We've all grimly observed how a family member steps up to become the official spokesperson when there's a death in a celebrated family.
We saw it when SuperMegaRockStar Michael Jackson died.
We saw it when left liberal mediahead Brian Williams gravely chronicled the impending death of the SuperMegaRockStar Godfather of his political family, Ted Kennedy, from brain cancer, on his NBC nightly Newscasts.
Now Williams is back, forced to step up again to report the lingering demise of yet another celebrated SuperMegaRockStar member of the Progressive Family, Global Warming.
A report from the Pew Research Center titled "Fewer Americans See Solid Evidence of Global Warming" was released on October 22.
It recounted, in harsh statistical details, how America's belief in Global Warming has dropped from 70 percent to only 57 percent in the past three years, and how people who don't believe in climate change at all has doubled in that time.
(Note that "climate change" is the catchall cover-up code phrase for Global Warming, which positions politicos to spend massive amounts of our money no matter what the weather does.)
It was almost painful to watch Williams briefly announce the devastating news and quickly move on. It was like witnessing a retired matador-turned-announcer for the National Arena Bullfighting League courageously calling a game and admitting that the bull was winning.
This must be seen as a blow to True Believers who adopted Global Warming as their personal secular messiah since it dovetailed so perfectly with their catechism of Mother Earth Good, Humankind Bad.
It may also be a blow to the overweening overreaching Progressive ruling class that has long viewed Global Warming as a contrived mechanism for leaping from the puny platform of America onto the global stage where they can strut their stuff in search of power, wealth, and ego fulfillment at our expense.
All this just as President Obama prepares to traipse off to Copenhagen where he's likely to sign a proposal designed to create an international "cap and trade" scheme (which libertarians call "cap and tax") to control carbon emissions.
But wait. The sub headline of that Pew report is this: Modest Support for "Cap and Trade" Policy.
Obama and his progressive pals will likely ignore it and press onward for cap and trade. And libertarians can hope that ignoring the wishes of his fellow citizens will have the same result as Woodrow Wilson ignoring the lack of support for a League of Nations, or LBJ ignoring the lack of support for the Vietnam War, or Ford ignoring the real reasons for inflation by wearing Whip Inflation Now buttons.
So why this dramatic loss of faith in Global Warming? Has the virus of science reinfected Global Warming to spread its plague of contagious rationality throughout its body of research, driving out politicized opportunism and political correctness?
Progressives will not give it up any time soon. In fact, we may have already heard what will become the Official Climate Changer's Spin. Brian Williams said it at the end of his Nightly News report:
"In a down economy people are less sensitive to the environment."
A remix on the old mantra, "it's the economy, stupid."
Or could it possibly be that people are just finally wising up?
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Comments
Anthropogenic Global Climate Change is a religion that is losing the battle of evidence.
Rational thinkers realize that a prosperous and free society is the ONLY one that can do anything to preserve or reclaim the environment. Poor people have all they can do to survive.
I'm troubled by conservatives' and libertarians' tendency to dismiss climate change. It's a bad sign when science is opposed based on one's politics. It looks especially bad for conservatives, who are associated with creationism.
And if it turns out that climate change is real, conservatives will have lost any credibility they still have. Just ask the Catholic Church: arguing against a scientist is a bad idea.
Let's face it: small government folks wouldn't care about climate change's truth or falsity if it weren't for the fact that all the "solutions" from the Democrats involve big government. So instead of trying to deny it, libertarians should be talking about small-government changes that make sense whether climate change is happening or not. Like ending our support of Arab dictatorships, ending all energy subsidies (including any for carbon fuels), ending the de facto ban on nuclear power, fixing environmental laws that block wind farm construction, etc.
that is one lousy research method...1500 people polled???...1500 people polled for New York city alone would be a terrible sampling...1500 polled for the whole country?????...if you polled 1500 American 1000 times you would get 1000 different results...I have some background with focus groups (for product evaluation and jury evaluation) and the tiny group that Pew Research Center sampled is completely meaningless...if this poll would have come out 80 percent for global warming, I would still be as outraged at the unscientific method in which the poll was conducted...even 1500 polled on Manhatan will differ from 1500 polled in Queens...how can 1500 be a sampling for 300 million?????
Actually, Walrus, 1500 is a reasonable sample. The formula for calculating a sample size is surprising: it's independent of the size of the population. Instead, it's dependent upon the variability of the population, i.e., in this case, the number of different answers they can give to the question "do you believe in global climate change?" If the survey allowed only two answers (or even three, for an "undecided") the sample size could be small, like 1500, and have a reasonable margin of error.
The margin of error, of course, decreases with larger samples. But it behaves in a surprising way too. Going from surveying 500 people to surveying 1500 people gives you a big improvement in the margin of error. Going from 1500 to 2500 doesn't help anywhere near as much.
Briffa's tree-ring circus and the hockey stick made of 12 trees says you warmers are gullible and lazy. Appeal to authority much?
