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back to article US climate-change skeptics losing support

Not only does a growing majority of Americans believe that global warming is, indeed, underway, but for the first time a majority have come to the conclusion that it's caused by human activity. "Americans' belief in the reality of global warming has increased by 13 percentage points over the past two and a half years, from 57 …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    As someone who considers himself too ill-versed in the science to draw a reasonable conclusion, and as someone who voiciferously opposes measures to force behavior change in the name of efficiency (lack of 100watt incandescents, for example), and as someone who is continually annoyed by luddites and extremist do-gooder environmentalists who oppose nuclear power... As someone in all of those categories...

    ...I have to say that the boiling rage of people like the 'skeptics' in this thread inclines me strongly to take a default position in favor of man-made warming. When faced on one side with ill-paid (relatively) scientists who have no motivation to take a false stand in favor of GW, and on the other side with the collective barbaric yawp sounded by incensed-to-insensibility forum posters and far-right bookmongers (whose record of correctness in other areas is, to say the least, sketchy) I have a pretty strong circumstantial case.

    Honesty, I'd kind of rather be wrong with the scientists than right with the frothing forumites and apoplectic authors.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      best comment ever.

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    2. InnerCynic
      Reply Icon
      Mushroom

      Say what?

      Have no motivation? Are you nuts?! Those involved in pimping the global warming hysteria are most certainly funded or have their dirty mitts in tax-funded pies that the rest of us will be bent over and forced to pay up for. Don't be so naive.

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    3. peter_dtm
      Reply Icon
      Holmes

      --> David W. Posted Sunday 21st October 2012 02:02 GMT

      Do your self a favour

      Find out how much money 'Big Oil' donates to Green Peace & WWF (Shell is one of WWF biggest donnors)

      How may CAGW proponent climate scientists are wholly funded by Governments who are not exactly neutral ?

      See if you can find out where people like Steve MacIntyre and Anthony Watts earn their funding - and how much they actually get ?

      Now come back with just who is 'ill paid' (How much does Phil Jones of CRU earn ? How about the Head of the Met Office ?)

      You do know the founders of GreenPeace left in disgust because of the political take over ?

      Have a look at a few web sites; try asking questions on say WattsUpWithThat and SkepticalScience - you may well be insulted on both; but give it a go :

      Question 1 : Please explain why Solar input is effectively ignored by the IPCC; surely the SUn has more influance than CO2 ?

      Question 2 : Please explain why CO" is not causing 2 degrees per century global warming; after all the IPCC says this is so

      and ask some of those questions you may have about the science behind AGW.

      Boiling Rage - have you read some of the things said about people who do not BELIEVE in CAGW; - they are compared to Holocaust Deniers (the term denier is deliberate).

      Hanson wants them to be tried for War Crimes

      Have a look at what happened to Dr Judith Curry when she dared suggest that there should be DISCUSSION between the Catastrophic Climate Change believers and the skeptical community - which includes Physicists and Statisticians.

      Research the inability of so called deniers to get peer reviewed papers published and the propaganda war (IPCC response to being caught out using WWF non-peer reviewed papers purporting to show glacier melt down was to shout VODOO SCIENCE at the people who demonstrated the nonsense published by the IPCC)

      IF CO2 is not a problem what happens to :

      the IPCC jamborees

      RoC (tax on energy-- $$$)

      Carbon Exchanges (where RoC are supposed to be traded for $$$$; Al Gore founded the Chicago RoC exchange)

      Windmills

      Bio Fuels

      the whole renewable energy scam (I speak the word scam as an engineer)

      Taxes

      The doubling of your lecky bills over the next 5 years ..

      The crippling of the economy in the UK -- EU -- USA as pointless restrictions on cheap energy push us back to a feudal existence

      and so on and so on...

      FWIW - The climate changes; always has and always will; the skeptics question the influence of CO2 and man's OTHER activities on the climate; and especially question the CATASTROPHIC projection of some shoddy models.

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      1. Dodgy Geezer Silver badge
        Reply Icon
        Boffin

        Re: --> David W. Posted Sunday 21st October 2012 02:02 GMT

        ...Have a look at a few web sites; try asking questions on say WattsUpWithThat and SkepticalScience - you may well be insulted on both; but give it a go :

        Question 1 : Please explain why Solar input is effectively ignored by the IPCC; surely the SUn has more influance than CO2 ?

        Question 2 : Please explain why CO" is not causing 2 degrees per century global warming; after all the IPCC says this is so

        and ask some of those questions you may have about the science behind AGW...

        If I may, I would like to take a guess at the answers to those questions from each camp. W=warmists, S=Skeptics.

        1 - Why ignore the Sun?

        W - The heat input from the Sun has been fairly stable over this period, and it has not varied sufficiently to explain the increase in temperatures.

