Articles Tagged "Public Polls"

Poor Al Gore. As if an im- pending divorce and allegations of sexual misconduct from an Oregon masseuse weren't bad enough (he has since been cleared of wrongdoing), the apparent collapse of "cap-and-trade" legislation in the U.S. Senate has driven the former vice president to despair.

As reported by Steve Milloy on his blog Green Hell, Mr. Gore recently admitted to supporters in a conference call, "[T]his [cap-and-trade] battle has not been successful and is pretty much over for this year." Mr. Gore blamed everyone and their monkey for the failure of Congress to pass comprehensive climate legislation, including his former colleagues: "The U.S. Senate has failed us," he lamented, "the federal government has failed us."

The fortunes of Mr. Gore's global-warming crusade certainly are in decline: A recent Rasmussen poll found that just 34 percent of respondents "feel human activity is the main contributor" to global warming and that the percentage of those who consider global warming a "serious issue" has "trended down slightly since last November."

Mr. Gore himself is to blame for at least some of the public backlash against global-warming orthodoxy: Using bad science to justify bad policy will inevitably rub people the wrong way. And Mr. Gore has not helped his cause by consistently expressing outrageous falsehoods ("the debate is over") and shamelessly trying to shield his assertions from legitimate criticism by claiming "settled science." All the while, he has enriched himself and pushed a left-wing economic agenda.

Fewer believe climate change results from human activities

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Australians' attitudes about global warming could be a factor later this month in the general election where climate change has emerged as an issue. The percentage of Australians who are aware of climate change and say it results from human activities fell from 52% in June 2008 to 44% in March 2010, while the number attributing it to natural causes increased 10 percentage points.

Such a shift is particularly noteworthy among a population that follows the global warming debate closely. Awareness of climate change in Australia remains among the highest measured in the world -- 97% say they know "a great deal" (24%) or "something" (73%) about the issue. Therefore, the "climategate" controversy that surfaced in late 2009 may partly explain some of the shifts in Australians' attitudes on primary causes. Published e-mails from University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) -- one of the world's leading climate study institutions -- called CRU's research into question. The accusation that CRU was manipulating the data to inflate the case for human-caused climate change has since been refuted.

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As I mentioned in Al Gore Appears–Note to Warmers: No More Do-Overs!:

If at first they don’t succeed then they will deny and lie again! And that goes for the second time, the third, the fourth …. You get it – as never-ending as Florida recounts; it goes on and on until responsible people step in and put a stop to it.

From the ardent Internet believer in global warming “theory” who can’t provide any real scientific evidence, to the East Anglia researchers who insist that Climategate is merely a misunderstanding, to IPCC defenders who claim their reports are only in error by a few insignificant typos, to Al Gore still battling the imminent destruction of planet Earth by the evil “global warming pollutants,” there can never be too many chances to ignore defeat and start all over again – from the beginning.

OK … now … certainly if you’ve tried to follow the warmers arguments at all, you remember the claim of a “scientific consensus.” It was showcased in Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth. Supposedly, all credible scientists were absolutely certain that the things he said in his movie were true; just as surely as gravity exists and the earth is round.

It’s part of the basic propaganda formula. Claiming that everyone who’s anyone believes … is sometimes called the bandwagon technique. In this case, the “everyone” refers to scientists, and that adds an appeal to authority, another propaganda ploy. (related article on these techniques and others) Al Gore was very direct. “This isn’t me claiming these things,” he insisted. (I’m not going to watch the movie again to make sure I have this word for word, but it’s accurate.) “These are scientists.” And he went on to quote figures from a published article on how many articles had been published that referred to global warming.

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Many climate researchers worry that scepticism about global warming is on the rise. Jeff Tollefson investigates the basis for that concern and what scientists are doing about it.

Last November, a catchy music video popped up on YouTube and attracted thousands of fans. Called 'Hide the Decline', the video featured a caricature of climate researcher Michael Mann admitting that he had committed fraud while creating his famous 'hockey-stick' graph of temperatures over the past millennium. Accompanied by a kitten playing the guitar, the cartoon image of Mann joyfully sings, "Making up data the old hard way, fudging the numbers day by day."

The video wasn't funny to the real Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. A lawyer wrote to the group responsible for it, threatening to sue them for defamation and for using a copyrighted image. The video was promptly taken down and a new version — without the copyrighted photo — appeared on YouTube.

Mann has grown weary of dealing with the various groups that are criticizing him. "In reality, these groups are guilty over and over again of defamation, slander and libel, but that is far more difficult to fight legally," Mann says. "Even if you were to prevail, you would have invested potentially several years of your career, and frankly those of us who love doing science are not willing to do that."

