This chart, adopted from a very interesting new survey (.pdf) of 2,164 American adults on climate policy, reveals part of the problem that advocates of more aggressive measures to curb climate change may be encountering as they seek to push forward initiatives like cap-and-trade.
The survey, conducted by George Mason University's Center for Climate Change Communication, reveals that Americans are concerned about global warming in the abstract -- but perhaps only in the abstract. Just 32 percent of Americans think global warming will harm them "a great deal" or a "a moderate amount" personally. The further we get out from the individual, however, the more impactful people think climate change will tend to be: more impactful on their families than themselves; more impactful on their communities than their families; more impactful on their country than their communities; more impactful than other counties than on the United States; more impactful on future generations than the present one, and finally, more impactful on plants and animals than on humans.
These beliefs are not necessarily irrational. Climate change probably will have more impact on the developing world than the developed one, and it almost certainly will have more impact on our children than it does on ourselves.
Nevertheless, the fact that fewer than a third of Americans are worried about the effects that climate change will have on them personally strikes me as significant. Although more aggressive policy responses on climate change generally poll fairly well, they are also often the first things to be sacrificed in Americans' minds when something else intervenes, such as a recession or higher energy prices. Advocates of cap-and-trade may need to find ways to personalize the terms of the debate.
4.26.2009
The Environmental Inverted Pyramid
@ 9:49 AM
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The problem is that this poll sort of has it right.
Global Warming is like the deficit or social security or medicare in that the bill for not solving it will come due in the future. Different scientist with different models give you slightly different ranges on when the problems will become severe but none of them have disaster striking in the next 5-10 years.
That basic fact makes it hard to keep global warming as a political priority because voters tend to discount future pain and emphasize current pain. Solving global warming will involve some current pain (not as much as opponents like to claim but there will be some).
Basically sums it up. Most people feel removed from its effects so they don't really care. Honestly I think we members of the Green Movement should focus publicity more so on health issues. For argument's sake let's say global warming is a complete fabrication. Pollution STILL needs to be controlled because it affects our health at every angle, spreads disease, etc. The best way to solve this is incrementally (e.g. cloth bags). Small steps people can take that make a huge impact adopted en masse. And use the pulpit of President Obama and groups like Union of Concerned Scientists to push for publicity and endorsements of the IMMEDIATE HEALTH IMPLICATIONS of a polluted Earth.
Could you make the pyramid to scale, representing the actual percentages please?
@ksays (and everyone else who asks these questions)
Please feel free to acquire the data yourself and make your own damn graph. Are you asking because you want a different visualization to understand it better, or would it just look nicer in your term paper?
Jeez.
You see, the problem is in how we've marketed environmentalism for the past 50 years.
You see bumperstickers saying "Save the whales", for example. Which is fine for the people that have a sense of compassion for other species and all that. For people who don't, its meaningless. Remember, there are still alot of people that thing that animals were created for human consumption, that they don't have souls and only humans do, that they lack intelligence and most lack the ability to feel emotions, etc etc. For the people that see animals as little more than furry robots, "Save the Whales" seems like a joke.
You have to repackage it to show how the loss of any one species affects human beings in terms not of squishy sentimentality but in terms of survival. If we kill off all the coral, the barrier reefs go and hurricanes hit coastal cities full force, that kinda thing.
It's not "Save the Whales". It ought to be, "Save your Ass"
"Not necessarily irrational"? These beliefs sound entirely, surprisingly rational, except that the pyramid probably doesn't narrow as sharply as it should.
The idea that climate change is coming to get YOU and your family would be, for most people, very unreasonable. The expectation of some unspecified harm is more warranted as the set of potential victims grows larger and the timeframe grows longer.
I'm still amazed that Sarah Palin doesn't believe in Global Warming or at least man made pollution.
Interesting chart, but come on, man... a typo in the headline? Is FiveThirtyEight ever going to get some decent copy editing? It's embarrassing.
Mark,
You know how people used to believe in a geocentric universe, and Galileo got in trouble fort saying the sun was in the middle and not us?
That,s the basis of Palin's religion. her god created the univrese for her, yes her, particular benefit. It's the ultimate self-obsession, because the whole premise of it is that she is the most important being in existence.
Such a person isn't going to believe that anything can hurt her unless her god makes it happen that way, and that god won't allow that if she's been a good little girl and does whatever the bible tells her to.
Therefore, everyone that died in Katrina was to her some kind of sinner that deserved it
statler-agree that we have marketed saving the planet poorly. it really should be about saving yourself.
in a country so self obsessed it was foolish to think that talking about whales or baby seals would have much effect.
BUT SARAH PALIN??? please let us try to forget about that walking, talking, idiot of a disaster.
i was having a good morning looking at obamas new poll #s!
wish nate would look at torture poll #'s. some are out now and i wish the public would stop acting like torture is good for america
Off topic- but my sign in name has changed here and i dont know why?
id mention my old name but it kind of feels good to be someone else.
It only took 7 comments until we got our first Sarah Palin reference. Unbelievable.
I think if the poll was worded differently, people might be more concerned about humanity. It asks if global warming is a threat to "me" -- and no, it's generally not. The human race isn't going to be wiped out by GW in the next seventy years, so I'll be fine.
If it asked if we're concerned about Global Warming's threat to humanity, though, I think the number would be higher.
I'd like to say that, for many, it would be irrational to believe global warming will affect them.
