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Record Number of Americans See Climate Change As a Current Threat (axios.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: More Americans are very worried about global warming and say the issue is personally important to them than ever before, according to a new poll released Tuesday. The polling may indicate that extreme weather events -- coupled with a series of grim scientific findings -- over the past year are starting to change peoples' minds about climate change, which could have significant implications for any significant climate legislation passing Congress. The key finding from the new survey from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication is that Americans increasingly view global warming as a present-day threat to them, rather than an issue that will affect future generations. Nearly half of Americans (46%) said they personally experienced the effects of global warming -- a 15-point spike since March 2015.
"Denialist pollution source owners' propaganda efforts failing, American idiots slowly pulling their collective heads out of their asses and realizing changes must be made quickly, or this is going to get much worse."
Okay, so you cannot see any evidence that global warming and climate change is affecting you, even though the evidence is there, it is overwhelming and the effective is very significant.
That's fine, so here is how it is affecting you in your daily life. Another people are concerned about the massive impact that fossil fuels are having on the world, that economics is changing and their lifespan as a viable source of energy is limited. So, everything that you do that depends on fossil fuels is already and will increasingly change. Is that going to change your life? I think it will.
Your signature is... just... perfect.
I remember back in the 80s when the warning came out with the predictions of what would happen.
We're living it.
I'm not interested in "Liberal" vs "Conservative" bickering or what is "fake" or not.
From everything I have seen, doing what I can to reduce human caused climate change means a better way of life for me. Less pollution. Less money being spent. Healthier lifestyle. A better way of life for my children and grandchildren. Less wars. Less migrations and the trouble that causes.
If we could just stop these bullshit wars that cause people to migrate. I cannot blame any Syrian who wants to leave. The same for every other country over-run with assholes who want to take over everything for whatever reason.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Just because your life doesn't appear to be directly affected doesn't mean the lives of others aren't. Rising sea levels are affecting island nations. Significant portions of the great barrier reef around Australia have died off. Severe droughts in various regions around the world are forcing people to relocate. Huge numbers of insects populations and species are dying off which is going to have detrimental effects on the food chain in those regions.
Droughts and abnormal temperatures also affect crop yields, which affects the price of everything at the grocery store. Sure, there are other factors that affect grocery store prices, but climate change is certainly a contributing one.
Right now? Probably not a hell of a lot unless you live in California or the southeast US. The worst is that you're likely needing to run the A/C a bit more during the summer and pay a bit more on your electricity bill.
Let's assume you don't think climate change is a problem, or at least not enough of one for the government to take action because of negative economic effects.
Consider then what happens in the future, even the near future. Climate change is linked to changing weather patterns and an increase in destructive storms ( https://nca2014.globalchange.gov/report/our-changing-climate/changes-hurricanes ). These storms have an economic cost - businesses destroyed, homes destroyed, cleanup, reconstruction. Right there, that's insurance companies and the government involved. If the insurance companies don't go bankrupt from the increased cost then they'll definitely be passing on the cost in the form of higher premiums to their customers. Government money only goes so far, so either programs will be cut or taxes will go up.
Let's not forget that the changing weather patterns are also going to affect agriculture, fishing... A large chunk of our food production. Farmland becomes unusable due to drought, heating oceans disrupt the ecology and trigger mass die-offs. ( https://www.forbes.com/sites/priyashukla/2018/07/26/oceans-expected-to-become-more-acidic-than-theyve-been-in-14-million-years/ )
Oh! How about another potential problem: like to go outside? You could also be at a higher risk of contracting Lyme or other tick-borne diseases because the weather is more favourable to them now in two ways. Either it's extending the amount of time ticks are active during the year (they go dormant below either 2 or 4 C, I forget which) or extending the territory they normally inhabit farther north because those latitudes are now more hospitable to them. ( http://www.vdci.net/blog/lyme-disease-3-reasons-it-is-on-the-rise-in-the-northeast )
These are just a few things off the top of my head. So unless you were being sarcastic in your post, this shit is 100% real and even if it has no impact on your daily life right now, I can guarantee it'll become your concern soon enough.
Are you a farmer that will have to find new sources of water as droughts affect your crops? If additional water is not enough, can you switch to alternative crops? Not a farmer, are you or someone you know will be affected if farming has to change because of climate change? That's just on crops.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Well....yeah. If cancer isn't affecting me directly, it's not a problem for me. Why should I care if other people have cancer? Same as climate change. So far it isn't directly impacting my life in any way that matters, so I don't care about it.
