"When our political leaders can't agree on whether climate change is a threat, the majority of people can't either. The public is divided because our political leaders are polarized."
This is the upshot of a recent study on U.S. public attitudes towards climate change according to one of its lead authors, J. Craig Jenkins of Ohio State University.
The research suggests it was no coincidence that Americans were most concerned about the threat of climate change at a time when at least some leaders in both parties strongly advocated action. I suspect that if the same study were done in other countries, the findings would be similar.
But I can't help wondering if polarization between political parties is the only determining factor -- what about the inconsistent behaviour of climate champions themselves? Countless leaders recognize the threat of climate change and call for action to reverse it, yet continue to implement policies which do the opposite.
Take the EU Fuel Quality Directive for example. In a few days' time, Europe will vote on a law which would formally designate (and thus penalize) tar sands oil as excessively carbon-intensive in comparison with other fuels. The UK, Netherlands and France -- often considered climate leaders within Europe -- are under pressure from petro-lobby interests and are thought likely to block the decision. If tar sands interests win out, it will be a significant setback for the fight against climate change.
But if Europe caves on tar sands this week, it will be a breathtaking display of climate schizophrenia, given the massive showdown it's facing on aviation policy. As of January 1, all flights to and from Europe are now subject to the EU's Emissions Trading Scheme, and the rest of the world doesn't like it.
Starting tomorrow a 26-member "coalition of the unwilling" is meeting in Moscow to plot strategy and prepare counter-moves against Europe.
Who are the 26 members? Amongst others, China, India and Brazil, all of whom place the responsibility for greatest action on Europe and other developed countries in the context of the climate negotiations. But isn't this precisely what Europe is trying to do with its aviation legislation?
The additional cost for a ticket to Europe amounts to only a few dollars difference, and anyone with enough money to buy the ticket in the first place will not be unduly disadvantaged. So what's the problem here?
Forget logic, it's just climate schizophrenia.
The U.S., another fully paid-up member of the coalition of the unwilling, launched a coalition of its own last week. The six countries participating in the Climate and Clean Air Coalition will work to reduce short-lived climate pollutants such as black carbon, the soot from cookstoves used in developing countries. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said at the launch:
Climate change is one of the most serious and complex problems facing our world. We know its impacts. It impacts global security, the global economy, global food and water supplies, and the health and well-being of people everywhere. And we know that in the principal effort necessary to reduce the effects of carbon dioxide, the world has not yet done enough. So when we discover effective and affordable ways to reduce global warming -- not just a little, but by a lot -- it is a call to action.
The New York Times reported that the motive for launching the initiative was "impatience with the slow pace of international climate change negotiations."
Ironically (or schizophrenically) enough, the U.S. is one of the countries most responsible for the slow pace of those negotiations.
It gets even better. Canada, which formally reneged on its obligations under the Kyoto Protocol in order to fully develop the Alberta tar sands, is a founding member committed to providing $3 million over the next two years. Don't get me wrong, it's a great initiative, but it's not a substitute for the urgent need to massively reduce CO2 emissions.
There are many other examples of climate schizophrenia. Remember when the World Bank approved a multibillion-dollar, highly controversial loan for the Medupi coal-fired power plant in South Africa in 2010? The U.S. was one of several countries which opposed the project on climate grounds, yet failed to stop it by choosing merely to abstain. Germany, climate champion extraordinaire, actively voted to approve it.
Climate schizophrenia is not even limited to countries. As leaked documents revealed last week, 19 public corporations fund the climate change-denying Heartland Institute, some of whom scrambled to distance themselves from Heartland's climate program. Of all the companies named, I was most disappointed to see Microsoft on the list, albeit only for the provision of around $60,000 worth of free software. Bill Gates the philanthropist is very worried about climate change, but not enough for his company to cut off support to a climate-denial group.
The public looks to its elected representatives for leadership. A cynic would point out that it's precisely because of our polarized political discourse that unity around any issue would be something to stand up and take notice of. Not being a cynic, I would argue that the consequences of climate change are so far-reaching that anything less than a serious, well-considered plan of action based on the best available scientific information is a violation of the public trust. Is it too much to ask for that our leaders take this responsibility seriously and stop using climate as a political football?
And at the end of the day, the scale of the response should match the scale of the rhetoric. If Hillary Clinton really believes that climate change impacts security, the economy, health, food and water supplies, why on Earth is the U.S. throwing up so many roadblocks on the pathway to climate salvation?