For example, take myself. I live in Quebec City, Canada. I'm not in a coastal area, so rising water levels won't affect me. we are not threatened by tornadoes, hurricanes, or heatwaves. The only thing global warming will do to us is make us have more snow in winter, and that's not all that dangerous considering how well we deal with it. Heck, winters will be warmer, so fewer people will die from the cold.
So, will it harm me, my family, or my community? Most likely not. Will it adversely affect people in my country, industrialized nations, developing countries, future generations, and animals species? Yes.
Can I just point out that we are an animal species...
So I read it as saying 62% agree it will hurt them... they just have cognitive dissonance...
GROG said...
It only took 7 comments until we got our first Sarah Palin reference. Unbelievable.
Hardly unbelievable. ;) She has taken up the mantle of the anti-intellectual wing of the GOP. She was chosen by the RNC, and make no mistake that it was a collective choice rather than solely McCain's choice, then opened her mouth and revealed herself as a caricature of George W. Bush.
Although I will give her that she's ahead of W in at least one way, she is on record for keeping Creationism out of science class. Apparently a relative teacher got to and at least beat that into her skull. I've seen video of W, at least a few times, parroting the coded "teaching the controversy" line.
If you would like people to stop talking about her I suggest you do your best to keep her off the national stage.
While I tend to agree that the poll results are probably a good reflection of Average Joe's perspective on climate change impacts, I don't think there is much that can be done about this by changing the message. Granted there are negative health impacts associated with today's pollution and we can work on those. But there is a big difference between, campaigning to abandon plastic bags, and investing in large-scale programs to implement new energy technologies which are desperately needed NOW to avert global-scale disaster in 30-50 years (give-or- take). I think the fundamental problem is the general level of education and awareness. Unless and until AJ (like Bradford, for example?) has a B.Sc. with a decent understanding of physics and biology, we're losing an uphill battle.
I do tend to hold the religious Rightists (like Palin) partly accountable for a significant fraction of the US population not taking anthropogenic climate change seriously. (I.e. those who think that
TRUE BELIEVERS ARE SAVED, and the rest of us will fry in the Hell of our own making.) But Nate's earlier report on religions and belief in human-caused GW suggests I may be overly concerned on that point.
Nate Silver and Chris Mooney need to get together to write a book on the intersection between politics and science
Nate's findings more likely are actually a tell-tale calibrator of the strength of people's faith in the reality and or correctability of global warming. In other words, we try to do what cardiologists recommend to reduce the chance of a of getting a heart attack precisely because we believe 100 % in the existence of heart attacks, and 90 % in the effectiveness of the advice of cardiologists.
In the case of global warming, I'm a pretty liberal sort of person, but far from convinced that any green-going technology is going to make the slightest dent in global warming, given the overwhelming weight of factors like limitless population growth, together with limitless development ambition in developing nations.
And as for green technology being the pancea that true believers seem to trust so dogmatically, I'm old enough to remember that we were once promised that technology would gift mankind with a 24-hour work week.
Where I work, people have to spend 24 hours a week just applying and testing the latest releases of myriad installed software products, as each vendor in turn announces that they'll soon stop supporting their respective previous software releases. So much for what is left of our faith in the promise of technology.
It's too bad the study doesn't break results down by age. People who are 70 are likely to answer differently from people who are 20 about whether climate change will affect them personally.
Global warming is a farce. Period.
All of this crap is dreamed up by many people to get more money in the form of taxes. Al Gore, you are not excluded as you have made it come to the forefront with your crap.
Should we become better stewards of our planet? Without a doubt. I think that we are responsible to be more careful in the way we approach the subject of maintaining the planet though. Government plays no role in this as they foul everything up and it ultimately comes back to us paying for some bureuacries creationg to siphon more money from our pockets.
Disregard the planet's precession which inevitably allows the planet to move closer and further from the sun due to the tilt on the earth's axis. Disregard that we are not in e perfect circular orbit around the sun which invariably leads us to be closer and further from the sun over a twenty-six thousand year period. Ignore the fact that ice cores have shown this repeating process over time. Disregard the fact that before over indulgent humans roamed the planet freely with 2 mpg cars and the additional carbon emitter add-on was available that throughout history there have been higher volumes of Carbon in the atmosphere without our intervention. To my surpise, the planet is still here.
So, please continue to be uneducated sheep and shove the S#!t into your mouths so the government can once again screw us over. I am amazed that a country who appeared above average in intelligence at one time, now buys into every piece of crap that is fed to them. You are caught up in what the television feeds to you (Corporate Owned Media) or what any one of us idiots feeds to you over the internet (Al Gore's creation).
Anyway, remember to be a responsible human or one day you may have the government taxing you for wiping you a55.
Grog,
You made her what she is today, so don't whine at us when she embarrasses you. If you're that ashamed, run her out of office.
Mob,
If you have multiple google/blogger/lj identities, whichever one you,re signed in as at the moment (like, whichever one you logged into last, even after you left the website for this one) is what this thing will identify you as.
And its not just this country. If you think about it, there's nothing more self-obsessed than fundamentalist christianity. The whole scheme of it centers on the self. They give lip service to the idea of serving others, and maybe they'll turn out their congregations on Easter and Thanksgiving and Xmas to go work at a homeless shelter, but the rest of the time, they're not thinking about anybody but themselves.
