In a front-page story, The New York Times rightly features the decline in belief in global warming this spring in the UK.
The UK is one of the most secular nations on earth, and in the recent past readily accepted the existence of global warming. Just fifteen percent of the populace, according to a poll taken last fall, doubted it.
Now one quarter of the people in the UK flatly disbelieve that the earth is warming. Although the so-called Climategate story does show up as a reason for that disbelief, a much bigger cause (83% to 57%) cited in the poll is a cold winter. (Of course, the two possible causes for disbelief are not mutually exclusive, but the numbers nonetheless point towards the weather more than the news as the reason.)
This was the warmest March on record (since 1880, according to NOAA) but that fact apparently hasn't registered. Probably a graph won't help, but what the heck, it's worth a try.
As mentioned in a past post, the rise in disbelief around the world was predicted last spring in a paper by an ecologist at Cornell named Janis Dickinson. According to her analysis, the connection in the popular mind between global warming and apocalypse (as discussed yesterday by The Onion, below) means that the more people hear about it on the news, the more they will fear it, and the more people fear it the more people will deny it, regardless of the science.
Okay — for the sake of argument, let's assume that's true.
Here's my question: How do we test it? What proxy for fear of death can we correlate to global warming and belief? And preferably, what proxies can we compare from existing polls?
Thinking, thinking…
Kit Stolz 