I think these scientists are misinterpreting the meaning of their data. People who are "informed" about global warming are not "apathetic", they just do not believe the fear and hysteria being promoted by the true believers of man-caused global warming.
I also think this is why people like Al Gore continually say "the debate is over", and there is a scientific "consensus" that man is causing global warming, when they know full well there is not. They know an educated public will not believe the hype and alarmism, so they want to stifle debate, and hide the truth. That is why they also avoid open and honest debate. They are not interested in science and finding the truth, or even protecting the environment. The environmental industry is into power and control, pure and simple.
Peter
source:
Increased Knowledge About Global Warming Leads To Apathy, Study Shows
ScienceDaily (Mar. 28, 2008) — The more you know the less you care -- at least that seems to be the case with global warming. A telephone survey of 1,093 Americans by two Texas A&M University political scientists and a former colleague indicates that trend, as explained in their recent article in the peer-reviewed journal Risk Analysis.
"More informed respondents both feel less personally responsible for global warming, and also show less concern for global warming," states the article, titled "Personal Efficacy, the Information Environment, and Attitudes toward Global Warming and Climate Change in the USA."
The study showed high levels of confidence in scientists among Americans led to a decreased sense of responsibility for global warming.
The diminished concern and sense of responsibility flies in the face of awareness campaigns about climate change, such as in the movies An Inconvenient Truth and Ice Age: The Meltdown and in the mainstream media's escalating emphasis on the trend.
The research was conducted by Paul M. Kellstedt, a political science associate professor at Texas A&M; Arnold Vedlitz, Bob Bullock Chair in Government and Public Policy at Texas A&M's George Bush School of Government and Public Service; and Sammy Zahran, formerly of Texas A&M and now an assistant professor of sociology at Colorado State University.
Kellstedt says the findings were a bit unexpected. The focus of the study, he says, was not to measure how informed or how uninformed Americans are about global warming, but to understand why some individuals who are more or less informed about it showed more or less concern.
"In that sense, we didn't really have expectations about how aware or unaware people were of global warming," he says.
But, he adds, "The findings that the more informed respondents were less concerned about global warming, and that they felt less personally responsible for it, did surprise us. We expected just the opposite.
"The findings, while rather modest in magnitude -- there are other variables we measured which had much larger effects on concern for global warming -- were statistically quite robust, which is to say that they continued to appear regardless of how we modeled the data."
Measuring knowledge about global warming is a tricky business, Kellstedt adds.
"That's true of many other things we would like to measure in surveys, of course, especially things that might embarrass people (like ignorance) or that they might feel social pressure to avoid revealing (like prejudice)," he says.
"There are no industry standards, so to speak, for measuring knowledge about global warming. We opted for this straightforward measure and realize that other measures might produce different results."
Now, for better or worse, scientists have to deal with the public's abundant confidence in them. "But it cannot be comforting to the researchers in the scientific community that the more trust people have in them as scientists, the less concerned they are about their findings," the researchers conclude in their study.
Adapted from materials provided by Texas A&M University, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.
Showing posts with label opinion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label opinion. Show all posts
Friday, March 28, 2008
Thursday, October 4, 2007
More Fear-Mongering Drivel About Global Warming
Here is another example of ignorant fear-mongering from otherwise supposedly intelligent people about the issue of global warming and climate change. It contains the usual litany of ifs, maybes, coulds, and speculation. The most grievous mistake is the accepted assumption that man's carbon dioxide emissions are the cause of this destructive global warming and climate change.
All Thomas Homer-Dixon does is warn us about the dangers of global warming without offering any solutions. He's just another person "crying FIRE in a crowded theater". We all know what happened to "the boy who cried Wolf" too often; people began ignoring him, and he was eaten. At least I think that is how the story goes.
In conclusion, he says: "In response to the new dangers of climate change, we need a similar mobilization — of mothers, of students and of everyone with a stake in the future — now." A mobilization to do what? Read the following opinion piece published in the New York Times and see how ridiculous his statements are.