        S - But the Solar magnetic activity cycle HAS varied in line with the observed temperatures. And Dr Svenmark has proposed a mechanism whereby this could easily cause the observed temperature variation.

        W - We don't accept unproven hypotheses.

        2 - Why does the increase in CO2 not result in recent warming?

        W - There may often be pauses due to natural cycles overwhelming the signal. A few years may easily show a drop. But the signal is still there. We would only get worried if the temperature paused for a long period - say, 15 years.

        S - But it's been 16 years with no warming now....

        W - Sorry - did we say 15? We meant 20....

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        1. NomNomNom
          Reply Icon

          Re: --> David W. Posted Sunday 21st October 2012 02:02 GMT

          "But the Solar magnetic activity cycle HAS varied in line with the observed temperatures"

          No, it just hasn't. If it had skeptics would be constantly showing the graph that depicted it rather than just claiming it.

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        2. Jerome Fryer
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          The usual strawman tactics?

          "1 - Why ignore the Sun?"

          It *is* factored in. Pretending that it isn't is an absurd lie -- absurd because it has been in a period of lowest activity during the highest spikes in global temperature. (Less energy input from the Sun leads to *higher* temperatures?)

          "2 - Why does the increase in CO2 not result in recent warming?"

          It does. Thus we see warming tracking CO2.

          "S - But it's been 16 years with no warming now...."

          No, it hasn't. Even ignoring correcting for the usual El Nino / La Nina cycle it has *still* increased. When the known cyclical fluctuations *are* factored in the trend is still increasing, as predicted by the various studies.

          You'd do better to read what the scientists are saying yourself instead of basing your opinions on deliberate quote-mining mixed with either incompetence in data interpretation / or deliberate manipulation.

          The earlier response:

          http://metofficenews.wordpress.com/2012/01/29/met-office-in-the-media-29-january-2012/

          The response to the re-hashed lie:

          http://metofficenews.wordpress.com/2012/10/14/met-office-in-the-media-14-october-2012/

          (Now go ahead and claim that the scientists -- who get paid the same regardless of what their conclusions are, BTW -- are somehow the liars while the professional liars -- sensationalist journos, politicians, and right wing "Think Tanks" -- are breaking with form and presenting the truth; without any qualifications to even comprehend the data they are looking at.)

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          1. peter_dtm
            Reply Icon
            FAIL

            Re: The usual strawman tactics?

            Quote Jerome :

            (Now go ahead and claim that the scientists -- who get paid the same regardless of what their conclusions are, BTW

            end quote

            Totally wrong. Scientist get paid IF they get research grants; or work for an academic institution that gets research grants OR they work for private industry. According to many non skeptics; scientists paid by Bi Oil or other private companies can not be trusted (but why then can scientists paid by Big Government (the source of all those grants) be any more trusted ?)

            So 'research scientists' (most of the Climate scientists fall into this category) are totally reliant on the Government giving them grants.

            Governments LIKE catastrophic global warming; so if your livelihood depended on it; would you promote research that would bolster catastrophic climate change or would you swim against the tide ?

            And just like the drug company scientists appear to be economical with the truth regarding the data from ALL their tests; why would big government paid scientists not be biased into the same habits ?

            Regarding the met office's response - see the response from Dr Judith Curry to the Met Office; she says (I give the links elsewhere on this thread) that the Met Office's statement and their response did NOT disagree OR refute David Rose. Worse; the Met Office totally failed to admit/point out that the 'trend' they could find is LESS THAN THE ERRORS - therefore as any statistician/engineer/scientist knows that means there was NO warming within statistical bounds or to put it more correctly the trend IS 0 deg C per decade plus/minus 0.015 deg C

            So just who is telling the WHOLE truth (some thing DR Judith Curry actually suggests would be a good thing for the Met Office to start doing - see her article)

            Oh; and don't ever forget even Phil Jones from CRU agrees there has been no statistically significant warming

            so somehow I don't think the 'There's been no warming for the last 15 years' is any thing other than the scientific truth; and remember; it was the (big government paid) Climate Scientist who claimed that if there was no warming for at least 16 years then they would have a problem. So who do you trust ? The scientists wh say 'if there is no significant warming for 16 years there is a problem' or some non scientist like AL Gore; Big Renewables and other interested parties ?

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            1. Anonymous Coward
              Reply Icon
              Facepalm

              Re: The usual strawman tactics?

              "Governments LIKE catastrophic global warming; so if your livelihood depended on it; would you promote research that would bolster catastrophic climate change or would you swim against the tide ?"

              I don't know about the UK, but I can tell you that in the US, the government has most assuredly not been conspiring to pump up worries about global warming. During GWB's tenure, in fact, I seem to recall specific efforts being made to discourage academics from coming to the, er, wrong conclusions - or at the very least, efforts to specifically ignore any work done in the area. And even Obama's administration has hardly set the world afire (ahem) with financial or political support for AGW.

