Mecklenburg County residents are becoming more dubious about man-made climate change even as scientists become more sure of it, the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute's annual survey shows.
Three out of four residents still believe climate change is a serious problem. But the number who say it's not a problem has doubled since 2012, to 14 percent, the survey shows.
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| UNC Charlotte Urban Institute 2013 Annual Survey data |
Fewer than 40 percent of those surveyed blame human activity, significantly lower than the 45.5 percent who said so in 2012.
A Pew Research Center poll in June found Americans generally less concerned about climate change than people in the rest of the world.
The Urban Institute quotes assistant earth-science professor Manda Adams, who studies the interaction between weather, climate and energy systems, as saying "there's still a lot of confusion in the general public" about climate change.
Most climate scientists, she notes, no longer debate causes. Instead, she says, they focus on the "lots of little parts that we don't have an understanding of yet."
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13 comments:
Bruce,
The IPCC is not made up of 'scientists'. Please don't make your ignorance of the subject contagious by passing it on.
Anon at 11:40am, are you stupid? You are correct, the IPCC itself isn't scientists, but it takes its information ONLY from scientists. REAL scientists, with REAL research, peer-reviewed and published in REAL literature. Good lord you people are clueless.
I'm really curious about why they oversampled landline phones. Very few people have them anymore and it would definitely skew the results.
The IPCC is certainly made up of scientists! Indeed, they are leading scientists. Your mistake might be that these scientists are not reporting only their own research, rather they evaluate and summarize the entire body of research for the IPCC report.
The disconnect between what the public 'thinks' and what scientists have concluded over 50-100 years of research and evidence is due to this kind of misinformation.
The first conjecture of human induced climate change was over 100 years ago. The scientific community was skeptical until the 1960s, when the evidence began to consistently point to one result. As more evidence has emerged, more confidence has resulted. The special interests are spending lots of money to misinform the public and it is working, unfortunately. And unfortunately people without any training beyond superficial stories think they know more than scientists that went to college 10 years and researched the issue for decades. With such delusion, they must have slept in a Holiday Inn.
I suppose that the skeptical scientific community, pointing to a singular cause of global warming in the 60's had no problem when all the media was telling us we were crashing headlong into an ice age in the early '70's.
Hi, I’m the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute researcher who manages the institute’s Annual Survey program. We recognize the demographic differences that exist between a landline-only survey and one that includes cell phones, and we weight the results to account for those demographic differences. In a perfect world we would include higher number of cell phones in the surveying, but that type of survey is cost-prohibitive for us. Thanks for reading.
@ anonymous 9:11 AM
The number of scientists who wrote peer reviewed papers in support of global warming dwarfed the number of whom concluded global cooling.
That Time magazine chose to publish and sensationalized global cooling back in 1974 (Newsweek '75).
Because these two major media institutions chose to publish these articles in the 70's has no consequence on the reality of near scientific consensus on the matter.
Too bad so many in our general public are ignorant or unconcerned about the facts about global warming. What matters, though, is whether governments and businesses care and take action to reduce carbon emissions and promote energy savings, like our government does at Federal, state and local levels through laws and tax incentives+. Many other countries are ahead of the USA in taking such measures.
IPCC reports are not written by the scientists. The projections offered by those reports are based on models that have NEVER been correct. The comment about climate warming consensus in the sixties is comical as the temperatures had consistently fallen from the mid 40's finally bottoming out in the mid seventies. This is quite interesting since co2 levels continued to climb over that same span. Fast forward to temps since 98 that have been relatively static...yet the co2 keeps going up. There must be more to it, no?
"Global Warming" is the biggest scam since the flat earthers. Funny how the remedy is to TAX the wealthiest nations who pump out CO2. Sound familiar? Can you say Obamacare? ANY REAL scientific endeavor WELCOMES challenges to it's established hypothesis.....EXCEPT the Climate Change scaremongers. NOBODY can explain WHY the earth is in a cooling mode for the past 14 years. Anartic glaciers are growing according to NASA, BUT, you can't say that because it flies in the face of the Scaremongers. This is simply a SCAM! We had the DUSTBOWL in the 30s......so you Scaremongers out there, just how did MAN cause THAT? And we hear that the Scaremongers are censuring scientists who provide contrarty data. Again, tell me, just HOW is that SCIENCE again?
Less product needs to be made in China and other countries that do not care about emissions. Tightening environmental controls in the USA only forces more product to be made in China. Thus tightening environmental controls in USA makes worldwide emissions higher.
Despite many claims to the contrary, the 1970′s global cooling fears were widespread among many scientists and in the media. Despite the fact that there was no UN IPCC organization created to promote global cooling in the 1970s and despite the fact that there was nowhere near the tens of billions of dollars in funding spent today to promote man-made global warming, fears of a coming ice age, showed up in peer-reviewed literature, at scientific conferences, voiced by prominent scientists and throughout the media.
Newsweek Magazine even used the climate “tipping point” argument in 1975. Newsweek wrote April 28, 1975 article: “The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.”
So, why would there be doubts about global warming, especially when it seems the primary motive is to TAX more?
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