Pirate's Cove

It just keeps getting worse for the alarmists, especially as the questions continue to get better

Views about the existence and causes of global warming have changed little over the past year. A new Pew Research Center poll finds that 59% of adults say there is solid evidence that the earth’s average temperature has been getting warmer over the past few decades. In October 2009, 57% said this.

I’ll agree with that. There has been a little warming. It’s been a trend since the mid-1800’s, as the Little Ice Age came to a close. Perhaps we are due for a downturn, like happened from the 40’s-70’s. Perhaps the Earth is due for another small ice age (we are actually due for a real ice age, which happens every 20,000 years or so). We’ll see what nature does. Quite a bit is due to land use, the Urban Island Effect.

Roughly a third (34%) say that global warming is occurring mostly because of human activity, such as the burning of fossil fuels, which also is little changed from last year (36%).

Yeah, but (via Steven Goddard, who also links to an article showing that temps in North America have plummeted over the past 5 years)

Check out the whole article about the poll, and check the responses. I don’t want to steal all their thunder.

Meanwhile, an interesting point from Andrew Revkin and Randy Olson

People talk about wanting to mobilize a military sized effort on climate. This is where it should start. There are ways to get the entire public interested and supporting climate. No communication challenge is impossible. Humans are creatures with endlessly malleable brains. But it has to begin by correctly identifying the problem. This stuff is bo-ho-ho-ring.

Really, to most people who are not big into the subject of climate, it probably is boring. But, also, there are other reasons. Consider that various information which is in direct contradiction. Information that is spun both ways. Sometimes the data and models and science is extremely deep, and people don’t want to learn it. At other times, it is so simplistic that it insults the intelligence. Consider that we are told that weather is not climate, then immediately told that a tornado, a hurricane, a heat wave, or a flood are signs of AGW. And the next day we are told that lack of storms, no landfalling hurricanes, cold weather, and drought are signs of AGW.  Glaciers are melting and growing because of AGW. Once a century blizzards are because of AGW. You name it, AGW is to blame, even if it makes no sense. And people aren’t buying it anymore.

Add in that the leaders of the climate alarmist movement are utter hypocrites, why should people believe? People are, and have been, waking up to the reality that natural processes drive most of what happens with the Earth’s climate, especially when they understand that the AGW movement is mostly about politics.