              The US has hosted a large percentage of academic work in the area, and the suggestion that the government has pushed for results suggesting AGW is patently absurd, somewhat like suggesting that the Catholic church has pushed for research proving the efficacy of birth control.

              I would think that the US' refusal to sign Kyoto would have helped make this fairly clear, but apparently not.

              I also find the use of the term 'big government' rather interesting. Are there governments which are -not- big? Somalia's, perhaps? Would you be more inclined to trust the judgments of scientists funded by the government of, say, Liechtenstein? It's probably pretty small. Maybe Monte Carlo?

              It's all so confusing.

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    They missed important questions from the survey

    Q:

    How many Americans who think that Humans are responsible for Global Warming ALSO believe that the Earth was created by God in 6 days about 5000 years ago and that God will save us all.

    i.e. Religious Creationists.

    As it seems that it is not mandatory to teach this in schools I guess that the numbers would be pretty high.

    In certain parts of the USA the simple act of NOT going to Church on a Sunday will make you an outcast in that community.

    Even (to them) the sky high price of Gas is not getting them out of their SUV's and Pickups in any great numbers. So the US is not going to meet any of the targets set for greenhouse gas emission reductions.

    Yes folks, the US is a shallow as it is shown on TV.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Mushroom

      Re: They missed important questions from the survey

      "How many Americans who think that Humans are responsible for Global Warming ALSO believe that the Earth was created by God in 6 days about 5000 years ago and that God will save us all."

      Well, given that support of GW trends tends to skew left, and given that religious fundamentalism tends to skew (far) right, I'd say there's... yeah, pretty much no overlap.

      Yes folks, Anonymous Coward really doesn't know as much about the US as he thinks he does.

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Survey

    So, basically, it was warm this past year and people read about the record melt. Therefore there must be AGCC.

    I'd be happier to read that 100% of peole surveyed answered. "Why are you asking me? I'm not a climatologist".

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  4. Dodgy Geezer Silver badge
    Flame

    What a lot of hype over nothing...

    This survey - it's a public opinion survey. It purports to measure how people feel AT A PARTICULAR TIME.

    So let us look at the time when it was commissioned. I see the OP states:

    "Americans' belief in the reality of global warming has increased by 13 percentage points over the past two and a half years, from 57 percent in January 2010 to 70 percent in September 2012."

    Aha! I recall that the Americans had a particularly hot summer this year, and there were a lot of frenzied pieces in the press about how Global Warming had arrived at last. So what the survey says is that if you ask a random selection of the uneducated public about whether Global Warming is happening in the middle of a heatwave, you will get 13% more saying 'Yes' than if you ask them in the middle of winter.

    You know, I could have guessed that without paying for a survey. And so, I suspect, could the climate activists. Which is probably why they timed the surveys the way they did.

    The reason warmists are stooping to cheap tricks like this is that they can no longer engage by publishing scientific papers. More and more modern research is now showing the early scaremongering assertions to be hopelessly exaggerated, and often plain wrong. So they are left pushing political and public relations propaganda. And not too well either. You might have thought they should have saved their money. Ah, silly me - of course, it's not THEIR money, is it? It's probably tax funded, so it's OUR money they're spending...

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  5. Msnthrp
    WTF?

    Question

    Would some AGW proponant please tell me why the last ice age ended 8,000 years ago? Could it have been manmade?

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    1. RICHTO
      Reply Icon
      Mushroom

      Re: Question

      Because of natural changes to the Earth - which take thousands of years to make the sort of changes we are now seeing in decades. Technically we are still in the ice age that began 2.6 million years ago at the start of the Pleistocene epoch, because the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets still exist. Since then, the world has seen cycles of glaciation with ice sheets advancing and retreating on 40,000- and 100,000-year time scales called glacial periods, glacials or glacial advances, and interglacial periods, interglacials or glacial retreats. The earth is currently in an interglacial, and the last glacial period ended about 10,000 years ago.

      No it couldnt have been humans unless there was some significant cause of pollution that we are not aware of.

      Current global warming tracks the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere (which is known as largely man made) since the Industrial Revolution very well...As does temperature versus CO2 during the Ice Ages.....

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    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Question

      Ice ages are primarily caused by Milankovitch cycles:

      The Earth's axis completes one full cycle of precession approximately every 26,000 years. At the same time the elliptical orbit rotates more slowly. The combined effect of the two precessions leads to a 21,000-year period between the astronomical seasons and the orbit. In addition, the angle between Earth's rotational axis and the normal to the plane of its orbit (obliquity) oscillates between 22.1 and 24.5 degrees on a 41,000-year cycle. It is currently 23.44 degrees and decreasing.

