Here's Why People Don't Buy Global Warming

(National Review Online)  Though professional hysterics may seek to "hide the decline," there has been a noticeable drop in the number of Americans who believe that global warming is a man-made phenomenon. Pause on that for a moment. Though Americans have been harangued about global warming for more than a decade, only 35 percent told a recent Pew survey that global warming is a serious problem, compared with 44 percent the previous year.

This skepticism predated the exposure of the East Anglia e-mails - those playful missives that reveal some of the most prominent climate researchers to be, if not outright charlatans, at least partisans.

Why don't people buy global warming? Doubtless the poor economy has pushed less immediate worries to the background. But even before the e-mails revealed that supposed neutral truth seekers were prepared to "redefine peer review," and engage in statistical sleight of hand "to hide" inconvenient truths, there were ample reasons for skepticism.

* It's chilly. There is the pesky fact that, contrary to the dire predictions of climate alarmists, there has been no measurable increase in world temperatures since 1998. Yet the amount of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere has continued to rise. The computer models immortalized by Al Gore did not anticipate this; in fact, they predicted that temperatures would continue to rise steeply more or less forever, except that human beings would all die in 50 years or so with unknown (though presumably salutary) effects on the by-then Venus-like surface of planet Earth.

* Bullying. Every time a scientist or policymaker slammed his hand on a desk and growled, "The science is settled!" he demonstrated how remote he was from the scientific method. In true science, nothing is ever settled.

* It's Freudian. The Viennese analyst taught that if you say you hate your mother, you hate your mother. And if you say you love your mother, you are in denial about hating your mother. Climate-change believers are like Freudians. If the weather is warm, it's proof of global warming. But if the weather is cool, this is evidence of the sinister tricks global warming can play.

* Look at the graphs comparing sunspot activity since 1860 with global sea surface temperatures. They look like matching S curves (unlike the graphs comparing temperatures with CO₂ output). Harvard astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon notes that 2008 may have been a cold year because sunspot activity was low. The sun has been quiet in 2009 too. "If this deep solar minimum continues," Dr. Soon explains, "and our planet cools while CO₂ levels continue to rise, thinking needs to change. This will be a very telling time and it's very, very useful in terms of science and society, in my opinion."

* Nuclear energy. Global-warming priests, while sermonizing about the need to spend trillions on new energy sources, almost never have a kind word for nuclear power - casting doubt on their motives. If the goal were really to reduce our carbon output (and not to recast our way of life), clean, efficient, affordable nuclear power would be the obvious choice.

* Fool me once. The same people whose hair is on fire now about climate change have dressed up in fright masks before. Thirty years ago they were (no joke) enormously agitated about the coming new ice age. From these same precincts (the Club of Rome, 1972) we were warned that the world was rapidly running out of oil, gas, aluminum, lead, zinc, copper, tin, and uranium. (We didn't.) At the same time, all of the smart people were absolutely convinced that overpopulation was the greatest threat to the globe and to humanity itself. Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, offered in 1980 that "if I were a gambler, I would bet even money that England will not exist in the year 2000." That same year, the Carter administration issued a global forecast predicting that "the world in 2000 will be more crowded, more polluted, less stable ecologically . . . and the world's people will be poorer in many ways than they are today." Um, no.

The scaremongers' track record is poor. For people who seem to worship Mother Earth, they are oddly arrogant about their ability to understand complex systems like climate. Every day brings new discoveries about the incredibly complicated interplay of oceans, atmospheric gases, algae, wind, plants, animal excretions, solar radiation, and so forth.

The East Anglia e-mails reveal a priesthood becoming more and more hysterical as their certainty evaporates. Like all orthodoxies under duress, they are making war on heresy.

By Mona Charen:
Reprinted with permission from National Review Online

[ge556]

The reason people doubt global warming is the same as the reason people doubted the dangers of tobacco years ago--people like Mona Charen misleading us about the dangers.

Claiming that the East Anglia email messages showed deception is a lie.

Claiming that there has been no global warming since 1998 is a lie. The warmest decade on record was 2001-2010, with 2 years warmer than 1988.

Claiming that the people warning about climate change are bullies? Nonsense.

And for her to be surprised that people who care about the environment might be cautious about nuclear power is disingenuous.

[ge556]

Oops--that "1988" should read "1998".