Think about the very premise of the whole End Times shtick. If they were truly selfless, they'd try to create heaven here on earth, building homeless shelters and not cathedrals, hospitals and not megachurches. God's house is inside every living thing, so he doesn't need a gold statue on top of the mormon tabernacle, but they'd rather have that statue up there, so everyone can see how lavish their temple is. Isn't the Vatican so pretty? ook at all the money we have to spend on building shit like that, we must be impressive!
I went to volunteer at a suicide hotline a year ago. During the training session, everyone patted each other on the back about how noble we all were, and how god is looking down on us. When it came round to asking why were we doing this, the responses ranged from the "Praise Jesus!" in a loud booming voice to self-flagellation bordering on publicly masturbating in front of a mirror. On my turn I suggested that we needed a social safety net so that if anyone of us should wind up in trouble, someone would be there to catch us, as sort of mutual insurance policy. The whole room looked at me like I was on drugs.
Same with the environment. These people don't think about the pain other people feel, except for whatever points they'll score in this cosmic video game, with the more 'souls you save for Jesus' earning you greater rewards than consciously not building a subdivision in a fragile ecosystem that would lead to the deaths and suffering of numerous animals. You can almost hear a bell ringing when they talk, "I'm gettin holier!" ding ding ding ding!
When you've been told your whole life that the earth is something dirty and nasty and filthy, and nature is something you should hate; when you've been told that your natural instincts are sinful and evil and you should always be on guard to attack the enemy within-then it's no surprise that you will have no compassion for other species, wild things, creatures that don't live in 'civilized' environments like we do and shout Praise Jesus! as loud as possible so the whole world will see its them thats doing the praising.
Am I bitter? Hell yeah. I trust animals more than i do people now. I can trust what a wild animal will and won't do-I know, for example, that most times a poisonous snake is more scared of me than I am of it, and as long as I make a deliberate effort to not freak it out and just walk around the thing instead of poking it with a stick or something stupid like that, it'll probably leave me alone. People on the other hand will attack anything just to make themselves look better, they'll destroy life for the sheer sport of it.
I wonder sometimes if it isn't the animals that have the souls we lack.
Bradford said
The poll is proof that even with indoctrination, and the take over the global science community with political correctness, that Americans still think for themselves.
---------------------------
Or is it proof that many Americans prefer there indoctrination to come from the pulpit and not the science lab?
Anyway I think the problem is that people understand the more abstract nature of this problem, but struggle to appreciate the more pragmatic problems that there own life will have if we do not make modern life more sustainable. In fact we understand the pragmatic affects of doing something about it on our lives and typically we shrink from those affects (less use of our cars and of planes as an example of a change that many people don't seem to want to make).
I think the biggest threat to humanity in the global-warming issue is not in the rising oceans, but in the depletion of biodiversity (due both to warming and to ocean-acidification). Unfortunately, it is very difficult to predict specifically how loss of 25% of species will affect ecosystems and thus humanity. We can say that it will get much harder to develop new medicines, because most of these come from experimentation with exotic plant or animal extracts. But many things about how ecosystems work are difficult to predict.
For example, when sea otters were wiped out in kelp forests, the forests themselves died back, due to overeating by sea urchins. Nobody predicted that, it was observed after the fact. When the sea otters were protected and moved back into what was left, the kelp forests started to come back. This is just one example. If we lose 25% of species, there will be many other examples; but they can hardly be predicted in advance, because interactions among species in ecosystems are well beyond our ability to understand and predict.
It is not possible to regulate CO2 as "pollution" on grounds other than global warming: It is not toxic, except in quantities that are about 5%, or 50,000 ppm, about 166 times greater.
Actually, Nate's genius is NOT in designing a scientifically accurate study but designing a visually accurate portrayal of a study. He didn't design the study he's showing, he just shows it in a way everyone can understand. That's genius! Thanks Nate!
Bradford, Your point's well-made and well-taken. Nate specializes in polls... Why are you so angry?
Above, I should say: "It is not possible to regulate CO2 as 'pollution' on grounds other than environmental damage."
Bradford:
- The estimates I have seen suggest that biologists believe they have identified about 10% of species.
- Of the ones they know, the expectation is that some 25% are likely to be wiped out.
- There is no reason to expect that species that haven't been identified & classified will be more robust to large changes in their environment (like temperature change and acidity increase) than the species that we have already studied.
System -
You are ill-informed and advance illogical and irrelevant arguments.
Global warming is a farce. Period.
All of this crap is dreamed up by many people to get more money in the form of taxes. First of all, if this were true, it wouldn't be an argument against human contribution to climate change. Pearl Harbor was a reason for more government spending (and ultimately more taxes); that doesn't mean Pearl Harbor didn't happen.
Al Gore, you are not excluded as you have made it come to the forefront with your crap.
Should we become better stewards of our planet? Without a doubt. I think that we are responsible to be more careful in the way we approach the subject of maintaining the planet though. Government plays no role in this as they foul everything up and it ultimately comes back to us paying for some bureuacries creationg to siphon more money from our pockets."Government plays no role" in maintaining the environment? Only an unreasonable ideologue would make such a statement.
