Less Than A Third Of Americans Still Worry About Global Warming

Benny Peiser’s Global Warming Policy Foundation Reports that US Concern About Global Warming Drops To 1980s Levels

Editor’s Note – If it wasn’t for the internet the Kyoto Accords would have been ratified.  If the internet had been in existence in the 1980’s the only way the Montreal Protocol would have passed would have been into the ash heap of history - where it belongs!

Less than a third of Americans are now concerned about global warming and climate change: 32 percent fret about those environmental factors says the annual Gallup Environmental survey, released Wednesday. Naturally, there’s a partisan divide: 13 percent of Republicans are concerned about global warming and climate problems, compared to 52 percent of Democrats. --Jennifer Harper, The Washington Times, 25 March 2015

Americans’ concern about several major environmental threats has eased after increasing last year. As in the past, Americans express the greatest worry about pollution of drinking water, and the least about global warming or climate change. Importantly, even as global warming has received greater attention as an environmental problem from politicians and the media in recent years, Americans’ worry about it is no higher now than when Gallup first asked about it in 1989. --Gallup, 25 March 2015

The new Gallup Poll is out. Most commentators are focused on the worried “a great deal” category, which is back to 1989 levels, but that’s largely noise. The important trend is at the other end of the spectrum, and seems to be missed. The only category with steady growth are the hard core skeptics, people who are worried “not at all”. That’s doubled from 12 to 24%; the trend is up. This is an unequivocal category. One quarter of the population are solidly, completely skeptical. --Jo Nova, 26 March 2015

The public's obsession with climate change, a common feature during much of the 1980s and 1990s, has been waning rapidly. The reason for growing climate fatigue is not so much a PR failure. After all, hundreds of millions are being spent each year around the world by thousands of NGOs, green energy lobbies and green government ministers. It is rather that reality no longer corresponds with alarmist predictions that were issued just a few years ago. The novelty of global warming and the habitual alarm have lost their original shock value. Most people have begun to take climate scares with a sizeable pinch of salt. -- Benny Peiser, PR Week, 10 September 2014

As United Nations delegates gather this week to negotiate new Sustainable Development Goals, the National Association of Scholars released the first major critical report detailing how the campus sustainability movement harms higher education. Sustainability: Higher Education’s New Fundamentalism shows that the sustainability movement distorts college curricula and cuts off free inquiry on important questions. The study shows how the sustainability movement has shut down reasoned debate on campuses by foreclosing open inquiry about climate change. --National Association of Scholars, 25 March 2015

I believe that climate moralists are impervious to the adverse impact of their policies because their morality is closely interwoven with misunderstanding of economics, distaste for capitalism, lack of interest in history and the overwhelming desire of their psychic elephants to dictate how other people should live. The climate issue has to be seen as the latest chapter in the two century long battle to use the alleged moral shortcomings of capitalism to justify political power. --Peter Foster, House of Lords, 24 March 2015