehow sustainable then), decades from now(everything has to go exactly the way we need it to go). Plus, there is no action we could take in order to stop climate change that wouldn't change the climate, so we're really not even trying to stop climate change.