Americans Still Split on Global Warming, Poll Shows - NYTimes.com
...When asked to assume that global warming is happening and to ascribe a cause, only 47 percent said that it was caused mostly by human activity, however, down from 50 percent last year.
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Most Americans seem unaware of the broad consensus among scientists that global warming is under way. Only 39 percent of the respondents agreed that “most scientists think global warming is happening,” and 40 percent agreed with the statement, “There is a lot of disagreement among scientists about whether or not global warming is happening.” Eighteen percent said they did not know enough to say one way or the other.
When questioned about flooding, droughts, hurricanes, and wildfires, roughly half the adults surveyed strongly agreed or agreed somewhat that global warming was making such events worse, however. All the same, despite the frequency of such events recently, only 12 percent said they had been thinking “a lot” about global warming, versus 18 percent last year.
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Neither the mainstream news media nor television weather reporters received high marks for their global warming coverage: 62 percent of the respondents said they strongly distrusted or somewhat distrusted information provided by the mainstream news media regarding global warming; and 48 percent felt the same way about global warming coverage from TV weather reporters.
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Anyone who thinks clearly on this subject should recognize the fact that their government should not be deciding for them, coming up with corrupt schemes such as "carbon trading" or "carbon storing" funded from tax collected revenue, without input and/or passage via their duly elected representatives-- this "executive order" nonsense used to bypass representative ruling needs to be stopped one way or the other-- unfortunately that currently seems not possible until the next election, November 2012-- REMEMBER.
One obvious reason people aren't worried about global warming is that it's not warming significantly. In fact, the contiguous United States only warmed 1.3 degree Fahrenheit in the last 115 years, most of which occurred before 1950. Since 1950 we had cooling until 1977 (as CO2 increased rapidly, then warming until 1998, then cooling since.
Warming was much higher in the 12th century - the Medieval Warm Period - and sea level was 8 inches higher. It was even warmer over 3,000 years ago in the Holocene Climate Optimum, when sea level was over ten feet higher than now.
Current warming is not unprecendented. In the past 10,000 years there were five greater warming periods than this current one. All that makes it special is we are here now in a panic about it, and we are coming off the Little Ice Age, the coldest period of the past 10,000 years.
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