Climate Deniers respond – “This is not Happening”.
A poll due for release on Wednesday shows that a large majority of Americans believe that this year’s unusually warm winter, last year’s blistering summer and some other weather disasters were probably made worse by global warming. And by a 2-to-1 margin, the public says the weather has been getting worse, rather than better, in recent years.
The survey, the most detailed to date on the public response to weather extremes, comes atop other polling showing a recent uptick in concern about climate change. Read together, the polls suggest that direct experience of erratic weather may be convincing some people that the problem is no longer just a vague and distant threat.
“Most people in the country are looking at everything that’s happened; it just seems to be one disaster after another after another,” said Anthony A. Leiserowitz of Yale University, one of the researchers who commissioned the new poll. “People are starting to connect the dots.”
In 2011, Americans experienced a record-breaking 14 weather and climate disasters that each caused $1 billion or more in damages, in total costing approximately $53 billion, along with incalculable loss of human life. These disasters included severe drought in Texas and the Great Plains, Hurricane Irene along the eastern seaboard, tornadoes in the Midwest, and massive floods in the Mississippi River Valley. In the period of January through March 2012, Americans also experienced record warm temperatures, with temperatures across the contiguous United States 6.0 degrees F above the long-term average. In March alone, 15,292 warm temperature records were broken across the United States.
In March 2012 we conducted a nationally representative survey and found that a large majority of Americans say they personally experienced an extreme weather event or natural disaster in the past year. A majority of Americans also say the weather in the United States is getting worse and many report that extreme weather in their own local area has become more frequent and damaging. Further, large majorities believe that global warming made a number of recent extreme weather events worse.
A majority of Americans say that unusual weather events have occurred in the past twelve months in both their local area (56%) and elsewhere in the U.S. (62%). Overall, 82 percent of Americans report that they personally experienced one or more types of extreme weather or natural disaster in the past year. These include extreme high winds (60%), extreme rainstorms (49%), extreme heat waves (42%), drought (34%), extreme cold temperatures (29%), extreme snowstorms (26%), tornadoes (21%), floods (19%), hurricanes (16%) or wildfires (15%).People in the Northeast are more likely to report having personally experienced extreme high winds, rainstorms, cold temperatures, snowstorms, floods and hurricanes in the past year. People in the Midwest are more likely to report having personally experienced extreme high winds, rainstorms, snowstorms, and tornadoes. People in the South are more likely to report having experienced an extreme heat wave or drought, while people in the West are more likely to report having experienced a wildfire in the past year.
I have very mixed feelings about this – unless people really understand the issues, uncertainties and complexities of global warming, this is a straw poll.
A couple “normal” years would easily shift opinions in the other direction.
I share your angst. The best hope is to clearly communicate the underlying scientifically certain causes as the public is getting an early taste of future extreme weather affects – the details of which science can’t precisely predict.
i love all the ‘wheres the evidence?’ lot..you show them and they say they cant see it..
i want to say something that might sound dumb..i read a lot of muslim hating crap on threads.most are downright racist..maybe the middle east countries and people who come from there are fed up with the oil grabbing that goes on..well ok stop invading and oil grabbing..will that lessen the effects and contribution to global warming? but then will the middle east owners of oil get annoyed with west for cutting down on oil usage..?
What should really grab (and hold) people’s attention in places like Texas, is the fact that, within little over a year, an extremely wet event should be followed by an extremely dry event. This was one of the points made by Katharine Hayhoe on the BBC’s Horizon programme on ‘Global Weirding’ which is, as I think Peter made some time ago on this website, at least 3 Standard Deviations away from being average…. It is extremely unlikely – and frankly pushes optimism bias – to beyond the limits of credibility to insist this is nothing more than natural climate variability. Do we really have to wait until each successive year brings us all-time-record-breaking conditions?
I hope not because, yes, natural variability, makes that extremely unlikely. However, in the interim, repetitive far-from-typical weather (i.e. extreme events of all kinds) should be sufficient to convince all but the most ideologically-prejudiced that human activity has changed the nature of what is now normal.
NO NO all this erratic weather is imagined…everything is fine..GOD says so…(hmmm)
It seems no amount of “evidence” will persuade the willingly blind:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/apr/18/uk-driest-march-59-years
A great number of posters simply refuse to open their eyes to reality.
well god makes everything, us, the earth and the weather. so if we are doing stuff that messes up the weather, then we (in gods image) are imperfect..,or, that god bloke isnt very good at this weather stuff..
The public- as numb as they have been on this issue, IS beginning to connect the dots, by the sheer evidence of SO much weather that has been very extreme.
The NYT however sold out on AGW long ago. Those fat ad revenues by fossil fuel companies, and other conservative corporations are too tantilizing to ignore.
Ethics is somthing the Times left at the door a long time ago. One day soon Andy Revkin might put the dots together- when the subway system he goes home on is flooded from rising sea levels.
The question ought to have been has climate change “made these events more frequent” not “made them worse”.
Connect the climate dots….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhCY-3XnqS0&list=PL552406456821E78E&feature=player_embedded
Climate impact day 5/5/2012
http://www.climatedots.org/
thanks. Stephen Thomson, who made this video, is a budding genius working undercover as a stacker at Wholefoods in San francisco. Have
included this vid in a post today.
(note to Stephen. Talent is over-rated. See me for details)