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The continued support for climate change consensus from new research is good to see, but is it having an effect on the final ~25% of Americans that haven't beli

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• ForHackernews 4y ago
  Al Gore made a movie about climate change so the other team was obligated to violently disbelieve in it.
  • mmastrac 4y ago
    Oddly the political view tag suggests that it's an opposing team issue, but even left-leaning folks did have a blip. Maybe it's just a survey issue with the first datapoint? (I can't seem to link to the political view tab directly) The good news is that even the most staunchly anti-climate-change group, conservative republicans, are nearly at 50/50 when it comes to whether it's happening at all.
    • Izkata 4y ago
      > Maybe it's just a survey issue with the first datapoint? (I can't seem to link to the political view tab directly) Probably not because I just spotted something from that link that I find even more interesting: On the radios in the upper-right, switch to "policy support". There was a very sudden shift in 2013, from consistently down to consistently up. ...and now that I think about it, I think that might actually explain it: The sudden drop in the late 2000s might be due to the great recession. They may have accidentally measured "why do I care?" instead of "is it happening?", and maybe it took until 2013 for peoples' lives to stabilize enough to care again.
    • Spooky23 4y ago
      The reactionaries have a strategy that’s like the old “embrace, extend, extinguish”… “deny, rationalize, accept”. Post-Al Gore, it was “don’t believe your lying eyes”. That gradually pivoted to “climate change is happening, but it’s a natural cycle”. Eventually it will pivot to “meh” or “it’s gods will”. It’s a pattern applied to lots of issues by the reactionary elements. It works because it’s easy to deny and subsequently concede small points. We’ve trained a generation to be adept at this online.
  • OrvalWintermute 4y ago
    Al Gore made a movie about Global Warming, not Climate Change. When the hyperbolic claims about Global Warming with runaway climate forcing failed, it was swiftly rebranded Climate Change. At which point, the critics became accurate, since climatic periods are measured in 30 year intervals, and weather != climate. Solar Radiance being the keymost driver of earth's temperature of course, varies due to the natural cycle and supercycles of the Sun [1] The longterm trend of deglaciation and CO2 levels rising back to nearer Earth's historical norms continues unabated. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cycle
    • deadbolt 4y ago
      > Al Gore made a movie about Global Warming, not Climate Change. How would you define those two terms?
      • transcriptase 4y ago
        One is an observable phenomenon. The other gets grant money in perpetuity no matter what the data says.
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        • deadbolt 4y ago
          I wasn't asking you, but okay.
      • jjtheblunt 4y ago
        Climate Change could include onset of an ice age?
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  • llanowarelves 4y ago
    Giving cataclysmic predictions that don't happen, and quietly ignoring them when the year comes to replace it with the next cataclysmic prediction, is much like how some religious people say we're always either in or about to be in the End of Days. And is treated the same. Especially when malincentives like regulators lining their pockets are involved ("Carbon credits" can be like a type of religious indulgence). More measured approaches on shorter timescales -- actually going after the big fish and not ignoring their excess because they are more "important" than the little people -- is taken more seriously.
    • yongjik 4y ago
      > actually going after the big fish and not ignoring their excess because they are more "important" than the little people Is this yet another allusion on Al Gore and his infamous private jet? Last year, 506,769 airplanes either took off or landed in LAX only. That's 1388 per day in one airport. All packed to the gill by "little people" like you and me. Al Gore could fly his jet across the Pacific every day and it would be literally a drop in the bucket-full of little guys, in the grand scheme of things. I'm tired of these talks of "big guys ruining the environment," which is conveniently only brought up when these big guys talk about the environment. This is plain simple "hate the message, shoot the messenger" strategy.
      • llanowarelves 4y ago
        Cool, so I can morally use as much as I want because in the grand scheme of things I am just one person. You know what, I agree with that. Now I don't have to change my behavior for any of this stuff. I just needed to see myself as important as them. Thank you for this change in perspective. Now I can say a few words about the environment, while consuming as much as possible, and you'll have to defend me from critique. By "big fish" I actually meant companies (who are a prime shake-down target for carbon credits), but if for the rich, celebs, and politicians the shoe fits... They are supposed to have noblesse oblige.
        • ForHackernews 4y ago
• melling 4y ago
  Fox News and other media outlets https://www.foxnews.com/politics/climate-activists-embrace-doomsday-rhetoric-despite-falling-flat-in-previous-warnings.amp https://www.foxnews.com/politics/climate-activists-embrace-d... There’s also not much of attempt on the left to understand climate change better. Every weather disaster is directly attributed to climate change, even if it scientifically can’t be directly linked. This convinces deniers that there isn’t a problem and people are being “alarmists”.