Mann isn't alone in wondering how to respond to the wave of attacks that followed November's leak of e-mails from climate researchers at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. Beyond the satire and vitriol appearing on blogs, researchers have endured threatening phone messages and other forms of harassment. And they're frustrated that governments have yet to mobilize in the face of solid evidence for global warming. All of this has spread fear among climate scientists that they are losing the war over public opinion, just a few years after a swell of support followed the most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in Geneva, Switzerland, which garnered a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

However, polling data suggest that the situation is not as dire as many researchers suspect. Studies in the United States and the United Kingdom show that belief in global warming has dropped in recent years, but a majority of people still trust climate scientists. There are also signs that public support for actions on global warming have grown in recent months.

Global warming scepticism is rising, a major poll shows.

It found that 78 per cent of Britons believed the world's climate was changing, compared to 91 per cent five years ago. Researchers said the growing doubts had been fuelled by the coldest winter in three decades and the row over leaked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit.

These appeared to show that scientists manipulated data on temperature records, although two inquiries ruled out malpractice. The Ipsos Mori survey of 1,822 people for Cardiff University found 40 per cent believed the seriousness of global warming was exaggerated. But the vast majority believed in climate change and that human activity was to blame.

Only 18 per cent thought it was mainly or entirely caused by natural processes. Almost two-thirds would be willing to cut their energy use to help tackle the problem, and 40 per cent would pay significantly more for energy-efficient products.

Professor Nick Pidgeon, of Cardiff University's school of psychology, said the fall in belief in climate change could be down to people's 'finite pool of worry' and greater concern with the financial crisis. He added: 'The short-term effects are more obvious - the emails and the fact we had a very cold winter - and people think "where is global warming when we're sitting here in 3ft of snow?".'

According to Newsweek, we are "crazed flat-earther", however the underline score is we are now starting to come out on top regarding public opinion, another year and who knows we may be just "Moon landing deniers".

Bickering and defensive, climate researchers have lost the public’s trust.

Blame economic worries, another freezing winter, or the cascade of scandals emerging from the world’s leading climate-research body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But concern over global warming has cooled down dramatically. In über-green Germany, only 42 percent of citizens worry about global warming now, down from 62 percent in 2006. In Britain, just 26 percent believe climate change is man-made, down from 41 percent as recently as November 2009. And Americans rank global warming dead last in a list of 21 problems that concern them, according to a January Pew poll.

The shift has left many once celebrated climate researchers feeling like the used-car salesmen of the science world. In Britain, one leading scientist told an interviewer he is taking anti-anxiety pills and considered suicide following the leak of thousands of IPCC-related e-mails and documents suggesting that researchers cherry-picked data and suppressed rival studies to play up global warming. In the U.S., another researcher is under investigation for allegedly using exaggerated climate data to obtain public funds. In an open letter published in the May issue of Science magazine, 255 American climate researchers decry “political assaults” on their work by “deniers” and followers of “dogma” and “special interests.”

Only 62% of Britons interested in subject, down from 80% in 2006, according to YouGov survey

Popular concern about climate change has declined significantly, following this year's harsh winter and rows over statistics on global warming, a survey has found.

The numbers of those interested in where Britain's electricity comes from have also slipped back, according to a survey commissioned by the energy company EDF, demonstrating what appears to be growing consumer complacency in an era of electric-powered gadgetry.

At the same time resistance to building new nuclear power stations appears to be slackening. The results of the YouGov poll, based on a sample of 4,300 adults questioned during the week after the general election, show that interest in climate change fell from 80% of respondents in 2006, to 71% last year and now stands at only 62%. Only 80% say they are interested in where electrical power is made, down from 82% the previous year.

Other recent polls have recorded a similar drop in public alarm about the imminence of climate-triggered disaster. The number of climate change agnostics – those unsure whether human activity is warming the planet – has risen from 25% in 2007 to 33% now.

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Click for NYT article - Climate Fears Turn to Doubts Among Britons

Good news! What is perhaps the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on humanity is now sliding toward the ash heap of history: the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming.

The hypothesis never got much support beyond “fudged” computer models and a lot of conjecture and hysteria, but Al Gore and his fellow apostles of environmental doom wanted everyone to believe that all scientists believed it, and you should, too. Even the so-called “consensus” claim was a hoax; tens of thousands of scientists never bought it. Socialists like Al Gore simply wanted to appeal to people’s “herd instinct” and motivate them to move in the direction they perceived the herd was going.

People were already realizing in greater numbers that anthropogenic global warming claims were nothing but hot air, but when it was revealed that the Climate Research Unit in England, one of about four sources for all the “information” supporting the hypothesis of AGW, was playing fast and loose with the data, ClimateGate accelerated the demise of this already-thin theory.

Americans are increasingly less worried about global warming and less convinced its effects are already happening, according to an annual Gallup survey released Thursday.

The poll also finds a sharp turnaround in views about what's causing the rise in global temperatures. Half, or 50%, now agree with most climate scientists that human activities are the cause, down from 61% in 2003.

"The survey results show that the reversal in Americans' concerns about global warming that began last year has continued in 2010 -- in some cases reverting to the levels recorded when Gallup began tracking global warming measures more than a decade ago," Gallup says.

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