Peter
from: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/opinion/04homer-dixon.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin
A Swiftly Melting Planet
By THOMAS HOMER-DIXON
Published: October 4, 2007
Toronto
THE Arctic ice cap melted this summer at a shocking pace, disappearing at a far higher rate than predicted by even the most pessimistic experts in global warming. But we shouldn’t be shocked, because scientists have long known that major features of earth’s interlinked climate system of air and water can change abruptly.
A big reason such change happens is feedback — not the feedback that you’d like to give your boss, but the feedback that creates a vicious circle. This type of feedback in our global climate could determine humankind’s future prosperity and even survival.
The vast expanse of ice floating on the surface of the Arctic Ocean always recedes in the summer, reaching its lowest point sometime in September. Every winter it expands again, as the long Arctic night descends and temperatures plummet. Each summer over the past six years, global warming has trimmed this ice’s total area a little more, and each winter the ice’s recovery has been a little less robust. These trends alarmed climate scientists, but most thought that sea ice wouldn’t disappear completely in the Arctic summer before 2040 at the earliest.
But this past summer sent scientists scrambling to redo their estimates. Week by week, the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., reported the trend: from 2.23 million square miles of ice remaining on Aug. 8 to 1.6 million square miles on Sept. 16, an astonishing drop from the previous low of 2.05 million square miles, reached in 2005.
The loss of Arctic sea ice won’t be the last abrupt change in earth’s climate, because of feedbacks. One of the climate’s most important destabilizing feedbacks involves Arctic ice. It works like this: our release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases around the planet causes some initial warming that melts some ice. Melting ice leaves behind open ocean water that has a much lower reflectivity (or albedo) than that of ice. Open ocean water absorbs about 80 percent more solar radiation than sea ice does. And so as the sun warms the ocean, even more ice melts, in a vicious circle. This ice-albedo feedback is one of the main reasons warming is happening far faster in the high north, where there are vast stretches of sea ice, than anywhere else on Earth.
There are other destabilizing feedbacks in the carbon cycle that involve the oceans. Each year, the oceans absorb about half the carbon dioxide that humans emit into the atmosphere. But as oceans warm, they will absorb less carbon dioxide, partly because the gas dissolves less readily in warmer water, and partly because warming will reduce the mixing between deep and surface waters that provides nutrients to plankton that absorb carbon dioxide. And when oceans take up less carbon dioxide, warming worsens.
Scientists have done a good job incorporating some feedbacks into their climate models, especially those, like the ice-albedo feedback, that operate directly on the temperature of air or water. But they haven’t incorporated as well feedbacks that operate on the atmosphere’s concentrations of greenhouse gases or that affect the cycle of carbon among air, land, oceans and organisms. Yet these may be the most important feedbacks of all.
Global warming is melting large areas of permafrost in Alaska, Canada and Siberia. As it melts, the organic matter in the permafrost starts to rot, releasing carbon dioxide and methane (molecule for molecule, methane traps far more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide).
Warming is also affecting wetlands and forests around the world, helping to desiccate immense peat bogs in Indonesia, contributing to more frequent drought in the Amazon basin, and propelling a widening beetle infestation that’s killing enormous tracts of pine forest in Alaska and British Columbia. (This infestation is on the brink of crossing the Canadian Rockies into the boreal forest that extends east to Newfoundland.) Dried peat and dead and dying forests are vulnerable to wildfires that would emit huge quantities of carbon into the atmosphere.
This summer’s loss of Arctic sea ice indicates that at least one major destabilizing feedback is gaining force quickly. Scientists have also recently learned that the Southern Ocean, which encircles Antarctica, appears to be absorbing less carbon, while Greenland’s ice sheet is melting at an accelerating rate.
