Source:  Canada Free Press

In the past two weeks many U.S. media gave supportive coverage to two public opinion polls about global warming.  However, reporters were duped. The surveys released on October 9th and 18th by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication were hopelessly biased. They therefore cannot be meaningful measures of American public opinion. (more…)

Fewer Americans today believe there is a scientific consensus than did so during the 2000s… after peaking in 2010, public skepticism about global warming softened slightly in 2011, and remains at lower level this year…Today’s level of belief that global warming is similar to what Gallup found in 1997 & from 2001-2005′ — 42% say media exaggerate the seriousness, a higher amount than it was for much of the past decade.

see full article here:

Gallup Poll: ‘In U.S., Global Warming Views Steady Despite Warm Winter; Just over half say effects of global warming are now evident, similar to 49% last year’

Source:  Telegraph of London

Why Barack Obama is the decline and despair president  

This week, The Hill newspaper published a poll that is dispiriting to anyone concerned about the future of America as the world’s leading power. It was one of the most damning yet, illustrating just how far most Americans believe their country has fallen in recent years. According to The Hill:

More than two-thirds of voters say the United States is declining, and a clear majority think the next generation will be worse off than this one, according to the results of a new poll commissioned by The Hill.

A resounding 69 percent of respondents said the country is “in decline,” the survey found, while 57 percent predict today’s kids won’t live better lives than their parents. Additionally, 83 percent of voters indicated they’re either very or somewhat worried about the future of the nation, with 49 percent saying they’re “very worried.”

The results suggest that Americans don’t view the country’s current economic and political troubles as temporary, but instead see them continuing for many years. (more…)

Source:  CNS NEWS

By Terence P. Jeffrey

(CNSNews.com) – Most of the human race does not see global warming as a serious threat, according to a Gallup poll released last week that surveyed individuals in 111 countries.

Respondents were asked: “How serious of a threat is global warming to you and your family?” They were given the options of anwering: not at all serious, not very serious, somewhat serious or very serious.

Worldwide, only 42 percent told Gallup they believed global warming was either a “somewhat serious” or “very serious” threat. Gallup did not publish the separate percentages for each answer.

In the United States, 53 percent said they believed global warming was a “somewhat serious” or “very serious” threat to themselves and their families. That was down from 63 percent in polling that Gallup did on the question in the United States in 2007 and 2008. (more…)

Source:  Quadrant Online

“Today’s debate about global warming is essentially a debate about freedom. The environmentalists would like to mastermind each and every possible (and impossible) aspect of our lives.”

Vaclav Klaus
Blue Planet in Green Shackles

Shhsshh … don’t talk about the science

by Bob Carter

February 28, 2011

Carbon dioxide tax – the People’s Revolt – Part II

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Last Wednesday, February 23, Prime Minister Gillard announced, on behalf of her Multi-Party Committee on Climate Change, an in-principle commitment to introduce a carbon dioxide tax in Australia on July 1, 2012.

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This despite the irreconcilable breakdown of the Copenhagen and Cancun meetings that were aimed at achieving international agreement on similar action, and despite it now being clear also that cap-and-trade measures are dead for the foreseeable future in the USA.

This representing, first, a broken election promise of some magnitude, and, second, a stupid policy, it is not surprising that the announcement provoked an immediate blizzard of public criticism and resistance. Yet as I write, and after almost 4 days of saturation press coverage, not a single mainstream media commentator appears to have discussed the real issue at hand.

That issue is, of course, supposedly dangerous global warming caused by human carbon dioxide emissions. And note the two adjectives “supposedly” and “dangerous”, for both are critically important to the debate that we are failing to have. (more…)

Source:  SPIEGEL

By Axel Bojanowski

The amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere keeps going up and up, but public interest in climate change is sinking. Environmentalists are trying to come up with new ways to make the issue sexy. But shock tactics can backfire all too easily.

Climate change used to make headlines. But these days the issue appears to have largely fallen off the radar.

World leaders recently negotiated a new climate agreement at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Cancun, Mexico, but public interest in the issue was limited. It was a marked contrast to the UN climate conference in Copenhagen in December 2009, which had been declared of historic importance in the runup to the meeting, only to then fail spectacularly. The theft of e-mails from the University of East Anglia had badly damaged the image of climate research shortly before the summit.

Environmentalists and scientists are concerned about the massive drop in public interest in the topic over the last year. Now they are looking for new strategies to turn the tide. They’re searching for so-called “mind bombs” — highly emotional images that reduce a complex problem down to one core message. (more…)

Source:  National Post (Canada)

by Larry Solomon

[SPPI Note: Also see http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/climate_qconsensusq_opiate_the_97_solution.html ]

How do we know there’s a scientific consensus on climate change? Pundits and the press tell us so. And how do the pundits and the press know? Until recently, they typically pointed to the number 2500 – that’s the number of scientists associated with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Those 2500, the pundits and the press believed, had endorsed the IPCC position.

To their embarrassment, most of the pundits and press discovered that they were mistaken – those 2500 scientists hadn’t endorsed the IPCC’s conclusions, they had merely reviewed some part or other of the IPCC’s mammoth studies. To add to their embarrassment, many of those reviewers from within the IPCC establishment actually disagreed with the IPCC’s conclusions, sometimes vehemently.

