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

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.