      Such changes in movement and orientation alter the amount and location of solar radiation reaching the Earth.

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  6. Jtom
    FAIL

    Can you say BIASED? I knew you could!

    ""Americans' belief in the reality of global warming has increased by 13 percentage points over the past two and a half years, from 57 percent in January 2010 to 70 percent in September 2012," report the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication in a survey published this week."

    LOL! Take a look at the dates of the polls! The last one is the ONLY POLL TAKEN AT THE END OF SUMMER. Try taking one in February, and you will get a completely different result. They compare a January poll to a September poll. What the heck do you think people will say after sweating the whole summer versus freezing their keisters off in winter?

    Wake me up when they can compare polls taken in May or November when people no longer have frostbite or heatstroke on their minds. Until then, this is only garbage designed to push an agenda.

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  7. paulc
    Mushroom

    Brainwashing the young...

    they've been steadily indoctrinating them in the schools for the past ten years and this is why the belief in man made global warming is so strong over there...there is no science to back it up, just faith and constant denial of the true scientific process... get them while they're young and malleable and you can shape them any way you want...

    They refuse to accept the evidence that the Earth is now entering a cooling phase.

    Boing Boing and Slashdot are particularly filled with true believing warmists...

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  8. Michael Nidd
    Unhappy

    Who made those graphs?

    The points are spaced 14, 5, 11, 6, 4, and 6 months apart, but plotted at regular intervals.

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  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Slightly changed, this could have been the title

    of an article that could have been published 2000 years ago - Pagans losing ground to Christians - bring on the new religion - YOU VILL NOT QUESTION CLIMATE CHANGE OR VE VILL SHOOT YOU.

    Its all bollocks, the human race will eventually die out (hopefully), the planet will eventually be destroyed and a large number of things will happen between now and then and we will have very little control.

    The only reason for 'climate change' is to raise taxes - get with the program, pay more, do more for less and dont ask why.

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  10. Senior Climatologist

    Senior Climatologist

    No surprise. Yale and GMU were commissioned by the AMS and other climate advocacy groups to develop the 'messaging' that would cause more Americans to buy the global warming mantra that government has spent $39B to foster (for political reasons). That is how we moved from global warming to climate change to climate disruption to the hyping of extremes. As Eisenhower warned in his farewell address remembered for his military industrial complex comment that "The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded....we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite." The elitists are trying to sway the public to support the big lie...blaming man for natural climate change to achieve it alternative goals of one world governance and as the UN's IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer stated openly "...one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore." These liberal institutions are destroying science and brainwashing our youth and are despicable.

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    1. Loyal Commenter Silver badge
      Reply Icon
      FAIL

      Re: Senior Climatologist

      If you are a climatologist, then I'm the queen of Sheba.

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    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Senior Climatologist

      You heard it here first, folks - the US government has been pushing AGW in order to facilitate wealth redistribution to poor nations and to achieve the goal of one-world government. And all of this either during the Bush administration or with Republicans in control of the House.

      Christ, for the past two years, Congress has been refusing to raise taxes because they (really, it's true, ~50% of Republicans in general believe this) feel that it's unfair for the rich to have to pay as high a percentage as the poor. Unfair to the rich, that is.

      And they're plotting for redistributing the US' wealth to poor nations while they're at it? Yuhhh huh.

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  11. Loyal Commenter Silver badge

    I object to the term 'climate skeptic'

    "Of course, that lack of surety might be perfectly reasonable, seeing as how climate-change skeptics are, well, skeptical – an honorable trait."

    Sadly, this is not he case; most of those who would call themselves 'skeptics' are nothing of the sort. Skepticism is all about not believing what you are told, but having to see the evidence for yourself. Arguably the most skeptical in this sense are the climate scientists, who overwhelmingly agree that anthropogenic climate change is real, after having studied the ahrd science and constructed the predictive models.

    The least skeptical are ironically those who call themselves skeptics, and who believe whoever shouts the loudest or comes up with the most convincing sound-bites or conspiracy theory. I doubt any of these people have ever actually read and understood the science behind the matter, in the same way that the fundie religious nutjobs who shout about evolution being 'only a theory' fail (and often actively refuse) to understand the meaning of the word theory in a formal context.

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  12. This post has been deleted by its author

    1. diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      "the moderators here are loserz"

      Says the chap putting a Z at the end of words, hm? :-)

      C.

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      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Happy

        Well, at least he didn't say 'loosers'. Take solace in the minor victories, that's what I always say.

        Or at least, I did just now.

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      2. jake Silver badge
        Reply Icon
        Pint

        ::horselaugh::

        You owe me a KeyBr0ad, C. ;-)

        Ta. This round is on me :-)

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