Disregard the planet's precession which inevitably allows the planet to move closer and further from the sun due to the tilt on the earth's axis. Disregard that we are not in e perfect circular orbit around the sun which invariably leads us to be closer and further from the sun over a twenty-six thousand year period. Ignore the fact that ice cores have shown this repeating process over time. Disregard the fact that before over indulgent humans roamed the planet freely with 2 mpg cars and the additional carbon emitter add-on was available that throughout history there have been higher volumes of Carbon in the atmosphere without our intervention. To my surpise, the planet is still here.You appear to subscribe to a delusion that climatologists, geologists and physicists know less about the history of the earth and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels than you do.
Let me assure you that you are comically mistaken.
So, please continue to be uneducated sheep and shove the S#!t into your mouths Now there's a convincing argument.
so the government can once again screw us over. I am amazed that a country who appeared above average in intelligence at one time, now buys into every piece of crap that is fed to them. You are caught up in what the television feeds to you (Corporate Owned Media) or what any one of us idiots feeds to you over the internet (Al Gore's creation).A "country" can't have "intelligence". The rest of this is too incoherent and paranoid to address.
Anyway, remember to be a responsible human or one day you may have the government taxing you for wiping you a55.Is this statement supposed to represent an argument against human contribution to climate change?
Bradford,
It's kind of silly for you to argue that there's nothing special about humanity: If we took that seriously, murder would be no more strongly punished than butchering of cattle. But that doesn't seem to be the way normal human beings think about the situation. I think you should get over your attitude of pretending to be superior to the entirety of humanity - nobody else is impressed.
Eliminating species over millions of years is normal, because it allows time for new species to evolve.
Eliminating species over a couple hundred years is impoverishment of the planet, because it doesn't.
GROG…
Lyndon Johnson once said, “If your mother-in-law has only one eye, and it’s in the middle of her forehead, you don’t keep her in the living room.”
Well, Sarah Palin is the GOP’s one-eyed mother-in-law, and since they made the mistake of letting her loose on the world it’s only appropriate that they suffer the consequences.
Again and again and again, if need be.
@Bradford- What is it with all the scientific abcs? Humans are a type of mammal with language. The universe doesn't give a shit about us. Sometimes there are big 'punctuations' driven from outside the biosphere (e.g. 65 mil yr bp, asteroid) or by internal biosphere dynamics (0 yr bp, us).
Look, most of us know all that stuff. We still think that we can do better or worse by our children, depending on our actions. We want to do better. Like, you know, ordinary mammals.
I haven’t read the comments above, but I think a third of the electorate concerned about GW to this degree is more significant than Nate suggests. But even this significance may be more apparent than real and ultimately represents yet another vulnerability of the Obama administration. Nate raising the issue in this manner makes me suspect that he has soured to a degree on Obama and is becoming to smell the hypocrisy (to a degree) and have doubts about the vain ambitiousness of it all. I have faith in Nate.
Sean is a lawyer and a free speech absolutist. While Nate is a wonk (and a wanker), Sean is so cool and oh so concerned about the faithful portrayal of America as it is. Recall his trenchant Racists for Obama piece, as controversial a theory - - and one that requires a degree of cunning that these sort of people are not normally supposed to possess. So in my mind, having observed the Orwellian lack of transparency of the Obama Administration, Sean is already casting a jaundiced eye on the Administration and its goals so as to better assure himself and his journalistic audience of the veracity of what he is reporting, and, concededly, what he seeks to encourage.
Am I being too obtuse? It has been a long weekend!
With regard to Nate’s Global Warming poll, two nuances suggest themselves.
One, that there are a number of public GW deniers who won't admit to being worried for political reasons. The Democratic Party agenda is so thoroughly tied to the Environment as an Agenda that it is the Right’s interest to debunk the Left’s environmental policies -- even if they have merit, if only to reduce this segment of the electorate.
The other point to consider is that recognition of the potential harmful impact of GW does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that (A) it is manmade and (B) a Political Solution will work.
The manmade vel. non meme is really a distraction, as it really does not matter in terms of an informed and sensible GW policy position. Such position would begin from the pole that no regulation is best and then only if there is a positive cost-benefit analysis. Under the circumstances the World finds itself in, it makes little sense to be sentimental about “Mother Earth”. Decisions must pass cold, hard tests of positive impact versus negative cost. Anything else is folly. This is the second nuance that makes the poll more or less irrelevant.
There is growing recognition that unilateral government action, as in the US acting alone or the EU acting alone, won’t have beneficial impact (or a much diluted ones) unless the developing world, China and India, but also the huge economies of Indonesia and Brazil, can be made to cooperate as well. This is the reason why US refusal to drill domestically for oil is a decision that in the short run is increasing environmental pollution by increasing the demand for oil production from “dirty” states we trade with, especially those in Africa like Nigeria and Kenya. The White Man’s Burden (sigh!) is such that little is expected from Africa other than lawlessness. How remarkable then that we elected the Dark Continent’s standard bearer in Barack Obama, a man of Muslim extraction, no less. What could have been more improbable?
But I digress, in a way. Back to the point: Only a Global Solution can stem the tide of Global Warming.
Unilateral action is unlikely to have much beneficial impact – at least for the individual country (remember the rest of the World is a free rider) and certainly will cost more to domestic economies than the nation will get back in terms of climate and related benefits.
Cap and Trade in particular is a flawed vehicle and clumsy Executive Legislation is a close second. Both are easily defeatable as putting too great a burden on the economy and on the citizenry without much in the way of truly verifiable benefits. At best it is a costly, symbolic gesture, one we would be better sponsoring the Swiss to do, so we can see reforms work in smaller, less risky laboratories and not in the United States.