Bob Alexander says:
"Actually, Walrus, 1500 is a reasonable sample. The formula for calculating a sample size is surprising: it's independent of the size of the population. Instead, it's dependent upon the variability of the population, i.e., in this case, the number of different answers they can give to the question "do you believe in global climate change?" If the survey allowed only two answers (or even three, for an "undecided") the sample size could be small, like 1500, and have a reasonable margin of error."
you forget to factor in the human factor...2pm and all your answers are coming from homebodies (generally less educated)...6pm and your answers are coming from tired workers with possible attitudes...a surveyor with an attitude in his/her 7th hour will get a lot of hangups...that surveyor skews the survey immensely when he/she represents 10 percent...almost not at all when he/she represents 1/10th of 1 percent.
to add to that (human factor)...questioning an equal amount of liberal and conservative strongholds still doesn't get you a clean representation...liberals differ...white liberals are more interested in global issues...black and hispanic liberals are more interested in local issues...so a sampling of a liberal stronghold in say, Watts or Compton will not be representative of an overall liberal response...the same with a sampling of conservatives in Manhattan vs Ft. Worth, TX...the big question becomes, where did the samplings come from on BOTH of the polls compared and were the questions exactly the same?
I wonder how anyone could think global warming is true knowing it has been warmer in the past. Not so distant a past in the US, 1934. And knowing that the amount of C02 in the atmosphere was higher in the 40's. I figure the only ones who can believe this are uneducated kids. I think I am right. There is a sleep out in Boston. I am encouraging them to sleep out forever. Imagine the savings on heat, electricty and water. Not to mention food. If I was their parents I would encourge them also.
Eve, if you wonder how anyone could believe in global warming, perhaps you should read the scientific literature on the subject. I hope you're not suggesting that the overwhelming majority of climatologists are clueless about 1934, or are so corrupt that they will alter their results for political purposes. Sure, some might be, but the overwhelming majority?
I modestly admit that I have not carefully studied the scientific papers. So, just as I accept the scientific consensus on quantum physics and the age of the universe, I accept the climate change theory. I know and trust the scientific method and the peer review process.
And so, instead of trying to deny climate change (which I am unqualified to do) I propose free market energy policies that would reduce the size of government and, incidentally, make alternative energies more competitive with oil. I see it as a win-win situation, whether climate change is real or not.
- Bob
A recent pool determined that over 80% of people who identified FOX news as their main source of news thought that the US had found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So what difference does it make what popular opinion is regarding Global Warming. Popular opinion is entirely separate from fact. Too bad you could not argue the facts of Climate Change but only argue the "truth" of popular opinion. How retarded!
Bob Alexander, I think you trust far too much. I believe in science as well, but I also understand what is science and what is not. Many things are called a science when in fact it is not. Science is based on hypotheses and experimentation. Scientists then publish their work so that other scientists can do similar tests to confirm the hypotheses. This has never been done in the science of global warming. It's base on theory and computer modeling that uses an incomplete set of variables. Give me that much leeway and I can prove that pigs can fly.
Exceptionally nice, Gary. The big surprise is that 70% ever believed that claptrap. Every care tactic in at least 40 years has been a lie. There IS no global warming caused by man, ALAR wasn't a menace, DDT does not kill dear little birdies (lack of it does kill millions a year from malaria), without salt you will die, and so forth. Research each issuse for yourself, people.
Don, obviously experiments are difficult to do on climate change because of the scale of the only specimen we have. It's similar to the problem of evolution: we can't evolve something in the lab, but that doesn't mean evolution is false. Stephen Jay Gould talked about this and described biology as historical science rather than experimental science. Climatology, with its reliance on tree rings and ice cores, is similar.
But all this misses the point. It doesn't matter what flaws the current scientific research has; it's still infinitely more reliable than the opinions of political pundits.
A scientist who collects evidence against man-made climate change has a place in the debate. A political pundit doesn't, and he's simply not qualified to take a stand against scientific consensus.
He is, however, qualified to comment on public policy in light of the scientific consensus, and that's what he should be doing.
Bob, I think the evidence for evolution is much stronger than climate change. We can see bacteria, fungus, and viruses evolve in front of our eyes. We can observe insects evolve during a human life time. We can trace fossil records and study DNA, so the evidence that evolution occurs is overwhelming.
As for climate change, we know for sure it has been happening for a long time. The fact that the earth has warmed during the last century while CO2 has increased proves nothing. They are both one time events that happen to coincide with each other, that's all it proves. I'm sure if the earth had cooled another theory would have been advanced as to the cause.
There are many sciences that I don't trust. Tree ring science is very suspect as is CO2 in ice core samples. Neither of these has ever been subjected to appropriate testing to verify accuracy.
Bob, I'll give you an example of why we shouldn't always trust science. For years here in Canada the forensic scientists used hair sample matching to help convict the accused. As DNA advanced and many of the old cases were revisited, one by one the cases that hinged on hair samples fell apart. If hair sample matching had been subject to proper testing methods it would never been allowed in a court of law.
I highly suspect that temperature proxies using tree rings would never pass a double blind test.
Notice, though, Don, that the old science of hair matching has been superseded by ... science.
Scientific knowledge is found to be correct or false through one method only: the scientific method. My point in all this is not that the science is right (I don't know if it is), but that political pundits are not the ones to say it's wrong. They're not qualified.
So if a conservative or liberal political pundit doesn't like the big-government solutions for climate change coming from the leftists, he should come up with small-government proposals. And the beauty of small-government proposals are that they're a good idea regardless of whether the science is right or not.
But for a political pundit to deny man made climate change, is just a waste of time. The scientists don't (and shouldn't) care what he says. Mother Nature doesn't care what he says. And he's gambling his credibility on something far out of his area of expertise. It's a recipe for failure.
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