When warming becomes its own cause, we might not be able to stop extremely harmful climate change no matter how much we cut our greenhouse gas emissions. We need a far more aggressive global response to climate change. In the 1960s, mothers learned that the milk they were feeding their children was laced with radioactive material from atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons and that this contamination could increase the risk of childhood leukemia. Soon women organized themselves in the tens of thousands to demand that nuclear powers ban atmospheric testing. Their campaign largely succeeded.
In response to the new dangers of climate change, we need a similar mobilization — of mothers, of students and of everyone with a stake in the future — now.
Thomas Homer-Dixon, a professor of peace and conflict studies at the University of Toronto, is the author of “The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization.”
All Thomas Homer-Dixon does is warn us about the dangers of global warming without offering any solutions. He's just another person "crying FIRE in a crowded theater". We all know what happened to "the boy who cried Wolf" too often; people began ignoring him, and he was eaten. At least I think that is how the story goes.
In conclusion, he says: "In response to the new dangers of climate change, we need a similar mobilization — of mothers, of students and of everyone with a stake in the future — now." A mobilization to do what? Read the following opinion piece published in the New York Times and see how ridiculous his statements are.
Peter
from: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/opinion/04homer-dixon.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin
A Swiftly Melting Planet
By THOMAS HOMER-DIXON
Published: October 4, 2007
Toronto
THE Arctic ice cap melted this summer at a shocking pace, disappearing at a far higher rate than predicted by even the most pessimistic experts in global warming. But we shouldn’t be shocked, because scientists have long known that major features of earth’s interlinked climate system of air and water can change abruptly.
A big reason such change happens is feedback — not the feedback that you’d like to give your boss, but the feedback that creates a vicious circle. This type of feedback in our global climate could determine humankind’s future prosperity and even survival.
The vast expanse of ice floating on the surface of the Arctic Ocean always recedes in the summer, reaching its lowest point sometime in September. Every winter it expands again, as the long Arctic night descends and temperatures plummet. Each summer over the past six years, global warming has trimmed this ice’s total area a little more, and each winter the ice’s recovery has been a little less robust. These trends alarmed climate scientists, but most thought that sea ice wouldn’t disappear completely in the Arctic summer before 2040 at the earliest.
But this past summer sent scientists scrambling to redo their estimates. Week by week, the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., reported the trend: from 2.23 million square miles of ice remaining on Aug. 8 to 1.6 million square miles on Sept. 16, an astonishing drop from the previous low of 2.05 million square miles, reached in 2005.
The loss of Arctic sea ice won’t be the last abrupt change in earth’s climate, because of feedbacks. One of the climate’s most important destabilizing feedbacks involves Arctic ice. It works like this: our release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases around the planet causes some initial warming that melts some ice. Melting ice leaves behind open ocean water that has a much lower reflectivity (or albedo) than that of ice. Open ocean water absorbs about 80 percent more solar radiation than sea ice does. And so as the sun warms the ocean, even more ice melts, in a vicious circle. This ice-albedo feedback is one of the main reasons warming is happening far faster in the high north, where there are vast stretches of sea ice, than anywhere else on Earth.
There are other destabilizing feedbacks in the carbon cycle that involve the oceans. Each year, the oceans absorb about half the carbon dioxide that humans emit into the atmosphere. But as oceans warm, they will absorb less carbon dioxide, partly because the gas dissolves less readily in warmer water, and partly because warming will reduce the mixing between deep and surface waters that provides nutrients to plankton that absorb carbon dioxide. And when oceans take up less carbon dioxide, warming worsens.
Scientists have done a good job incorporating some feedbacks into their climate models, especially those, like the ice-albedo feedback, that operate directly on the temperature of air or water. But they haven’t incorporated as well feedbacks that operate on the atmosphere’s concentrations of greenhouse gases or that affect the cycle of carbon among air, land, oceans and organisms. Yet these may be the most important feedbacks of all.