The Audacity of Audacity.
Obama cannot believe his good fortune, I am sure. I suspect that he and I are alike are scared of the prospect of it. Careful what you wish for!
The man does not really know what he is doing.
"Wreck havoc"!
PeteKent01 (follow me on twitter)
GROG said...
It only took 7 comments until we got our first Sarah Palin reference. Unbelievable.You may be on to something...Conservatards, Americans, denialists, etc. will not realize disaster until it is knocking on their door. Even saying pollution should be stopped is not effective.
Remember, "It's a recession if your neighbor loses their job; it's a depression if you lose your job."
This is why I have little faith in democracy. As bad as having no rights are, at least stuff gets done.
juvanya said...
It seems we need BR tags now when using HTML.
You don't need to use BR tags. Just follow the the closing italics tag with a space or some other character. Then the carriage return doesn't get eaten.
Personally, anything I now see out of George Mason University, I have to take with a large grain of salt.
GMU is the home of the Mercatus Center. The Mercatus Center was partially founded by, and still has on it's rolls one Wendy Gramm, listed as Mercatus Center Distinguished Senior Scholar.
Who is Wendy Gramm? Wife of former Senator Phil Gramm, and Phil Gramm is most likely the more sane of the two.
The Gramm's have an inordinate amount of influence over a lot of GMU these days.
Mike in Maryland
My Blogger ID is http://www.blogger.com/profile/02848893412251095965
You're missing it if you are under age 50, even if without younger family, and you think it won't affect you. Many people are already being affected (anyone notice some floods and fires a bit above average lately?); species and pest migration, socioeconomic conflict (abroad, I know). Australia paints a picture:
"Drought, fires, killer heat waves, wildlife extinction and mosquito-borne illness — the things that climate change models are predicting have already arrived there" etc.:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-climate-change-australia9-2009apr09,0,7128426,full.story
Methane is being released by Arctic melt now; may or may not be past tipping point (shorter duration in atmosphere (20-40 years) but 20+ times more powerful than CO2 (which has time sig: 400 years+). Arctic ice is thinner this year due to extraordinary melt; not unlikely full melt in summer by 2013.
Personally, I think this summer is going to surprise a whole lot of people.
In the meanwhile, I trust Obama and his fabulous team. Holdren is smart and with it.
Time to stop the wishful/magic thinking; money/health care have human control component, but bio-chemico-geo-physical climate does not have a human soul; it will be relentless.
For a good picture, this graphical entertainment, not particularly extreme (1 meter rise in 25 years is not unlikely at this point):
http://newpapyrusmagazine.blogspot.com/2008/03/worse-case-scenario.html
Bradford -
We like to argue with facts on this site. Got any?Yes. By the way I have a biology degree and a medical degree, just FYI. "Punctuated equilibrium" refers to the fact that human-perceived rates of morphologic change in the fossil record vary over time. This is undeniable, but there is some specialized debate over how to actually measure the "rate" of evolution, and how large the contribution of periods of "rapid" evolution to evolution, overall, may be.
Before presenting you with facts, let me start with some logic.
Perhaps you are familiar with the mathematical concept of expected value, E(X) = X*P(X). If not, it is easy to explain - the expected value of a random variable is the probability of it happening, times its value.
For example if a very short term financial choice (so short term we can ignore discounting and so on) has a 60% chance of costing you $100, but a 40% chance of gaining you $200, it has an EV of...
(-$100)*(.6) + ($200)*(.4)
Which equals +$20. Someone who repeatedly makes this choice will lose some of the time, but gain money in the long run.
We can note that, if we ascribe any probability other than zero to the possibility that modifiable human activity is impacting on the climate in a negative way (regardless of what else is impacting), the expected value of ignoring this is...
(probability that modifiable human activity impacts climate) * (cost of negative changes in climate that could have been avoided).
As the second term would be enormous, even if you ascribe a low probability to the possibility that human activity could influence the climate in a negative way, the EV of doing nothing is very costly. Almost certainly more costly than merely trying to modify some aspects of our behavior.
In reality, the evidence for negative human contribution to climate change is substantial.
Rather than list dozens or hundreds of scientific citations, I will refer you to a good Wikipedia article as a start. The article cites 120 references and has an extensive "further reading" list, so it's a very good place to begin. For facts, please see...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming
Of course, many other things beside human activity impact on climate, but that does not mean that we should persist in activities that make things worse. As an analogy, many factors other than smoking cigarettes impact on one's health, and indeed, non-smokers suffer disease and trauma all the time, but that is not a rational argument in favor of adding cigarettes to the mix.
@Nate - Great data as usual, but in this instance I have to quibble with your graphic. I only nitpick here because usually your graphics are excellent. The pyramid shape is quite misleading: the area of the graph representing the data point "32% You" is probably 1/10 the size of the graph area representing "62% Plant and Animal Species", even though the numbers only differ by a factor of two. The graph is certainly prettier this way, but it misstates the data and gives a false impression of how seriously people take global warming. 32% of people think global warming will impact them personally. This isn't as large as it should be, but it is a good start and shouldn't be understated!
Dwight said...
@Bradford
:/ You really are on a jackass tear. Tying one on tonight?
This place could really use the sign:
You must be this sober -----
to post here.
Bradford says:
Communicating is night and day to a written language.
