Majority of Americans Still 'Believe' in Global Warming

Three out of four Americans believe our planet has been warming as the result of human activity, down from the 84 percent who said so in 2007, according to survey results released today.

"Several national surveys released during the last eight months have been interpreted as showing that fewer and fewer Americans believe that climate change is real, human-caused and threatening to people," said Woods Institute Fellow Jon Krosnick, of Stanford University. "But our new survey shows just the opposite."

With funding from the National Science Foundation, Krosnick conducted the survey from June 1-7, including telephone interviews with 1,000 randomly selected adults.

When asked if the Earth's temperature probably had been heating up over the last 100 years, 74 percent of the respondents said yes. And 75 percent said that human behavior was substantially responsible for any warming that has occurred.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/201 ... RJWCFzfNdF

Sure, I believe humans have warmed up the planet. I don't believe it will be all bad, the Earth was much warmer when the Norse were colonizing Greenland and global cooling ended that.
Plus I don't think we can stop it or even slow it. Europe & Japan have totally failed in thier targets and neither China nor India want to go back to the times of widespread poverty and bicycles.
And finally, I don't believe humans are totally to blame, the planet goes through temporary climate changes that we are only beginning to understand.

(Robinson et al., 2008)

Robinson, A. B., N. E. Robinson, and W. Soon, 2008, Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide, Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, p. 1-12.


As a geologist who's research documents past global climatic changes, let me make it clear that global warming is real and will be a threat to all coastal settings that are less than 100 or 200 feet above sea level. Where I part company with the general perspective is that humans are the cause of it all. Human activity is not the cause. This is a flagrant egotistical view, similar in tune to that held centuries ago that the universe revolved around our planet. First and foremost, the geologic record features many consistent clues we use to document that there have been many episodes of global warming in the past. In fact we call those periods of time when the earth was cool and dominated by glaciers, ice house worlds and the opposing time periods when there were no glaciers on earth, green house world. The logical conclusion is that global warming a) has happened multiple times in the geologic past and b) humans certainly were not the trigger. Even when early humans lived during the latest ice ages most of us have heard about, there were intra-glacial periods during which higher average global temperatures existed than those we realize today. The second part of the conclusion I presented earlier is based on the when these events took place For example, the longest-lasting greenhouse period was during the Cretaceous about 145 to 65 million years ago. This is long before man arrived on the scene . And if you want to ignore this data, then there is still the matter of early man who experienced a short greenhouse globe but as a species did nothing significant in terms of pumping CO2 into the atmosphere.

These well-documented periods of global climatic change are currently largely ignored as the subject of the current change in global climate has become embraced within a political agenda. It is terribly naive to even contemplate that we as a species are going to stop much less even slow down global warming.

Thank you very much, but the real data not manipulated by politics, tell a very different story to that fed to the general population. For example, if you look at the glacial shortening history (melting of glaciers), it is apparent that this process began long before the onset of a major increase in the use of fossil fuels. As expected the sea level history curves illustrate a similar trend and relationship as shown for the glacial melting curve below (figure 1).

Figure 1 "Average length of 169 glaciers from 1700 to 2000 (4). The principal source of melt en ergy is solar radiation. Variations in glacier mass and length are primarily due to temperature and precipitation (5,6). This melting trend lags the temperature in crease by about 20 years, so it predates the 6-fold in crease in hydrocarbon use (7) even more than shown in the figure. Hydrocarbon use could not have caused this short ening trend." (from Robinson et al., 2008)

Secondly, data never shown and therefore seemingly not considered by climatologists is the incredible correlation between solar activity and surface temperature. The graph below illustrates this for the US. This seems pretty straight forward.

Figure 2 Arctic surface air temperature compared with to total solar irradiance as measured by sunspot cycle amplitude, sunspot cycle length, solar equatorial rotation rate, fraction of penumbral spots, and decay rate of the 11-year sunspot cycle (8,9). Solar irradiance correlates well with Arctic temperature, while hydrocarbon use (7) does not correlate.

Global climatic change past and present must have its roots in astrophysical processes. We are merely temporary tenants on this globe who will have another opportunity to experience global warming with associated higher sea levels and nothing we can do is going to affect the ultimate changes that have been in action long before we considered ourselves so damn important again. In short, our tax dollars and politic diatribes ought to focus on restructuring existing infrastructures along coastal areas by relocating them to higher ground. Because sea level will continue to rise no matter what we do and the task of moving hundreds of millions of people from low-lying regions is an enormous undertaking that will take huge investments of time and money. Best we get started now.

Robinson, A. B., N. E. Robinson, and W. Soon, 2008, Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide, Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, p. 1-12.

Great post Rockdoc!! And I totally agree with you. It's hard to argue with facts unless you are Al Gore looking to make billions off of it and his followers.

I'm confused, thought "global warming" was replaced by "climate change". It makes it easier to be right, twice the possibilities! I haven't drawn a conclusion yet, still listen to both sides. Thanks for posting the info. I was going to say something unflattering about Al Gore but I restrained myself! Wow!!!

It matters not how you wish to package it. Global warming is due to climatic changes on a global scale. I commend you on your restraint. lol

Next you'll say that the climate cycling is due to sun spots, and humans have nothing to do with it, That's just crazy talk...


"With funding from the National Science Foundation, Krosnick conducted the survey from June 1-7, including telephone interviews with 1,000 randomly selected adults."

THAT'S A HUGE SAMPLE, NOT! and should it read 1,000 randomly selected adults from the DNC, or PETA, or colleges, or local bars, strip clubs.... randomly from where?


Hope Ed doesn't take this one....

tongue:

Hey Rockdoc,

I certainly respect your expertise in your field, and appreciate your posts.

I do wonder about the source you've quoted in your post, though. I've heard about the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine before, and when I've looked into them in the past they just don't appear to be a legitimate scientific organization. They had a petition in the past claiming thousands of "scientists" have signed it (30,000 or so last time I checked a couple of years ago, and conservative talk show hosts loved quoting them, I'm sure the number is much more now) rejecting the idea of human caused global warming. But when I went to that site, I saw all you had to do was fill out a form and claim to be anyone you wanted to be. The did say you should have a degree in some science related field, as I recall, but that hardly made you a global warming expert.

Anyway, here are a couple of links about them. Any comments? Am I missing something, since while I'd qualify for their petition as an "expert" (physics degree, but an electronics engineer by trade), I make no claims about being an expert or scientist regarding global warming.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Petition

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Oregon_Institute_of_Science_and_Medicine

http://www.durangobill.com/GwdLiars/OregonInstituteOfScienceAndMedicine.html

I still wonder what percentage of individuals in the 70's really believed we were plunging ourselves into the next ice age... that would be an interesting comparison, right? I mean... while we're on the topic of percentages....