Global warming is melting large areas of permafrost in Alaska, Canada and Siberia. As it melts, the organic matter in the permafrost starts to rot, releasing carbon dioxide and methane (molecule for molecule, methane traps far more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide).
Warming is also affecting wetlands and forests around the world, helping to desiccate immense peat bogs in Indonesia, contributing to more frequent drought in the Amazon basin, and propelling a widening beetle infestation that’s killing enormous tracts of pine forest in Alaska and British Columbia. (This infestation is on the brink of crossing the Canadian Rockies into the boreal forest that extends east to Newfoundland.) Dried peat and dead and dying forests are vulnerable to wildfires that would emit huge quantities of carbon into the atmosphere.
This summer’s loss of Arctic sea ice indicates that at least one major destabilizing feedback is gaining force quickly. Scientists have also recently learned that the Southern Ocean, which encircles Antarctica, appears to be absorbing less carbon, while Greenland’s ice sheet is melting at an accelerating rate.
When warming becomes its own cause, we might not be able to stop extremely harmful climate change no matter how much we cut our greenhouse gas emissions. We need a far more aggressive global response to climate change. In the 1960s, mothers learned that the milk they were feeding their children was laced with radioactive material from atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons and that this contamination could increase the risk of childhood leukemia. Soon women organized themselves in the tens of thousands to demand that nuclear powers ban atmospheric testing. Their campaign largely succeeded.
In response to the new dangers of climate change, we need a similar mobilization — of mothers, of students and of everyone with a stake in the future — now.
Thomas Homer-Dixon, a professor of peace and conflict studies at the University of Toronto, is the author of “The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization.”
Friday, May 25, 2007
Gut Check America? Are They Kidding? This is Good.
This is good, really good. Let us have an open discussion of what "really matters in America". Is it "global warming"? What bothers me most, is our soldiers in Iraq. I respect and care for them. I cannot imagine being a "conscientiousness objector" on this issue when our enemy swears to kill us all. Everything else is mere rhetoric, to be polite.
Peter
Gut Check America: Share your stories
Your turn to start the conversation about what really matters in America
See what other readers consider the most important issues facing America today and register your opinion on the ‘Gut Check’ message board
MSNBC
Are you worried or outraged by something in your neighborhood, in our government or across the nation? What gnaws at you but seems to go unmentioned in the national political campaigns?
This is your chance to drive the conversation about what really matters in America.
Here’s how it works: You tell us about the specific issues that are most important to you and explain how they affect your daily life. We also want to hear how you would solve the problem.
Then, during the first week of each month leading to the 2008 presidential election, come to MSNBC.com to vote on the issues that our readers raise. Your vote will help determine our reporters’ assignment for the month and the focus of our online “Gut Check” forum.
To participate, fill out the form below and provide your contact information so our reporters can get in touch with you if your submission is chosen. We will not publish or share the information you provide.
By doing so, you will be engaging in discussion about the true character of our nation -- the kind of conversation on which democracy thrives.
Peter
Gut Check America: Share your stories
Your turn to start the conversation about what really matters in America
See what other readers consider the most important issues facing America today and register your opinion on the ‘Gut Check’ message board
MSNBC
Are you worried or outraged by something in your neighborhood, in our government or across the nation? What gnaws at you but seems to go unmentioned in the national political campaigns?
This is your chance to drive the conversation about what really matters in America.
Here’s how it works: You tell us about the specific issues that are most important to you and explain how they affect your daily life. We also want to hear how you would solve the problem.
Then, during the first week of each month leading to the 2008 presidential election, come to MSNBC.com to vote on the issues that our readers raise. Your vote will help determine our reporters’ assignment for the month and the focus of our online “Gut Check” forum.
To participate, fill out the form below and provide your contact information so our reporters can get in touch with you if your submission is chosen. We will not publish or share the information you provide.
By doing so, you will be engaging in discussion about the true character of our nation -- the kind of conversation on which democracy thrives.
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