Yeesh. How many languages are there in existence today? Somewhere around 3000. How many of those have a written component? About 100. 3% of all languages have a written component. So if language is what separates us from dogs, it's not written language, but spoken language (unless you seriously suggest that those without a written language aren't humans?)
How old is the written word? Well, roughly 6000 years old. How old is the spoken word? If you assume that H. sapiens basically always had a language, the spoken word is roughly 200,000 years old. For most of our history, we haven't had a written language. Managed just fine without one. Certainly don't need writing to transmit Beowulf. We were humans back then as much as we are today, just as different from dogs back then as we are today.
By the way, writing is simply a different method of communicating, not some completely different action from communicating as you seem to imply.
But is the data truly Guttman scalable? What's the C.R.?
Bradford is like many attorneys:
"If you can't argue the facts, argue the law. If you can't argue the facts or the law, blow smoke."
Bradford is in the 'blow smoke' category.
Mike in Maryland
My Blogger ID is http://www.blogger.com/profile/02848893412251095965
I'd be curious as to Bradford's thoughtful response to my post above which speaks to the political impracticality of dealing with Global warming as Obama is envisaging it.
He seems to be ignoring the cost-benefit deficit and the free rider problem associated with cap n' trade and the unilateral reduction in pollution by regulation or other legislation.
PeteKent01 (on twitter)
You Folks think this might be someone you know?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/26/tea-party-twitter-arrest_n_191527.html
Bradford said...
I am sober,but I am also pissed.
You'd do well to go get some sleep to see if your anger sub subsides enough to start talking sense because right now you are spouting some monumentally foolish things while waving around your [Yale Comp Lit?] PhD title.
I dont know much about polling, but a lot of those numbers are really pretty close, probably too close to call this a pyramid. Dont these numbers need to be evaluated at least by conventional barometers of value, i.e. statistics? For instance, what are the confidence intervals for these means? Are they significantly different?
The pyramid is a cool way to show all of this, but the real result probably looks more like
Your community, family and you (35%)
Nations (50%)
the Future and
popular conception of “the environment” (60%)
truly, what is the difference between 49% and 50%? 32 and 35%? Probably not enough to distinguish the categories. and if it is, where are (at least) the stats to back up the distinction?
You proved your idiocy before, thanks for doing so agin.???
See, it's stuff like that. I call you out on your lack of understanding of evolution, Harold points you to a list of references, and all you do is start tossing out empty "got a fact" and bullshit innuendo. :/
Goodnight. Get some sleep.
@David,
I was thinking the same thing, but the trouble with just asking 'what's the sampling error' like a typical poll is that it was the same people asked these questions (at least that's what I gathered). So someone who answered it would affect me would have to answer yes to it would affect my family/community. And (as we see) there may be times that it could affect family (or another country) without affecting them (or their country). So one would expect a pyramid such as the one obtained.
The interesting thing about it isn't the shape per se, but that there are the levels David pointed out, and the overall percentages.
Evolution is not leaving more genes in future generations?
Ah, but that isn't what you said. Or I guess more to the point you equated reaching reproduction age (which still isn't actually universal within humans BTW) with an equal passing on of genes. An entirely bogus assumption. Something I'd expect to come from someone with a solid B- in Grade 11 Biology under their belt and trying to use that little bit of knowledge to rationalize what they want to be true.
If you actually attended Charlesworth's class, and didn't sleep through it and weren't flunked out, you would have been better served shoring up your education with up with some critical thinking tutoring. :)
As a bonus it would probably help curb your embarrassing fixation on sunspots.
Ok, 'Bradford' is Fred after a few drinks.
That is exactly what he reminded me of, which is why I figured I'd give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he's posting drunk/stoned. *shrug*
Problem's with what Bradford is saying:
1) He is confusing is and ought. Evolution says what it, it says NOTHING about how things SHOULD be.
2) He is viewing punctured equilibria as good things - based exclusively on the fact that they happen. But in fact, punctured equilibria are generally terrible things for almost all species at the time.
3) He assumes that "survival of the fittest" is all that evolution is, when it's only one part of it - he ignores sexual selection, as well as other types of differential reproductive benefit.
4) He assumes that because humans are animals, all animals are equivalent to humans. I don't think anyone short of the most hardcore PETA member actually believes that humans are morally equivalent, to, say, sea urchins - but Bradford's arguments seem to assume we are.
5) He assumes that simply because a complex system has never gone fatally out of bounds BEFORE, that it can't now - this is sort of like assuming that because a person hasn't died when they were sick before, they can't die from this different illness, either.
I am a supporter of environmental issue, but a man made global warming skeptic. There are plenty of important local environmental issues which will achieve the same goals. Many urban areas have significant air pollution issues which effect public health.
Instead of wasting time trying to cordinate international carbon emissions, perhaps local communities could address local environmental concerns that impact local health and well being.
Gee, another chance to stir the pot.
There's no such thing as "punctured equilibria". The Gould hypothesis was about punctuated equilbrium, which is singular. It is just as incorrect to talk of "punctuated equilibria", i.e. more than one, as it is to talk about the theory of "evolutions".
All this talk about education and degrees, so how do these the simple errors go past without notice?
Paul,
You are a skeptic of anthropogenic global warming, but the vast majority of climate scientists are not. From their point of view, there is NO local-impact environmental action that would serve the same goals as reducing CO2 and other greenhouse gases. CO2 is not really an air-pollution issue, it is an environmental damage issue.