The right are so old that they'll die before or during a climate change problem would kill them: lack of food/water, weather being too hot/cold to handle by current buildings, power issues from the additional strain for compensating for erratic climate, species of important ecological impact on food production dying. These issues won't happen this year unless you live in a desert yet, but will slowly creep out from the deserts and into normal population centers and then shit will really hit the fan.
Why is it then predominantly only the left t
Nearly everywhere in the world, climate change is a non-partisan issue. Climate change denial is mostly relegated to small, and usually extreme, parties. The US is the great exception.
There are several reasons, but the root of the general anti-science position of the Republican party originates from peddling to fundamentalist Christian creationist voters. To be able to maintain the more brain-damaged forms of creationism, you need to reject a large part of modern science - and also a large part of the institutions of modern science. Once this "scepticism" has set in, it's easy to extend it to other aspects of science.
Stephan
Why is it then predominantly only the left that pushes the cataclysmic effects of climate change, while those on the right tend not to see it as a dire threat (if they acknowledge it exists)?
It's a matter of temperament with each group. At the risk of over-generalizing, leftists support progress, reform, internationalism, whereas rightists support order, tradition, and nationalism. More here.
Is it the those on the left are just so wise, and those on the right are dumb?
No and no. There are lots of dumb leftists and smart rightists. As I said, it's more an issue of temperament than intelligence.
Or is it that the left has been attaching climate change to all of their favorite other ideas, making it even less of an attractive/plausible issue to those on the right?
The left and the right have been known to agree on many things. Generally they just don't seem to do so on this one. I don't think the right is less inclined to deal with climate change because the left has the opposite view. Rather, they see the effort to deal with climate change as disruptive of a status quo they are comfortable with.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
The new tax and political demands passed under the cover of "climate change" will be a change to daily life.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Both the DOD and insurance companies have taken climate change seriously for over 20 years now. Neither can afford to deny reality because it directly affects thier bottom line.
This "poll" is from the "Yale Program on Climate Change Communication" - it seeks to push the entire narrative. Now, when you actually ask people what they think is the most important problem, you find environmental issues down around 2-3%. And that's right around where it's been for a LONG time. Push polls make great headlines, and when it's mrsmash as editor - you know it's pushing a defined agenda!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I wish more Americans were involved in foreign politics, they would realize this is very true. Also it's why everyone complains social media sites are all left wing because they get traffic from all over the world. America's far left are centrists in the eyes of the world.
Which island nations are losing area, are ending up underwater?
Miami Beach, FL
60% of republicans want Medicare for all, 90% of democrats do too. Even a poll on Fox News bore this out. Yet somehow all the right talking heads on tv say communists are the only ones that want socialized healthcare. The real reason we don't have it, or a lot of the other issues we all agree on is America is a representative democracy that only seems to represent moneyed interests and not citizens.
Has your country become almost uninhabitable because humidity moved in where before it was dry heat? Can you no longer farm or produce on your land? What do you think might happen if this country was a nuclear power and surrounding countries reject the millions of refugees seeking relief? These are the biggest problems with climate change, the hundreds of millions of climate refugees and the possible destabilization of middle eastern nuclear powers. Wars are already fought over resources, reducing the amount and shuffling them around could start WW3.
Not even close to being enough. First thing that will have to go is commercial flights. Those simply cannot be tolerated. Interconnected world the way we know it today simply cannot exist. It has to end.
Next thing to go is uninterrupted electricity for everyone. That means no reliable internet either. That's the other link that makes people care to some extent about "outsiders" far away from their nations.
Finally you'll have to accept that your very culture is dysfunctional, because we're not ready to commit genocide on the level that would make Hitler, Stalin and Mao look incredibly benevolent in comparison. We will have to cull most of the population in Africa, Asia and South America, because as they will desire to increase their wealth, they will become much more polluting per capita, easily nullifying all the cuts made in the West. We'll have to be the most brutal mass murderers to have ever existed.
It's the last part that most people genuinely are afraid of addressing. It's factually true that most of the people who either deny global warming, or just don't care about it are the overwhelming majority of humanity who are living in poor countries, and who thanks to the internet now know just how wealthy of lifestyles compared to theirs we have. And they want to be like us. And their lives are being uplifted at rapid rate, as globalization has shifted wealth to developing countries at incredible rate. This will have to be severed and destroyed, alongside the masses who already got a taste of better lifestyles afforded to them by the economic growth. Because they can't afford to care about a threat that might materialize in a hundred years. They have to care about immediate threats, like medicine so their children don't die, food so their children don't end up with stunted growth, housing so they actually have a home to be at, social security of some kind so they can afford to think of more than their next meal.
