Global Warming Concern Fading?

So everyone is all upset about George Will, apparently because he looked out the window and made a startling realization (well startling to everyone but Al Gore), and then a deduction based on poll numbers.

Because of today's economy, another law -- call it the Law of Clarifying Calamities -- is being (redundantly) confirmed. On graphs tracking public opinion, two lines are moving in tandem and inversely: The sharply rising line charts public concern about the economy, the plunging line follows concern about the environment. A recent Pew Research Center poll asked which of 20 issues should be the government's top priorities. Climate change ranked 20th.

Real calamities take our minds off hypothetical ones. Besides, according to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade, or one-third of the span since the global cooling scare.

Makes sense to me. Hard to get all worked about the world heating up when you're freezing, you just payed $950 to fill the propane tank, and you might not even have a job next week..

More detail from Watts Up With That?

January 2008 was an exceptional month for our planet, with a significant cooling, especially since January 2007 started out well above normal.

January 2008 capped a 12 month period of global temperature drops on all of the major well respected indicators. I have reported in the past two weeks that HadCRUT, RSS, UAH, and GISS global temperature sets all show sharp drops in the last year.

Also see the recent post on what the last 10 years looks like with the same four metrics - 3 of four show a flat trendline.

Oddly enough this roughly corresponds to the sunspot cycle data from NASA





Weird huh? I guess we should be thankful for all that attention to the sun's carbon footprint. Ol' Sol got the message. Seriously Nate Silver has a decent response, pointing out that according to some data, a long term trending higher has been in effect since the early 1900s. And that's a fair point, except that if we draw the history graph back even farther we may remember that the Vikings named a certain "Greenland" and Labrador they called "Vineland" because of all the Grapes growing there. So caution is warranted when drawing an arbitrary starting point.

Personally I'm not going to start worrying until I see Trump building resorts in Newfoundland.

But even more important than that is that we just don't have very good stable data going back further than the space age, so all temperature graphs are troublesome earlier than landsat. But that's all bye the bye.

I'll leave the last word with Michael Crichton:

First, we need an environmental movement, and such a movement is not very effective if it is conducted as a religion. We know from history that religions tend to kill people, and environmentalism has already killed somewhere between 10-30 million people since the 1970s. It's not a good record. Environmentalism needs to be absolutely based in objective and verifiable science, it needs to be rational, and it needs to be flexible. And it needs to be apolitical. To mix environmental concerns with the frantic fantasies that people have about one political party or another is to miss the cold truth---that there is very little difference between the parties, except a difference in pandering rhetoric. The effort to promote effective legislation for the environment is not helped by thinking that the Democrats will save us and the Republicans won't. Political history is more complicated than that. Never forget which president started the EPA: Richard Nixon. And never forget which president sold federal oil leases, allowing oil drilling in Santa Barbara: Lyndon Johnson. So get politics out of your thinking about the environment.

Judging by the hysterical reaction to George Will's reasonable deductions, we're a long way from a non-religious environmental movement.