Just as getting fire insurance has the same general intention as getting flood insurance, but getting one doesn't replace getting both.
I swear, if it were not for fundamentalist christianity, so many of the controversial issues of our time would be complete non-issues.
How can you say that man exists independent of his environment? You breathe the air and drink the water, don't you? Food doesn't just magically appear in a grocery store, it comes from nature. Yet you treat nature as if it were something 'over there', like it didn't really exist in America, like it were some foreign, alien thing to you.
You are nature. You are an animal. I don't mean that figuratively, I am being quite literal here. And just as the animals in the forest rely on other living things to survive, from the trees that provide them shade to the plants they eat-you too rely on nature for your survival.
Listen here, because this is important. The earth was around for billions of years before the first creatures that were recognizably human ever did. The earth will be around for many billions of years after we have gone extinct. In time, you will be mere dust, or maybe your bones will be petrified, but that is the only immortality you will ever know. You are impermanent, like everything else.
And, you can die prematurely. If you poison your environment, you most surely will. And long after you and I and all human beings are dead, this earth will continue.
So this isn't a save the earth thing. This is a save the humans thing. You are killing your own kind when you emit carbon. You are committing murder. Murder of generations not even yet born as well as the ones that now live.
What kind of god would have you behave like such a monster? If the god you worship would have you kill your fellow humans so wantonly, then I want nothing to do with such a god. Your religion is madness.
Pragmatus: Arguments over grammar are the lowest form of internet argument, but "punctuated equilibria" is, I assert, perfectly legitimate.
The equilibrium gets punctuated by a period of rapid change (sometimes by an external event - such as a meteor - and sometimes by ecological events such as a keystone species increasing or decreasing significantly in population as the result of gradual drift), and then things eventually stabilize out to a different equilibrium.
There is only ever one equilibrium at a time (obviously), but over time there are a series of different equilibria, all of which eventually become punctured.
Pragmatus, you are corect that there is only one theory of evolution - but the whole point of the Gould theory is that there have been several events that have caused mass extinctions over the earth's history - puntuated equilibria - such as the arrival of oxygen ands the meteor that killed the dinosaurs. Now go back to high school.
Michael-
I assume zero of the 5 things you purport. Thanks for playing though.
Dwight-
HUH? That post makes no sense and assumes all kinds of things I do not.
You kids can play on your internet board with Nate - the U of Chicago non-scientist - and assume anything you want about population genetics, but you most of you are clearly clueless.
Selection drives leaving more alleles of particular genes in future generations, period, as that is the very definition of the term. Humans, at least humans in the developed world, clearly left that as an average driver long ago.
As for me being Fred drunk or stoned - I am my own person, and sober to boot.
@ blog administrator- Odd, you've never gone back and deleted one of my posts before. What gives? Saying that someone 'isn't a quant type' doesn't seem very abusive by the standards here.
@ Michael- re your point #5- Since the global temperature (and CO2 level) has been all over the place on a long time scale, without any radical swings toward extreme heat, the feedback system doesn't seem to be unstable. That means that a real runaway is quite unlikely. Nonetheless the anthropogenic driving plus actual positive feedback will be enough to make terrible trouble for people.
Bradford...
It is no wonder you are the object of such ridicule here.
Punctuated equilibrium is the theory that the history of evolution is one of statis (equilibrium) punctuated by events that upset these periods. (Think of the asteroid that spelled the end of the dinosaurs.) To call each of these events, as you do, by the entire term "punctuated equilibrium" is the height of ignorant absurdity.
It's not possible to believe that you have any sort of education.
My 5:47 PM post,critical of Bradford,has been deleted " by a blog administrator." (Dwight's 4:49 PM post has likewise been deleted.)
All of Bradford's posts up until 11:55 PM have been totally erased, with no indication that they ever existed!
What's going on,Nate?
Michael...
You are saying that you haven't read Stephen Jay Gould on the subject of "punctuated equilibrium", otherwise you would not commit the blunder of insisting that there really are "equilibria". It has nothing to do with arguments over grammar. You simply have no aquaintance with the facts.
It's also clear that you have not studied evolution either.
A little information for those in the dark...
Punctuated Equilibrium.
Pragmatus: You reveal that you know less than you believe.
For instance, the 1972 essay by Eldredge and Gould is titled "Punctuated equilibria: an alternative to phyletic gradualism".
Equilibria, not equilibrium.
Punctured Equilibrium is the general name of the theory, but it is a theory about equlibiria - this is, in fact, a grammatical issue.
You cannot have more than one equilibirum - it is simply grammatically incorrect.
As for your belief that I have not studied evolution, perhaps your own extensive study of the subject can identify where I read, oh, "The Role of Nearly Neutral Mutations in the Evolution of Dynamical Neural Networks", or "Niche Construction and the Evolution of Complexity", or "Co-Evolution to the Edge of Chaos: Coupled Fitness Landscapes, Poised States, and Co-Evolutionary Avalanches", or "A Network of Dynamic Keystone Species"?
Or are you just blowing smoke because you read a book once and are convinced that nobody would talk about the topic without fixing the grammar?
@Opus 123
I deleted the 4:49PM post myself, the post following it contains the same thing with clarification. However there are other posts that are flat out missing. The admin probably came to the conclusion I now have, following his last post; Bradford isn't who he claims to be.