The upshot? The punditry looked for and recently found an alternate number to tout — “97% of the world’s climate scientists” accept the consensus, articles in the Washington Post and elsewhere have begun to claim.

This number will prove a new embarrassment to the pundits and press who use it. The number stems from a 2009 online survey of 10,257 earth scientists, conducted by two researchers at the University of Illinois. The survey results must have deeply disappointed the researchers – in the end, they chose to highlight the views of a subgroup of just 77 scientists, 75 of whom thought humans contributed to climate change.  The ratio 75/77 produces the 97% figure that pundits now tout. (more…)

Source:  Rasmussen

Most U.S. voters continue to be concerned about global warming but still are more inclined to think it’s caused by planetary trends rather than human activity.

A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Likely Voters finds that 41% think global warming is caused primarily by human activity, while 47% say long-term planetary trends are to blame. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

This is consistent with findings for nearly two years. A higher percentage of voters have consistently blamed global warming on planetary trends rather than human activity since early February 2009 despite the insistence of President Obama, the United Nations and a large part of the world scientific community that humans are the bigger culprits. (more…)

Source: Scientific American

by Michael D. Lemonick

As a profile of Judith Curry in the November 2010 issue of Scientific American makes clear, the University of Georgia climate scientist has become an increasingly polarizing figure IN the past year or so. Once firmly in the mainstream, Curry says she was radicalized by the so-called Climategate affair. It crystallized her sense that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in particular, had become corrupted by what Curry calls “groupthink”—the idea that questioning some of the facts asserted by the IPCC is tantamount to treason.

Yet Curry herself is convinced that some of those facts are seriously exaggerated, and that the IPCC has failed to acknowledge the real uncertainty in the science. As a result, she’s been engaging with climate outsiders, including outright skeptics, and trying to force her colleagues to acknowledge some of what she considers serious flaws in the IPCC process. She’s been denounced, sometimes vehemently, for her efforts. (more…)

Source:  Wattsup

It seems that the public just doesn’t share the worry some of the activists have.

From the Pew Research Center

Global Warming and the Environment

Dealing with global warming ranks at the bottom of the public’s list of priorities; just 28% consider this a top priority, the lowest measure for any issue tested in the survey.

Since 2007, when the item was first included on the priorities list, dealing with global warming has consistently ranked at or near the bottom. Even so, the percentage that now says addressing global warming should be a top priority has fallen 10 points from 2007, when 38% considered it a top priority. Such a low ranking is driven in part by indifference among Republicans: just 11% consider global warming a top priority, compared with 43% of Democrats and 25% of independents.

Protecting the environment fares somewhat better than dealing with global warming on the public’s list of priorities, though it still falls on the lower half of the list overall. Some 44% say that protecting the environment should be a top priority for Obama and Congress, little changed from 2009.

See the complete report at the Pew Research Center

Source:  heraldsun

The incredible shrinking issue of the end of the planet:

Two out of three Australians are not convinced climate change is man-made, and even those who do believe it is aren’t prepared to pay much to fix it, a new poll shows.

A Galaxy Poll, commissioned by the conservative Institute of Public Affairs, found 35 per cent of respondents blamed humans for global warming.

Fully 26 per cent believed it was just part of a natural cycle, while 38 per cent remained uncertain.

Thirty-five per cent said they would not be prepared to pay anything to generate cleaner energy and fight global warming.

Of those who believed climate change to be man-made, 27 per cent said they would be prepared to pay only $100 or less a year in increased tax and utility costs.

Astonishing change in climate.

Source:  TownHall

by Paul Driessen

It’s been a rough few weeks for the “eco-progressive” fringe.

Static jet streams induced near-record high temperatures in parts of the United States and Russia, but extreme cold pummeled Seattle, England and much of the Southern Hemisphere. Perhaps Al Gore, Michael Mann and Rajendra Pachauri can turn this hodgepodge into “catastrophic climate change,” but most folks understand it as Mother Nature and weather.

Polls and news accounts find more Americans, Europeans and other people becoming weary and skeptical of “manmade global warming disaster” claims, convinced that natural forces are the primary cause of recurrent climate change, and unwilling to accept soaring energy prices and reduced living standards in the name of stabilizing Earth’s unpredictable climate. (more…)

Source:  Telegraph

by James Delingpole

Are there really no depths to which ManBearPig-worshippers will not stoop in order to shore up their intellectually, morally and scientifically bankrupt cause?

Apparently not, as we see from the latest “study” – based on a petty, spiteful, Stasi-like blacklist produced by an obscure Canadian warmist – outrageously aggrandised by being published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study examined 1,372 scientists who had taken part in reviews of climate science or had put their name to statements regarding the key findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Scientists were grouped as “convinced” or “unconvinced”, and researchers examined how many times they had published papers on the climate.

The results showed that “unconvinced” scientists accounted for just three of the 100 most prolific authors on the subject, while papers by “convinced” scientists were more frequently cited in other research.

Well, no s***, Sherlock. And might this have anything to do, perchance, with the fact that – as the Climategate emails made abundantly clear – “unconvinced” scientists were deliberately shut out of the peer-review process by the “convinced” ones? (more…)