We need an urgent cure for climate schizophrenia. As Robert Fulghum, author of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten said, "Don't worry that your children never listen to you: worry that they are always watching you." The climate movement is indeed watching.
Follow Kelly Rigg on Twitter: www.twitter.com/kellyrigg
We can pay less for energy AND reduce cO2, but it will require a major commitment to nuclear.
The paranoia stem from their Lysenkoistic fear that whoever is skeptical of CAGW must be bought by big oil.
This fear causes them to wreak careers and not own up to the low quality of their scaremongering.
See the effects of the schizophrenia in my last post.
Neptune aka netdr aka several others has been banned multiple times for troIIing, yet he has no embarrassment about signing right back up and continuing his campaign of climate terror.
The article tries to imply that skeptics are schizophrenic but when I turn it back on them gallon howls !
• Tell the difference between real and unreal experiences
[The alarmists imagine there has been warming since 1998 despite clear data which shows there hasn’t. It may warm sometime later but for now warming has stopped. These periodic reversals keep overall warming down to ½ ° C per CENTURY.]
• Think logically
[Alarmists know that a doubling of CO2 only causes 1 ° C of warming even theoretically. Supposedly this is amplified by increased water vapor to 3 to 6 ° C.
Since 1950 total water vapor has gone down so the theory MUST BE WRONG.!
• Have normal emotional responses,
[Alarmists don’t have normal emotional responses because thy cling to any doom and gloom prediction no matter how unlikely.]
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2011/11/05/the-real-problem-with-the-global-warming-debate/
What he finds is the same slope before and after. This is BEST data, not Hadley CRU data so you may be looking at something slightly different. Also, I believe warming in the 20th century was more like 0.7-0.9 C. Also, water vapor is going UP by the most reliable measurements (remember it has to be integrated for the entire water column and entire Earth, so showing a measurement for a single location doesn't cut it).
Since 2001 there has clearly been a pause in warming and it may or may not warm slightly later.
PUB's link shows 2 data sets with a cooling trend and 3 with a very slight warming trend.
#1) Least squares trend line; slope = 0.000644556 per year
#2) Least squares trend line; slope = -0.00610265 per year
3) #Least squares trend line; slope = -0.00615866 per year
4) #Least squares trend line; slope = 0.00448098 per year
5) Least squares trend line; slope = 0.0030497 per year
#1 shows only slight warming in 10,000 years and is well within the margin of error, but his schizophrenia
causes him to believe it is significantly warming
#2 & #3 shows slight cooling.
What You and Pub don't understand is that these cooling trends occur every 6 years and last 30 years.
These cooling period limit long term warming to 1/2 ° C per century.
Netdr: "...Since 1950 total water vapor has gone down..."
Stop lying, Netdr.
---------------------------
* "Neptune2" is one of Netdr's many sock puppets.
** Gish Gallop: "A debating technique that involves drowning the opponent in such a torrent of half-truths, lies, and straw-man arguments that the opponent cannot possibly answer every falsehood that has been raised."
Since 1950 water vapor has gone down even though temperature has gone up slightly.
http://climate4you.com/images/NOAA%20ESRL%20AtmospericRelativeHumidity%20GlobalMonthlyTempSince1948%20With37monthRunningAverage.gif
http://tiny.cc/xdbtj
He has disputed this but when pressed for documentation he passes and resorts to name calling.
This fish clearly fears me !
Your absolutely right about that, though you could go far stronger. Not putting all and every effort into reducing the impacts of climate change, by reducing emissions at home, and negotiating to reduce them abroad, is a threat to the continued survival of all countries in the world. It is treachury to the people, to have political power, and not to use it for the best interests of your constituents, and the ongoing survival of their descendants.
BTW: A lot of America, and other countries excuses for doing nothing are made by blaming everything on China. This just allows people to pretend that their own polluting activities are somehow no relevant. For anyone in the industrialised world to take this position, is a sign of pure selfishness.
It has been much warmer and much colder before that.
Yes the warmest years have occurred since 1998 but the warming stopped in 2001 and cooling has set in.
It is like climbing a hill to a plateau and then you wander around not going up any more.
Would you fear that you would go up forever ?
Of course not.
Develop alternative energy if it can be done competitively to fossil fuels, otherwise let the market decide..
Artificially raising the price of fossil fuels is mentally challenged.
Of course alternative energy will not be that much cheaper than fossil fuels, until the economies of scale that are inherent in coal and oil, start kicking in to the new energy sources. Because of that, the Government should certainly subsidise them, with the $80billion/year taken away from fossil fuels.