@ Dwight
Where your 4;49PM post originally was,it says "removed by a blog administrator",not the usual "removed by the author." Very strange!
But my post,and apparently one by Michael(mbw),was removed by the mysterious administrator.
Bradford isn't whom he claims to be? And this was discovered? Stranger still!
The entire argument about punctuated equilibrium is beside the point. The point is: If there is a dramatic external change, whether that be a three-week stint in total darkness due to a giant meteorite or a two-hundred-year transition in climate, there will be a dramatic change in the species populations. In either case, many of them will die out without descendants. The remainder will "fill in the gaps", and over an extended period of time, will bring back biodiversity.
But the point is that human beings also evolved on this planet, and are most likely to take rapid environmental change (including the biological and ecological implications) very ill. WE LIKE THIS PLANET THE WAY THAT IT IS. We don't need to toss the dice to see what happens next. On nature, I'm CONSERVATIVE: I want to conserve things the way they are, to the extent possible. If Bradford is eager to experience a punctuated equilibrium, he should go get his own planet somewhere else and try it there; the rest of us are still living on this one.
I must agree with previous posters on the misleading nature of the graphic -- quite a surprise coming from Nate, who is usually right on top of things like that.
That isn't really the problem.
Of course global warming will have a bigger impact on future generations than current ones, and third world countries will be harmed more than industrialized ones... etc.
That doesn't affect the advocacy one bit. What matters is whether people believe that the solutions to global warming will have a greater adverse effect on them than global warming itself would.
If insurance costs were considerably higher than the catastrophic costs you were insuring against, you don't buy the insurance.
That's the problem in a nutshell. As long as the anti-global warming advocacy clings to rooftop solar, algae oil, cellulosic ethanol (which actually will worsen global warming), and carbon sequestration... the costs of doing something to reduce global warming emissions seems too much for society to bear. People are willing to gamble that future technology will emerge to deal with the problem more cost effectively than current technology...
That's the rhetorical battle. We can't LIE to people and say: if you don't do this than YOU will suffer so much that you should pay 3 times as much for energy NOW to avoid it!!! Global warming will harm ecosystems and future generations, but I will be in my air-conditioned house and workplace and live life mostly unchanged (though I'll pay more for water and food)...
The answer, is in finding potentially market viable technologies and funding them.
www.WindFuels.com
The corrected version of the pyramid graphic is at the Wonk Room.
It's really more of a vase.
Why are every single one of these studies and surveys about climate change / global warming? I know it's a useful umbrella term for environmental issues but it's implications when used in everyday discourse and academia, as an umbrella term, are really problematic. For a while it was CFCs, then acid rain, now global warming. We need to find language that doesn't constrain us in such a way. A survey like this (and the one last week about urgency) doesn't mean people are going to be less responsive to environmental appeals in general, it just demonstrates something inherent in the issue of global warming itself, i.e. that it is a temporally and spatially distant phenomena.
Jared,
Because this country nnever thinks pro-actively, only reactively. Did you know that the original budget stimulus, for example, included provisions for fighting pandemic influenza? Guess who cut those out of the stimulus package? Susan Collins and Arlen Specter. In fact, Senator Collins still brags about it on her website even though pandemic influenza has killed 180 people in less than a week and has now spread to the United States.
Republicans - not the progressive party; they're the regressive party.
Jared,
You're right, it has something to do with the issue of global warming: It is a long-term issue (although we are losing our lead-time at the rate of one year per year) that you cannot see happening in front of you: It takes years of comparative data to see a pattern, and to relate this to the predictions of the theory through complex calculations.
The reason it is important is NOT because it is characteristic of environmental concern by itself, but because the consequences are important. This literally is the old "frog in warming pot" problem: a non-dramatic change tends not to generate a vigorous response. Particularly, as in this case, when addressing the problem will impose costs upon people who are well-positioned to object and to argue about it. It will take some major changes to correct; and any big change creates winners and losers.
I agree with Statler- this is a Save the Humans thing. The whales, the polar bears, and the Energy Crisis of the 70's were just the canaries in the coal mine. Obviously, they didn't have enough appeal to make the case.
What I have NEVER understood and it is reflected here in this survey again, are all the people who don't seem to care about their kids or grandchildren and what the earth will have left to support them. I certainly hear a lot of, "what about our children" when it comes to the deficit and taxes... but not so much when it comes to caring for our earth that gives us life.
For Jared who feels previous umbrella terms have been ineffective - how about "The 6th Mass Extinction"? Here's a quote from the Field Museum (yes, that's in Chicago, bring it on) Evolving Planet Exhibit:
"... a sixth mass extinction began around 10,000 years ago and is still happening today.
Human activity is responsible for this mass extinction.
Early on, extreme climate and environmental change may have led to species loss. But today, human activity is destroying habitats, causing species to go extinct at a rapid rate. For the first time in Earth’s history, a single species—humans—is the primary cause of a mass extinction.
Scientists estimate we’ve lost 30,000 species in the last year.
The normal rate of extinction is one species every four years. But at our current rate, we’re losing 82 species every day, 4 species every hour. And because the Earth is home to far more species than we’ve identified, there are surely many species going extinct unnoticed."
Maybe someone should make a Species Extinction Counter, like they did for the Cost of the Wars, http://costofwar.com/. Maybe that will help advance the truth.
Geeze, I guessI can believe that Sarah Palin doesn't believe in Global Warming, I mean a lot of you people don't
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