[ge556]

The 21st century started with the warmest decade in history. But the deniers used 1998 (the warmest year in the 20th century, by far) as their baseline. "Only" two years of the 21st century, so far, have been warmer, and they use that to try to claim that global warming is not happening. But if you look at the data, there's no reason to believe that the trend is stopping, especially if you take El Nino and La Nina into account.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/

Also, the writer's "Climategate" claims of inappropriate behavior by the climate scientists have been debunked, but the deniers like to just ignore those facts, too.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/12/climategate-debunking-get_n_642980.html

[Void-Master]

Let us assume for the sake of argument that the alarmists are correct: that global warming is the result of human activity. That means the only way to stop it (never mind reverse it) would be to do away with advanced, technologically driven civilization.

So assuming that you are willing to return to the Stone Age, all you have to do now to solve global warming is convince the rest of the species to do the same.

Good luck with that.

[ge556]

Nonsense. We don't have to get rid of civilization, we have to stop burning fossil fuels so much. We have a great option in clean energy, with more jobs and less pollution.

[noloyalisti]

The main reason is that right wing wacko corporate Republicons like the "people" at the National Review have billions of dollars worth of propaganda. They have tricked Americans (and others) into thinking they are better than anyone else and deserved to be able to waste at will. They can live in the suburbs and drive their SUVs to the shopping malls to buy cheap junk from overseas to store in their storage units and closets and basements.

Good job NRO.

[noloyalisti]

Facts are facts about this. Unless you are a right wing wacko. The only question is how bad the damage will be and if we will even survive in any kind of decent manner. I myself it's going to be very, very ugly with lots of disaster and starvation of billions.

But that is the beauty of the right wing wackos like these at the National Review. Make there be enough doubt about the facts so that everyone else has to suffer the consequences and pay for it while the Top 1% go off scott free to their private compound.

Make more and more ignorant self-hating Americans destroy themselves. So far so good.

[doubleecho-2009]

Poor Mona - repeating the SAME tired, old & disproven non-sense. Just doing her job as part of the right-wing echo chamber apparently. If ONLY these folks would just shutup & let actual scientists handle this?
You know - the 98% of whom find the facts of human caused climate change to be convincing?

[Dr_Pangloss]

Other polls on this page say that the majority reject evolution and believe in ghosts. We have a lot of superstitious people who are not capable of thinking about a scientific matter like this.

Why would you poll the general public on a topic of this nature? If you had cancer, would you ask some guy who worked at the gas station for his medical opinion?

[newsieee]

How can you say overpopulation isn't a problem? We only finite space and resources

[Void-Master]

Look to the heavens. We have infinite space... We just need to stop screwing around and get out there.

[gbev88]

I think being skeptical of science and media claims is healthy. The author is correct in noting inaccuracies in predictions based on science. However, its important to avoid being dismissive of evidence. I'm defining evidence as recorded data in the context of methodologies. Evidence shows that average world temperature is increasing (not sure what the author is saying there). However, "global warming" is a bit of a misnomer because the temperature is not predicted to increase in all parts of the world. The author of this article should probably read a little about the issue because this is an important and fundamental distinction. Climate change is not something we can observe in our daily lives especially because overall, world temperatures are increasing by fractions of a degree every year. While this might not seem like a lot, but it is consider the fact that water is solid or liquid below or above exactly 0 degrees centigrade. Global temperatures are actually increasing at an accelerated rate not accounted for by ice age cycles and there is a vast quantity of data collected to show this to be true. Whether or not climate change is or is not occurring is not being debated with scientific evidence. The debate is whether or not climate change is anthropogenic. Basic chemistry, a field relatively impenetrable to politics and bias, tells us that the things we currently do as humans could cause climate change/warming. How much? Difficult to say, but there seems to be a lot of good evidence that what we do is a major and significant contributer. Most scientists agree even though they have strong incentives not. Good evidence that climate change is not happening would result in fame and grant money, everything a scientist wants.

[Rick_Carter1]

Natural cycles predict global cooling. Global warming would be far worse already if this were not true. Most earlier predictions did not take the cooling effect of these natural cycles into account. But at the same time, this only leaves mankind as the possible cause of global warming. But don't try explaining that to a (seemingly) intelligent species which suffers from a collective death wish. - Rick Carter

[bmallen3]

true, next up in the multi-million year cycle is an ice age which will be devastating.

[ge556]

Maybe we should save the fossil fuels for the next ice age.