  • geysersam 4y ago
    Particular weather events can never be directly linked to climate change. Most people understand this. In life casual chains are rarely clear cut. "Caused A" and "made A significantly more likely" are interchangeable outside of academic debates. One has to be severely climate change denialist to focus on such a detail. It's a strategy of sowing uncertainty.
• hotz 4y ago
  Ever hear of the boy who cried wolf...
  • Brometheus 4y ago
    Yeah, ever read the story? it ends with the wolf eating every sheep.
• Izkata 4y ago
  My guess would be a tipping point of failed predictions, though why exactly then I couldn't say: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/50-years-of-failed-doomsday-eco-pocalyptic-predictions-the-so-called-experts-are-0-50/ https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/50-years-of-failed-doomsday-e...
  • verbify 4y ago
    I clicked on a few "Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past" is about English snowfalls, and it is true that we don't have heavy snowfall, not sure why this is a failed prediction, it's more of a statement of fact. Some of these other predictions aren't necessarily falsified. Peak oil may have already occurred. The fact that we have to resort to offshore drilling shows the low hanging fruit have already been taken. Another example of a debatable prediction is "Fifty Million Climate Refugees by the Year 2020" - this is something that environmental groups claim is a correct prediction as they attribute certain current wars (e.g. Syrian Civil War) to have been caused by droughts caused by climate change. Some of these predictions were not made by scientists or were clearly just meant as a slogan to galvanise action - e.g. 2009: Climate Genius Prince Charles Says we Have 96 Months to Save World
  • evol262 4y ago
    This is pretty ridiculous. The "so-called 'experts'" are... journalists? Zero of these are studies. Zero. None. Nada. There's the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2004/feb/22/usnews.theobserver https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2004/feb/22/usnews.t... And Breitbart: https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2015/06/01/media-fail-no-major-hurricanes-in-9-years/ https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2015/06/01/media-fail-no... And a bunch of other nonsense. Every one of these "predictions" is either a journalist trying to sell copy by exaggerating a story, or conservative media outlets clapping themselves on the back for pointing out that journalists who exaggerated were wrong. None of these "predictions" are in any way science, and all of the climate modeling in the past 30 years has made predictions which are *more conservative than reality*.
    • Izkata 4y ago
      > The "so-called 'experts'" are... journalists? Zero of these are studies. Zero. None. Nada. > Every one of these "predictions" is either a journalist trying to sell copy by exaggerating a story > None of these "predictions" are in any way science That doesn't matter at all because this conversation is about public perception, and guess what makes it to the public?
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• OrvalWintermute 4y ago
  Much of the bogus predictions were based on flawed observations and bad ideas like the hockeystick data normalization problem, and a failure to account for the trend of deglaciation which predates industrialization. A general discounting of solar radiance, misunderstanding albedo, and pushing a low CO2 norm was also part and parcel to this hogwash. We knew there were incorrectly sited weather sensors that fed data into the climate record, just like ASOS, receiving prop blast and jetwash. Some HCN sensors that had been correctly sited became incorrect over time due to urbanization and industrialization. The discongruence between space based observations and in-situ flawed sensors are the clearest indication of this. This is also why we saw the rise of the HCN-Reference. We also saw a better understanding of the medieval warm period which, although potentially regionalized, is not without precedents. The process of fixing of these flaws, we call that science. However, this has not stopped the religious cult from a rearguard action defending by whatever name they choose to call it these days.
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  • misja111 4y ago
    This. Climate change is real, but the early climate activist movement has done itself and the rest of the world a disservice by overexaggerating the change and the effects.
• TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
  > what happened in the late 2000s to cause belief in climate change to drop off a cliff CRU leak?
• Tade0 4y ago
  I suppose it was due to the so-called "global warming hiatus": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_hiatus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_hiatus IIRC it was the most repeated counter-argument back then. Of course the 2010s showed that there was no counter-argument to begin with.
  • origin_path 4y ago
    The 2010s didn't show there was no counter-argument to begin with re: the hiatus/pause. What actually happened is that climatologists rewrote the temperature data of that period to simply remove the pause from history. In other words, having spent >10 years publishing scientific papers and studies on the causes of the pause in warming, they one day just announced that it'd never happened at all, that all that research had been on bad data and they'd "found" warming. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17700 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17700 Of course trust falls when that happens. It's correct for trust to fall. They'd been making hyper-confident assertions about the future of climate and temperature for many people's entire lives and then one day, whoops, actually, it's "we've not been measuring temperature right for the entire history of our field and it fundamentally changes the entire shape of the data".
• BirAdam 4y ago
  Politics caused the split. The change in course where it slowly creeped up is two fold. First, the warming became completely obvious. People could see in their own living memory very dramatic changes between their childhood and modern day. That just took time. Second, as the left became more and more radicalized toward actions to fight the threat, the right wing could take a less radical position and still claim to be holding the line against radicals. The left shifted the Overton Window left enough that the right could have a politically viable platform that included climate change.