Pirate's Cove

Because you can’t see polar bears starving to death right in front of your face. It’s the whole frog in a boiling pot thing, according to the alarmists at Grist

The frog and the polar bear: The real reasons Americans aren’t buying climate change

In the fall of 2008, Leiserowitz conducted a poll gauging Americans’ thoughts on the matter. Seventy-one percent of respondents said they believed global warming was happening, while 57 percent said humans were causing it. Fast forward two years, and only 57 percent of respondents to Leiserowitz’s poll believed global warming was real, while just 47 percent blamed humans.

Why can’t Americans seem to get their heads around climate change? While the recession, the Tea Party, a lack of media coverage, and other forces have taken a bite out of public support for the issue recently, the problem has its roots in human nature, researchers say.

Columbia psychology professor Elke Weber was among the early researchers to look at why the seriousness of climate change was not getting through to the American public. She and her fellow scholars have pointed out that climate change is intrinsically challenging to understand: Its main causes are invisible, its impacts are distant and far off for most Americans, and its signals are often hard to detect.

See? It has nothing to do with falsified data, cherry-picked data, fake data, politicized data, politicization of the “science”, unhinged and alarmist pronouncements, prognostications of things that might happen 50-100 years down the road, blaming everything on mankind, blaming every weather event on someone driving an SUV, oh, and a failure of Warmists to live their lives in accordance with their beliefs, not to mention living high on the carbon hog. Nope, it’s because you can’t see the effects of a trace invisible gas that has been at much higher levels for most of the history of the Earth, which will Destroy All Life or something this time, unlike the rest of Time.

In other words, he found that most people think “It’s the polar bear’s problem, not mine — and as long as it’s not my problem, I frankly have more pressing things to worry about.”

And why not? When we watch tens of thousands of True Believers hop on fossil fueled planes to head off for yet another climate vacation in a far off exotic spot at the ends of the Earth, why should we believe? When the temperatures are stagnant for 13 years, despite CO2 going way up, why should we believe?

In fact, two or three degrees would be a huge deal. Experts project sea levels in Florida will rise by three to five feet by 2100. With a two-foot rise, water would cover 28 percent of South Florida and wetlands would be lost as far from the coast as Homestead, about a 125-mile drive from Key West. Miami would become a barrier island.

So what, even if true? Things change. At one point, the central portion of the US was covered by an inland sea. During the last ice age, the Mediterranean was mostly empty of water. The Earth is not static. They grew reportedly excellent grapes for wine in England during the last warm period.

Some (including Grist’s own climate hawk, David Roberts) say that in order to startle Americans out of their apathy about climate change, we need to ring the alarm bells even louder. Some scholars, however, warn that approach could backfire. Tomorrow, we’ll discuss how they think it could be done differently.

Personally, I take the view that there are two reasons why the warmist religion is dying out. First, is because they are seeing the actual science, and find it lacking in reality. They are seeing through it and realizing that it is simply a manner to push fascistic controls on people and economies. Second, they are tired of the “alarm bells being rung”. They are tired of ever single thing that happens being blamed on someone driving an SUV and living a modern life. They are tired of people who are CO2 hogs telling them that they need to change their lives, while the CO2 hogs live the high life and enrich themselves.