Good question: why are you debating that we’re debating “climate change” if it is settled science, Ms. Carol Costello?
(CNN) There is no debate.
Climate change is real. And, yes, we are, in part, to blame.
There is a 97% consensus among scientific experts that humans are causing global warming. Ninety-seven percent!
Goodness! “Ninety-seven percent!!!!!!!!!!!!” Which has been entirely shredded. And consensus is not science.
Yet some very vocal Americans continue to debate what is surely fact.
The question is, why?
Trust certainly plays a part.
According to Gordon Gauchat, an associate professor of sociology from the University of Wisconsin, just 42% of adults in the U.S. have a great deal of confidence (PDF) in the scientific community.
Well, we should totally trust people who have completely failed in their prognostications, where the real “consensus” is that 95% of their computers models have failed. Where they “massage” the data, change the data, falsify the data. Where they take the hard data from the past and make it fit their cult. Where they enrich themselves while refusing to follow their own talking points.
We aren’t debating change, we are debating causation. I wonder if Ms. Constello has given up her own fossil fueled travel, and made her life “carbon neutral”?
In the same article from Ms. Costello, she cited Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, whose studies indicate we have six groups of Americans when it comes to climate change:
“The Alarmed” – 16% – They believe climate change is an urgent problem but have no clear idea of how to fix it.
“The Concerned” – 27% – They believe climate change is a problem but think it’s more about polar bears and tiny islands than a problem that directly affects them.
“The Cautious” – 23% – They haven’t made up their minds whether global warming is real or if it’s a man-made problem.
“The Doubtful” – 12% – They think it’s natural and poses no long-term risk.
“The Dismissives” – 15% – They say it’s a hoax, scientists are making up data, it’s a U.N. conspiracy (or) Al Gore and his friends want to get rich.
“The Disengaged” – 5% – Doesn’t know anything about climate change.
Most rightists fall into the Doubtful or Dismissive category, although many will protest they are just being Cautious, waiting for the evidence to unfold, but there is no evidence that can ever budge a Dismissive from their perch. None. Nada. Zip.
Anyway, the Dismissives et al have lost the scientific argument but are winning the political argument because they have superior political skills and simpler arguments. The Dismissive arguments cannot withstand scrutiny but they don’t have to, since so few hear the scientific arguments.
Climategate! Hide the decline! Proxies! Computer models! It stopped warming! algore!
Rich scientists! One World Order! God! Trace gas! Al Jazeera! MWP! 4 billion years!
Not one rightist hypothesis can withstand scrutiny but you scream them constantly.
Future generations will bemoan that we didn’t do more.
Jeff,
You missed a category. It is the nut jobs that don’t understand the science, don’t understand the earth orbits the sun, can not figure the logic, can not answer questions about the acidity of the oceans, do not understand the political ramifications of climate science including the significant control of our lives, fortunes, liberty and any other aspect of the “answer” to global climate change, and act as if we can really control something as massive as world climate. That would constitute about 51% of liberals and believers. Funny, that is the same number that don’t know the earth orbits the sun.