Global-Warming Skepticism Hits 6-Year High

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Chris Mooney writes at Mother Jones that a new study, from the Yale and George Mason University research teams on climate change communication, shows a 7-percentage-point increase in the proportion of Americans who say they do not believe that global warming is happening. And that's just since the spring of 2013. The number of deniers is now 23 percent; back at the start of last year, it was 16 percent (PDF). The obvious question is, what happened over the last year to produce more climate denial? The answer may lie in the so-called global warming "pause"—the misleading idea that global warming has slowed down or stopped over the the past 15 years or so. This claim was used by climate skeptics, to great effect, in their quest to undermine the release of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fifth Assessment Report in September 2013—precisely during the time period that is in question in the latest study. "The notion of a global warming "pause" is, at best, the result of statistical cherry-picking," writes Mooney. " It relies on starting with a very hot year (1998) and then examining a relatively short time period (say, 15 years), to suggest that global warming has slowed down or stopped during this particular stretch of time." Put these numbers back into a broader context and the overall warming trend remains clear. "If you shift just 2 years earlier, so use 1996-2010 instead of 1998-2012, the trend is 0.14 C per decade, so slightly greater than the long-term trend," explains Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at NASA who was heavily involved in producing the IPCC report. This is why climate scientists generally don't seize on 15 year periods and make a big thing about them. "Journalists take heed: Your coverage has consequences. All those media outlets who trumpeted the global warming "pause" may now be partly responsible for a documented decrease in Americans' scientific understanding.""

Comments

This isn't helping...

[Karmashock]

Apparently the UN Climate Chief just said that only Communism can stop global warming.

http://dailycaller.com/2014/01/15/un-climate-chief-communism-is-best-to-fight-global-warming/

So... you can see how that would effectively cause most of the opposition to feel vindicated that the whole thing is just a ploy to promote radical leftist redistributionalism.

Look, if you ACTUALLY care about the environment, then there is no way to get cooperation unless there is no perception of political bias. If you can't do that, then really you can't do anything. As pointed out in the article, communism actually has a terrible environmental record. So not even that would work.

Making Al Gore your front man was a strategic error. Saying the debate was over just meant a lot of minds closed instantly in response and decided then and there that you were wrong.

If you care... you'll reengage with humility, mutual respect, and patience. The only reason to not do that is because you refuse to control your ego, refuse to treat people you need the cooperation of with respect, and lack the intellectual patience to go through a matter in the time required.

And if that is the case... you don't really care.

I care. I have my own biases but I am willing to humbly go through the matter acknowledging what I don't know or understand, showing common courtesy to people that I might not agree with or trust, and patiently going through the matter step by step.

Anyone that cares must be willing to do that. Anyone that is not willing to can't possibly care because they've put their own petty personal prejudices above the vitality of the global ecosystem.