This has not been a good 2013 so far for those who peddle climate alarmism for fame and profit.
The Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin looks at an April 2 Pew poll and concludes “The public’s interest in climate change is waning.”
A new Pew poll shows the percentage who say that global warming is a “very serious” problem has slipped six points since October.
Our friend Matt Vespa at NewsBusters wondered why Eilperin’s post didn’t pull out the numbers to prove her point.
Maybe she omitted the hard numbers for the simple reason that Americans have NEVER viewed this as a high priority issue. Let’s go back to January when President Obama – and the media – were pushing hardest for gun control policies. Aa Washington Post/ABC Poll found that 18 percent of all adults viewed addressing global warming as a high priority. Concerning the partisan breakdown, only 26% of Democrats and 7% of Republicans thought that stopping the polar ice caps was of the highest national urgency.
You read that right, only slightly more than a quarter of Democrats thought global warming was our most urgent issue at a time when hardly anyone was talking about it. In other words, it doesn’t have a natural base of support when no one is paying any concerted attention to the issue. . . .
It doesn’t matter if people believe in manmade global warming, if the intensity isn’t there, there’s no interest for politicians to act. Also, these were the same people who predicted a rapidly cooling earth in the 1970s and massive food shortages. They were wrong, and it’s not the time to gambling hundreds of billions – if not trillions – of dollars on something that is a natural occurrence.
Yup. And that’s something Eilperin and others in the MSM would know about if they reported on the substance of Heartland’s eight international conferences on climate change rather than the “controversy” that they are held at all.
But about that Pew poll: Eilperin buried the lead. The most remarkable part of that poll is that it shows overwhelming support for the Keystone XL pipeline, which President Obama is still dragging his feet about approving.
As the Obama administration approaches a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline, a national survey finds broad public support for the project. Two-thirds of Americans (66%) favor building the pipeline, which would transport oil from Canada’s oil sands region through the Midwest to refineries in Texas. Just 23% oppose construction of the pipeline. As you can see from the breakdown below, the only group that opposes the Keystone XL pipeline construction are “liberals” and that opposition clocks in at just 42 percent. A majority of Democrats (54 percent) and even stronger majorities of independents (70 percent) and Republicans (82 percent) support the pipline.
If Obama rejects the pipeline, he will be alone with the hard left on this issue, and far away from the mainstream of America.
In other bad news for climate alarmists, James Hansen — who recently quit his job at NASA to dedicate his life to full-time Chicken Little advocacy — nonetheless had to admit in a new paper that his many years of predicting uncontrollable global warming has not come to pass.
Prominent global warming activist James Hansen admits in a new paper that world temperatures are not warming as fast as predicted by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
“Annual fossil fuel CO2 emissions have shot up in the past decade at about 3% [per] yr, double the rate of the prior three decades. The growth rate falls above the range of the IPCC (2001) ‘Marker’ scenarios,” Hansen reports.
Nevertheless, “the rate of global warming seems to be less this decade than it has been during the prior quarter century,” Hansen admits. The slower pace of warming contradicts IPCC computer models projecting accelerating global warming.
Ouch. Guess Hansen had better hit the lecture circuit telling the world that the sky is falling. If his hypothesis is to be ever proven right, making a giant carbon footprint might be the way to go.
Meanwhile . . .
- the new alarmist “hockey stick” graph by Shaun Marcott, Jeremy Shakun, Peter Clark and Alan Mix turned out to be groundless;
- a prominent columnist at Britain’s Daily Mail made the sobering observation that “It’s the cold, not global warming, that we should be worried about” (25 times more Brtis, mostly the elderly, die in winter because it’s getting harder to afford ever-rising energy prices to keep a home properly heated);
- The Weather Channel reports that 3 in 8 Americans believe that global warming is a “hoax”;
- The Australian notices a “Twenty-year hiatus in rising temperatures has climate scientists puzzled“;
- and the Arkansas legislature rejected a renewable power mandate — on the day Heartland’s James M. Taylor informed them of the high-costs-for-no-public-benefit nature of requiring the state to get 5 percent of its energy from “renewable” sources such as solar, wind, and biomass.
That’s a rough few weeks, but it’s early yet — and finally warming up here in Chicago. I imagine the green shoots of even more bad news for climate alarmists will start coming up soon. A good place to see those shoots is via a free subscription to The Heartland Institute’s Climate Change Weekly email newsletter.