Why have I been spending so much time on culture and not climate lately?
Because not only is the news discouraging, it seems American's can't handle the truth.
Take a look at this recent on-line poll from Scientific American. Yes, on-line polls are driven by the self-selecting and so untrustworthy. But as a snapshot of where the momentum is in the debate, this one seems defensible to me, and it's very bad news for those who see global warming as a problem.
The vast majority of the nearly 5000 respondents think global warming is the result of natural processes (76%). An even larger majority (82%) consider the IPCC — which has now issued four hugely detailed scientific portraits of a warming planet — "corrupt," "prone to groupthink," driven by a "political agenda." And nearly 80% will say they are willing to do exactly "nothing" to stop global warming.
You may say a vast horde of skeptics bum-rushed the poll, and probably that's true. But the results fit the pattern detected in a poll last year at this time by the Pew Research Center, which showed belief in global warming declining across the political spectrum:
Only liberal Democrats really thought in 2009 that global warming a very serious problem; Republicans largely doubted the very existence of the phenomenon, and more Independent voters doubted that there was such a thing as global warming (35%) than considered it a real problem (33%).
One bright note: my former editor at Grist, David Roberts, coined a new phrase for those of us concerned about the change in the planet: climate hawks. And super-popular blogger Matt Yglesias unfurls his writing skills to explain why it's such a good phrase:
What’s a climate hawk? Well of course much like a deficit hawk or a national security hawk or an inflation hawk, a climate hawk is tough-minded and awesome and entitled to worshipful media coverage. We’re very serious people who want to confront the major challenges of our time. Are we environmentalists? Perhaps. But many of us aren’t really “nature-lovers,” we just think it would be unfortunate if low-lying areas were flooded, while vast new regions of the earth are stricken with drought. We recognize that the particulate pollution from burning coal and the geopolitical consequences of oil dependence are both dire enough to make a compelling case for energy reform even apart from the greenhouse gas issue.
See, hawks are mean, and people respect meanness.
Kit Stolz 