This Saturday, October 24, is 350.org's International Day of Climate Action. Citizens all over the world will participate in rallies and creative actions to let governments and delegates to the Copenhagen climate change conference know they want real solutions on climate change now, and not incremental steps or half measures that punt to some future day of reckoning.
Here's a little creative action you can do to mark the occasion right now from your computer. Go ahead and News-Google the words: New Survey Climate Change. Watch what happens. At present writing, the top two search results that come up are utterly, irreconcilably contradictory. The first is a writeup of a groundbreaking project that I advised, World Wide Views on Global Warming, which surveyed citizens in the US and 37 other countries; we found that everywhere, including in the U.S., citizens want much more aggressive action on climate change than either the U.S. Congress or the negotiators preparing for the Copenhagen seem prepared to consider. The second is an article about a new Pew poll that shows the number of Americans who see global warming as a threat has fallen 20% in the last two years.
Who's right? It seems that our representatives in Washington and delegates to the UN COP15 climate summit in Copenhagen are eager to believe the second poll. Congressional debate on climate change legislation and preparations for COP15 are both following a similar pattern of lowering ambitions and expectations, focusing on limited areas of current agreement and incremental steps, and deferring more contentious issues of targets, timetables, funding and enforcement until some later date. We are increasingly hearing from climate policymakers that it will take more time to do things right, that we have to meet people where they are instead of imposing radical reforms from above.
But there is reason to believe that they're dead wrong, and that citizens are way ahead of the policy makers, despite what some polls say. Climate change polls typically spend a few minutes on the phone asking a random sample of people a couple of superficial, often leading questions, frequently interrupting dinnertime. The process elicits off-the-cuff reactions to complex issues that are profoundly consequential to life on our planet. It's a dubious way to gather opinion on a sober subject like climate change, and many understandably shrug it off with some cynicism.
World Wide Views on the other hand is a citizen deliberative process distinct from polling, and expanded for the first time to the global level. Unlike polls or this summer's over-heated Congressional "town halls" on health care, World Wide Views participants received balanced expert information in advance, based on the Fourth Assessment Report of the Nobel Prize-winning UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Then they spent an entire day learning together, in neutrally facilitated deliberations, prior to voting on policy recommendations.
Participants were everyday people selected to reflect general demographic tendencies in their nation or region in terms of age, gender, education, occupation, urban versus countryside, and ethnicity or race. Climate experts and staff from organized stakeholder groups involved with global warming were excluded. "I'm from West Virginia; coal miners don't talk a lot about climate change," explained Larry Ragland, a participant from Methuen, Massachusetts. "I'm not an environmentalist, and two weeks ago I had a completely different impression of what climate change meant."
Thousands of people like Larry gathered on September 26th in Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Los Angeles, and Phoenix, and throughout Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and Latin America. During the course of the day, they voted overwhelmingly that their leaders should do far more and go far faster, not scale back and slow down as they're apparently doing now.
Here are some of the key U.S. results from World Wide Views:
And among participants worldwide:
These are ambitions that you'll either find very much dumbed down or absent entirely in current negotiations on Kerry-Boxer and COP15. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to sense something is wrong with this picture.
Considering the deep concern and striking calls to action evident in World Wide Views' global and U.S. deliberative results, what should we make of conventional polls that say Americans and some others aren't really all that worked up about climate change and don't support robust measures to combat it? Are those polls measuring informed public opinion, or does their approach give political cover to climate incrementalists and climate change deniers? You decide.
So when citizens around the world take to streets on October 24 to demand faster, more aggressive action on climate change from Washington and Copenhagen, don't fall into the trap of dismissing them as somehow on the fringe. The best and most thoughtful vehicle we have for registering considered public opinion indicates that in reality those activists represent the mainstream. If members of Congress and delegates to Copenhagen want to be responsive to public opinion, as they claim they do, then World Wide Views provides the survey results they need to take to heart.
Leah Lamb: 350: The Climate Event That Might Just Save the World
Carl Pope: Walking Down the Avenue
Have the big money on their side.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Koch_Industries
The other major petroleum corporations and coal corporations are responsible for some propaganda, too, but due to financial reporting requirements on publicly traded corporations which don't apply to privately owned (not publicly traded) companies, Koch has been able to get away with a lot more false assertions about science and scientists. That should always be your prime suspect.
http://www.worldwatch.org/files/pdf/Livestock%20and%20Climate%20Change.pdf
The warmest decade on record was 1998 - 2008. While 1998 was the 2nd hottet year on record, 2008 was only the 8th hottest; therefore if you only look at those two years, you might assume there hasn't been warming. However, the ten warmest years all occur within the 12-year period 1997-2008, and 2005 was the hottest year ever.
Temperatures there have ranged from -13 in December 1963 (along with 14 inches of snow) to 108 in July 1980. 17.1 inches of snow in late March 1968. Temperatures in the low teens in April, 1-2 inch snow accumutations. Thirty-one 100 degree (or more) days in the summer of 1980 from July until October. Normal high for January... 51, Normal low.. 31. Normal high for July..91 Normal low.. 72
Weather is weather....Climate is longer term trends. The ice caps ARE melting.