It's a genuinely impossible equation. To make people care about things like global warming, you need to eliminate most of other threats in their lives - disease, food security, energy security, housing, social security, etc. And to do so worldwide, would require CO2 emissions that would make current emissions look absolutely tiny in comparison. Therefore, the only way to equalize the two would be to conduct genocide of unforeseen proportions.
Sort of...
I'm on the right. My reasons for disagreeing with most of the suggestions made by the left on this subject is that they tend to always increase the size and impact of government which I see is generally bad. Also, the majority of the suggested efforts largely ignore the geo-political impact of the proposed solutions will have as we unilaterally destroy our economy and thus reduce our ability to maintain our standards of living and freedoms.
Let's face it, there is zero chance we can have ANY effect on the amounts of carbon emitted by countries outside our borders. We can ask nicely I suppose, but do you think our competitors will willingly do this? Both China and Russia would be more than willing to keep burning fossil fuels for a competitive advantage over the free world and would be happy to keep burring by while we unilaterally stopped and made their fuel costs go down. In the long term, the world's CO2 load won't decrease anyway (at least while there are fossil fuels to burn), so what ever the bad effects of Global Warming turn out to be we will have to deal with them.
So, from my perspective, looking long term, if the left is correct, there isn't any way to avoid what's coming, no matter how hard the western world tries. So the right's approach seems the best one to me. Sure, do what we reasonably can with conservation and "green" energy, but let's not get so crazy about this as to hurt our geopolitical standing and vibrant economy. In the mean time, we should prepare for the effects of Global Warming as a higher priority than trying to avoid them so if/when they do come, we can effectively deal with them.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The Koch brothers paid for a study to prove Medicare for all costs more. Unfortunately for them the cost we pay now is 34 trillion per decade and the cost of healthcare for all, with everyone using it and using it more often, is 32 trillion per decade. How do we afford something 2 trillion dollars cheaper?!? IDK but maybe we can do it by taking the money we spend now, but use less of it. The insurance companies have a market valuation of 940 billion per year, that's not what they pay out to hospitals and doctors, its overhead and profits. Disbanding them all would save 9.4 trillion dollars and since they are only leaches that contribute nothing, are the thing you are looking for that we cannot keep paying for. Yes it increases taxes but you don't have those massive payments to insurance taken out of your paycheck so the result is better care for less. You know, like the rest of the world does it.
The left and the right have been known to agree on many things. Generally they just don't seem to do so on this one.
Prior to about 1988, conservatives pretty much did agree that climate change was a problem, and the science was not at all controversial. For instance, it was well understood through the 60s-70s that CO2 was the greenhouse gas that made the surface of Venus so much hotter than Mercury, and conservatives weren't inclined to dispute it.
When it came to the point of deciding what to do, certain corporations used their lobbying arms to reset opinion amongst the conservatives, framing it along typical lines around controversy and the threat of socialism, in order to protect the profits of those corporations.
I don't think the right is less inclined to deal with climate change because the left has the opposite view. Rather, they see the effort to deal with climate change as disruptive of a status quo they are comfortable with.
And by not participating in the discussion about what to do about climate change conservatives have created the impression that they do not have a solution, so we instead need to look to the left to solve it. Which is ridiculous, like every problem, there is a spectrum of approaches we can take.
You can't negotiate with the physical reality of climate change, it's not a matter of opinion, You can, however, advocate for more 'right friendly' ways of resolving the issue, and if you truly believe that 'right friendly' solutions are the best and most efficient, the right should be confident in advocating for those solutions.
The right saying that climate change is a socialist conspiracy is saying that only socialism can solve a class of global problems, which is not only incorrect it also invalidates the right wing altogether.
I like how people discount the measurements and observations thousands of scientists take day in and day out as they apply their PhDs and livelihood to observe what is happening to the world. They have worked full time or more for decades on end to come to these conclusions.
You think these fucking scientists love being holed up in a shotty little observation pod in Antarctica away from their families the majority of the year? No they're doing it so that they can report to humanity their findings and give us warning and advisement if need be.
To ignore their warning on the basis of "you just feel they're wrong", or "it's political" is a display of self destructive and ignorant hubris.
Seriously you'd have to be deluded or have a mental illness to think you know better than the worldwide scientific community. The worst part is your ignorance will destroy the world for our grandchildren.