According to the latest Gallup poll, half the American population or 48% think concerns about global warming are exaggerated and twisted out of proportion. That's the highest margin since Gallup started asking the question 13 years ago.
While most Americans believe that global warming is real, that number is dwindling. What's more, 35% say that the effects of global warming either will never happen (19%) or will not happen in their lifetimes (16%). The percentage of Americans who believe that global warming is going to affect them or their way of life in their lifetimes has dropped to 32% from 40% in 2008 and two out of three Americans say global warming will not affect them in their lifetimes. In 2003, 61% of Americans said increases in temperature were due to human activities and 33% said they were due to natural changes in the environment. Now, only 50% say temperature increases are due to human activities, and 46% say they are not.
Stephen Stromberg in the Washington Post says it's because global warming has become such a partisan political issue in the US. It's more complicated than that. The same thing is happening in other parts of the world. A recent BBC poll for instance has revealed a swing of 9% towards people believing that global warming is not taking place.
The problem is that in this day and age, when information is instantaneously available, when many can get what they want right now, people seem to have trouble thinking 40 to 50 years ahead. The biggest problem to tackling climate change is inside all of us. The psychology of climate change is the biggest hurdle, a phenomenon that I examine in my column here.
The other part of the problem is that tackling climate change means changing a consumerist society and people would resist that.
This is why 300 Australian doctors and scientists have written an open letter, co-signed by 2003 Australian of the Year Fiona Stanley who is Professor of Medicine at the University of Western Australia, along with former AMA president Professor Kerryn Phelps (University of Sydney), obesity expert Professor Boyd Swinburn (Deakin University) and Southern Cross University's Adjunct Professor of Health Sciences Garry Egger and published in the Medical Journal of Australia, warning that obesity and climate change, both the results of a consumerist society, are the biggest threats to civilisation. "As health professionals, we urge Australian politicians (and the public) to recognise the overlap in the underlying cause of two great health threats that our population now faces …the rise of obesity and its life-threatening disease consequences and the great threats to health from global climate change."
Whether the public pays any attention to that as they drive to McDonald's in their four wheel drives remains to be seen.
Great article.
How can these scientists predict the climate in 40 years time, when there is so much that is unknown ? Surely they should base any assumptions on things that can be measured, such as a rise in sea levels. After all, surface temperatures go up and down, but the rise in sea levels reflects both melting ice and thermal expansion.