Losing the Public Debate On Global Warming

Hugh Pickens writes "Dr. James Hansen, director of the NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who first made warnings about climate change in the 1980s, says that public skepticism about the threat of man-made climate change has increased despite the growing scientific consensus. He says that without public support, it will be impossible to make the changes he and his colleagues believe need to occur to protect future generations from the effects of climate change. 'The science has become stronger and stronger over the past five years while the public perception is has gone in completely the other direction. That is not an accident,' says Hansen. 'There is a very concerted effort by people who would prefer to see business to continue as usual. They have been winning the public debate with the help of tremendous resources.' Hansen's comments come as recent surveys have revealed that public support for tackling climate change has declined dramatically in recent years. A recent BBC poll found that 25% of British adults did not think global warming is happening and over a third said many claims about environmental threats are 'exaggerated,' compared to 24 per cent in 2000. Dr. Benny Peiser, director of skeptical think tank The Global Warming Policy Foundation, says it's time to stop exaggerating the impact of global warming and accept the uncertainty of predictions about the rate of climate change. 'James Hensen has been making predictions about climate change since the 1980s. When people are comparing what is happening now to those predictions, they can see they fail to match up.'"

Comments

Hansen Must Go

[moehoward]

Hansen needs to resign. He is abusing his post at NASA and tainting the agency with his political activism. His problem is that NASA gives him a platform, and he feels that he can't give it up because he will lose his voice with the press. He is exactly the type of scientist that the public despises. Scientists that I know obsess with finding out why their theory/science/findings are wrong. They want to be proven wrong. Hansen comes off as a nut job and does not possess the skepticism that makes a good scientist. Almost everyone sees right through his charade.

The fact that most climate science is not peer-reviewed causes folks like me to just toss it all to the side. Back in the Kyoto talks, we were TOLD that if no action was taken, then the point of no return was something like 2007. Well? Based on that "science", nothing we do can help anyway. Your Prius just makes your farts smell like roses, according to "science".

Re:What did we expect?

[Skapare]

There is a group of us who do believe in God and that natural selection is one of his means to achieve his goals. Then I look at the Republican party and really see TWO separate groups. One group is the God believers. The other is the Business believers. There's actually not much overlap. They just happen to be together as part of the same political party in part because decades ago the Democrats ousted the God believers with it's position on abortion. So therefore we have the odd couple that accept, or maybe more accurately, tolerate, each others position, but are big enough to make a substantial go of it together.

I know many people who are Republicans simply to not be a Democrat and to not support certain positions of the Democratic party. The largest of those positions makes up at least 75 percent of these "anything but Democrat" group, and that is the abortion issue (Democrats call it Women's Choice and this group calls it Women Murdering Children).

But I cannot be in the Republican party despite my strong lifelong opposition to abortion (and support of gun rights, strong military, etc) because of it perilous destructive nature on economic balance, fairness, the rule of law, etc. But is this position by the Democrats to allow the killing of not yet born children so important to hold on to?

We're going to destroy ourselves just because we have these TWO parties.

Whine whine whine

[J'raxis]

Good news for personal and economic freedom.

Sounds to me some bureaucrat is just upset his taxpayer-funded job might not be as secure as it once was.

Maybe climate change is real; maybe it isn't. Maybe if governments didn't spend billions of our own dollars trying to convince us that it is, in an effort to justify policies giving them more control over our lives, growing their bureaucracies, taking our money, regulating our businesses and private lives, and so on, there wouldn't be so much political push-back trying to "deny" global warming. Maybe if the government didn't use climate change to victimize people, those victims wouldn't be trying to defend themselves.

If you politicize something, you can always expect the truth to fall by the wayside. The progressives, technocrats, and other assorted socialists in government started this. Now they're upset the other side of the political battle they started is winning.

Good.