It appears that some how the vast majority of the worlds hottest years occurred during the time you say it stopped warming. The reaon of course is, that it has not stopped warming.
The hill certainly hasn't stopped. It will continue way beyond 2100, by which time it is expected to be between 3.5 and 7.4C higher than now.
Do you EVER think before you post?
The evidence suggests that the answer is NO!
Logic isn't the alarmist's strong suit.
If you climbed up a ladder onto a table you would be as high as you had ever been. Would that mean that you were still climbing ?
That is in essence the fallacy of the 10 out of 10.
There is no reason to believe that there would be catastrophic warming regardless of what we do or don't do. The climate models have malfunctioned so badly that believing them capable of predicting 90 years in the future is mentally challenged.
The argument of the "precautionary principal " has been exposed for the fallacy that it is many times.
If we waste tens of trillions of dollars on non problems then real problems will hurt people unnecessarily.
The past decade has been the hottest on record, replacing the previous decade which was the hottest, replacing the prior which was the hottest. This indicates warming.
neptune: "If you climbed up a ladder onto a table you would be as high as you had ever been. Would that mean that you were still climbing ?"
Faulty reasoning. The top of the ladder is higher than the bottom. The end of the decade is warmer than the beginning. And there is no plateau. It continues to warm. The warming is accelerating. It is expected to warm into the next century and beyond.
Neptune aka netdr et al, seems to be basing his science upon the trillion dollar scare figure he must have picked up from scare tv or scare radio. It always comes down to the term "trillions of dollars" with the deniers.
http://www.carbonstarvation.com/
It advocates that we burn fossil fuels until the CO2 get to at least 800ppm (twice its current value and four times its value throughout human history) because its BETTER FOR PLANTS. Now, all the evidence is that this will bury coastal populations in about 75 to 125 feet of water (the best evidence for this comes from studies of Earth the last time CO2 was this high, about half a million years ago).
Its hard to know what to say to someone who is so busy hugging trees that he would let Venice, Bangkok, Florida, NYC, London, and many, many, other coastal human developments drown. Calling them eco-terrorists is the kindest term I can find.
The rate has gone down recently.
Anyone that is worried about the effect of SLR on them is misinformed.
The US developed all the reactor types in use in the world today. The lab where they were invented or developed, Argonne, was working on its most advanced and best yet answer to all the criticisms of nuclear power, i.e. the IFR breeder reactor project, when its R&D effort was shut down by the incoming Clinton Administration in 1994. "We don't need it" said John Kerry, who led the effort in the Senate to stop US reactor research.
The IFR, according to its designers, could replace all fossil fuels as the design produces more fuel than it uses. If civilization chose to power itself using this design, there would be no worries about fuel for tens of thousands of years. The waste stream coming from IFR reactors contains no plutonium and decays away to radiation levels lower than the original ore in about 400 years, reducing the problems of nuclear waste by several orders of magnitude. In fact, this design can burn today's nuclear waste.
But we wouldn't want to use something like this. The only national US political party that has a climate policy made sure we would not have this option available.
Schizophrenic? You be the judge.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHJuz5pNQL8
How does powering the entire world for 72 years with spent fuel (aka waste) sound? The spent fuel would be mostly consumed in the process (up to 98% by volume).
Skip ahead to the 12 minute mark to get a sense of that.
You'd think we'd just deal with our garbage: but we obviously are not doing so. Your article highlights how most of us are not making sense as we are not dealing with this.
An astonishing example of this is in Watts Up With That:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/01/25/warming-trend-pdo-and-solar-correlate-better-than-co2/
On this page, the second figure from the top places GLOBAL temperature over CO2 content for the 20th century. The shapes of both curves are practically identical: an exponentially growing curve.
The WUWT paper, however, is trying to prove the opposite; that a temperature set called USHCN2 actually matches solar and Pacific Decadal Occilation forcers better than CO2. Actually, they do a good job. There's only one problem: USHCN2 is an average temperature for the United States only. Now, maybe, for deniers, the U.S. REALLY IS the only country worth considering in 'global warming'. But, for realists, the WUWT comparison is apples to oranges, and worthless. But, that's par for the course with WUWT, isn't it?
Wow, Watt showed that a 4 parameter fit to some data is better than an 0 parameter fit. That's so stupid it's awesome. Watt's analysis requires that there has never been any other source of climate change but CO2. But real climate scientists (Watt isn't one) recognize that climate is more than one parameter and it's more than just a correlation. So yet, Watt's throwing disinformation at us. And couldn't you find anything that wasn't 4 years old?
