One of the recurring leitmotifs in this past winter’s hyper-inflated media coverage of the “debate” about climate science was that the public doesn’t care about the issue anymore anyway, and that the snow in Virginia and the stolen emails from the Climate Research Unit had soured people on the science, even though it has been revealing for decades, consistently, that we’re in a bad place and it’s getting worse. However, bad reporting notwithstanding, I wrote in December about this global poll showing the opposite.
A terrific – and stunning – op-ed in yesterday’s “NY Times” further debunks the perception of a waning public concern about climate change. Jon A. Krosnick, head of Stanford University’s Political Psychology Research Group (PPRG), reports that not only does the public care, it cares quite a lot. It believes the clear conclusions of the science and it wants government to act. 76% of the respondents in the poll favored government limiting business’s emissions of greenhouse gases.
Not only does Krosnick show the depth and the extent of the concern, he also takes a good hard look at the polls that the media was reporting indicated that the issue was vanishing from the public’s consciousness. He notes that these polls “…violated two of the cardinal rules of good survey question design: ask about only one thing at a time, and choose language that makes it easy for respondents to understand and answer each question.”
Meanwhile, across the continent, another poll shows similar results. The majority of the American public not only accepts the fact of anthropomorphically induced climate change, but very large percentages indeed support vigorous action, for instance 77% support regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant – including 64% of Republicans. (But their preferred leadership in Congress doesn’t.) See the revealing numbers below.
Further, Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, says the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is “…reminding the public of the dark side of dependence on fossil fuels, which may be increasing support for clean energy policies.”
The next step for the public is to actively voice its concerns to its elected representatives. That’s what you do in a democracy. Carl Safina, president and co-founder of the Blue Ocean Institute, in talking with PBS recently, said, most eloquently, that the oil companies “…don’t want us to look at where we need to look which is to the next era of energy where the United States can regain leadership in the world. They don’t want that, and we have fallen for it. It’s not that we drive too much. It’s that we don’t insist on getting to where we need to go. While other countries have dreams, we’re just asleep at the switch. That’s why it’s our fault.” See Safina’s interview here.
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