Physics will be the arbiter of climate change. Physics doesn't care if you are right-wing or left. It is indifferent to how much you love your children. The only thing that will count (and, indeed, already counts) is how much solar radiation is retained by the atmosphere. This, in turn, (as could be demonstrated in any decent high-school science lab) will depend on how concentrated the greenhouse gases (C02, methane and a few others) are in the atmosphere.
The politicians can squirm as much as they like. They can deny and pretend, they can act tough and worldly. They can think of their seat, or the next election. Physics doesn't care. Only the greenhouse gases matter. They are already so concentrated that the world would continue to warm for decades, even if we put out every fire and other source of greenhouse gases today.
Yet, lately I've concluded, even with an 80% reduction of our CO2 footprint, that we probably can't sustain more than half the world's current population indefinately at present energy consumption levels. So, some major culling will occur, probably catastrophically. So, you denialists will successfully wreck our planet for many generations. I mean, even at 450-500 ppm of CO2, the global warming itself might just be manageable, barely. But the attendant political and military instability probably won't be.
Hey, I'm old. I have no grand kids. So, why should I care, right? But a few of yours may survive and they'll hate you for the havoc you'll have wrought, with your addiction to convenience and to feel-good ego-toys: your monster trucks, your bloated SUVs, your fat-laden fast foods, your pie-in-the sky denialist ideologies that bear no resemblance to reality at all.
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/users/profile/thedirtman?action=comments
It is simply a clever ruse to redistribute the planet's wealth.
If Kyoto is ever passed, it will result in increased man-made CO2.
The sun is the cause of the last wave of global warming, which, by the way, has been in remission since 1998.
I estimate at least half of them are astroturfers for Wall Street Finance, though they might not know it if the money to them is washed through environmental-sounding front organisations. Half the time they sound like astroturfers fearing they are astroturf, and looking for solace for others in the similar trap.
"While three-quarters of Democrats believe the evidence of a warming planet is solid, and nearly half believe the problem is serious, far fewer conservative and moderate Democrats see the problem as grave. Fifty-seven percent of Republicans say there is no solid evidence of global warming, up from 31 percent in early 2007."
Well, Republicans who turn to Fox News and AM radio for their information are misinformed about everything these days. The same percentage of conservatives who do not believe in warming also think Obama was born in Kenya, and that the government is creating death panels for grannies. They sort of inhabit a different planet anyway!
It may be that I just am listening to the "wrong" programs, but the same seems to hold true when I (infrequently) switch the order.
Do you have any data to support the assertion that Fox and conservative radio is pushing 'birtherism'? I hear the assertion all the time, but haven't seen it myself. I am interested in the facts...
Hopefully members of scientific organizations such as the APS will soon be able to vote on what their position is on global warming, with each physicist having one vote.
after all you are voting on on how your tax dollars should or should not be spent.
In 2007, APS adopted an official statement on climate change:
"Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth's climate. Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide as well as methane, nitrous oxide and other gases. They are emitted from fossil fuel combustion and a range of industrial and agricultural processes."
"The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.""
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Physical_Society
As the APS says, "The evidence is inconvertible." Besides if we had a vote on science wouldn't you vote to teach Intelligent Design in schools? It is scary to demagogue such issues
From my own readings, I would guess that most scientists in the "hard sciences" like physics, chemistry, geology, and astronomy would not think that AGW is real.
On the other hand, most of the scientists in sociology, psychology, and environmental science would think that AGW is real. The man centered sciences generally support the idea of man-made global warming. The sciences centered on the natural world generally support the idea of natural forces influencing climate change.
At least when I was at the university, the really smart people went into the hard sciences, while the rest of us went into the social sciences, including economics and political science.
"The world's most respected scientific bodies have stated unequivocally that global warming is occurring, and people are causing it by burning fossil fuels (like coal, oil, and natural gas) and cutting down forests. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences, which in 2005 the White House called "the gold standard of objective scientific assessment," issued a joint statement with 10 other National Academies of Science saying:
"The scientiifc understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action. it is vital that all nations identify cost-effective steps that they can take now, to contribute to substantial and long-term reduction in net global greenhouse gas emissions."
Did the Pew and Harris polls objectively discern the extent of current information reviewed by those poll participants? Did they discern if that info was read, examined, queried by those polled? Was there ANY background knowledge level (meteorological/climatological/biological/physics) on GCC of those polled discerned prior to asking them their subjective opinions of the reality of GCC?
I already know the answer. Hell no.
This is why Dr. Sloka's post is so vitally important, and why it will be ignored by the not-interested-in-the-truth media sources whose job it is to dig deep and post ALL info from all sources, juxtapose this info, present debate and objectify that debate into conclusions that can be digested by those citizens who are polled, as well as those not polled.
Polls have become/are nothing more than another psychological tool of manipulation paid for by the highest bidder, whose interests will be served by their propaganda whores, the truth be damned.
Damned Lies
Statistics
Political Polls