OOps sorry you want Aclimate forcer.
This gradual decline has been interrupted by the modern industrial age. Plot temperatures for the past 20,000 years or more and the modern warming shows up as a serious spike, with the rise actually accelerating now. We have already reached a temperature that the earth hasn't seen for 800,000 years. It will continue to warm till the end of the century. It will continue to warm into the next century.
But just to bend backwards, your supercilious logic amounts to saying, since the universe is nature, then everything is natural. So how can you call anything in the whole universe unnatural?
Yet, in the present context, everyone, with you as a possible exception, understands that the term "unnatural" here refers to man-made, human-induced, etc.
only man is unatural?
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The Earth's climate is now clearly out of balance and is warming. Many components of the climate system—including the temperatures of the atmosphere, land and ocean, the extent of sea ice and mountain glaciers, the sea level, the distribution of precipitation, and the length of seasons—are now changing at rates and in patterns that are not natural and are best explained by the increased atmospheric abundances of greenhouse gases and aerosols generated by human activity during the 20th century...
In the next 50 years, even the lower limit of impending climate change—an additional global mean warming of 1°C above the last decade—is far beyond the range of climate variability experienced during the past thousand years and poses global problems in planning for and adapting to it. Warming greater than 2°C above 19th century levels is projected to be disruptive, reducing global agricultural productivity, causing widespread loss of biodiversity, and—if sustained over centuries—melting much of the Greenland ice sheet with ensuing rise in sea level of several meters. If this 2°C warming is to be avoided, then our net annual emissions of CO2 must be reduced by more than 50 percent within this century.
http://www.agu.org/sci_pol/positions/climate_change2008.shtml
!20000 yrs ago?
200
300
400 thousands of years ago?
The long term trend is 1/2 ° C per century warming and the short term trend is cooling.
Paranoia is the only reason I can think for people to believe in a climate catastrophe.
Stop lying, Netdr.
Why dispute something which can easily be checked ?
how do you happen to know so little, so wrong and so suddenly, about the details of a field so far from your purported training?
And how do you have the time to post incessantly about it, despite having been banned at least 7 times (neptune2 = netdr = NGC2623 = HoosierDaddy25 = LeesburgLarry = Ptolemy101 = Texas-Titan) unless
in fact, posting climate change falsehoods has been your full-time job since this December?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/netdr/farm-bill-climate-change-crop-insurance-subsidies_n_1146058_123797495.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/netdr/farm-bill-climate-change-crop-insurance-subsidies_n_1146058_123792610.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/Publicola/farm-bill-climate-change-crop-insurance-subsidies_n_1146058_123811028.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/netdr?action=comments&display=all&sort=oldest
http://www.carbonstarvation.com/
But then, hey, just go ahead and keep your head in the tar sands if it makes you feel better.
Our planet is CO2 starved. Humanity is better served when planetary CO2 levels approach 1000ppm.
-- Congressional testimony by climate scientist Dr. Susan Solomon, March 2009
YOu know it.
I know it.
The WORLD knows it.
Time to get a real job.
Wrong.
So sorry you still seem to not understand very basic climate science, Frank.
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/6/4/044022/fulltext/
If you weren't repeatedly posting the same lies, they might let you stay.
Frank must make too much sense to someone.
http://www.carbonstarvation.com/
CO2 has been at 275ppm for the last 1000 years. The lowest value in the last 400,000 years is 175ppm. These are both shown in this plot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Carbon_Dioxide_400kyr.png
The last time CO2 was where it is now, about a million years ago, sea levels were 75-125 feet higher than they are now. This would probably impact a few economies. Yet your website promotes taking CO2 to 800ppm so that plants 'will flourish'. I didn't realize you guys were green terrorists, but there can be no other conclusion from your link. You love plants so much that you want human civilizations to be severely impacted.
For some real genuine scientific background on the CO2 concentration check out the Keeling curve and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
http://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu/program_history/keeling_curve_lessons.html
That means the fish fear him but cannot deny what he posts.
Vegan wrote
Please stop spinning this data, which could possibly confuse people and lead them to do nothing about the very serious problem we're facing with global warming. If you continue to spin the data and confuse people, I'd say your days of posting in these discussion boards are numbered. Now there's a number you might understand.
Vegan obviously doesn't like others to be exposed to both sides of the debate and wants to silence me.
This fish fears me.
Alarmists don't want you to know that fact.