While the national media was focused on California Governor Jerry Brown’s announcement of his state’s first mandatory cuts in water use by residents due to the ongoing drought (allegedly caused by man-made climate change), little was said about two Gallup polls and a study out of Germany showing those concerns about global warming to be greatly overblown.
The paper out of Germany’s Max Plank Institute for Meteorology concluded that gases blamed for the earth’s allegedly continuing climb in temperature have far less impact on that climb than previously estimated. Those estimates have, as a result, been thrown into serious doubt, according to two climatologists from the Cato Institute who reviewed the study:
This [study] basically eliminates the possibility of catastrophic climate change.… Such a result will also necessarily drive down estimates of the social cost of carbon, thereby undermining a key argument used by federal agencies to support increasingly burdensome regulations which seek to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. If this result holds up, it is the death blow to global warming hysteria.
The first poll on the environment conducted in early March and released by Gallup last week showed that half of those polled rate “the quality of the environment more positively than they have in the 14 years Gallup has been tracking it.” On the flip side, only 40 percent rate the environment as “fair,” “the lowest percentage found since 2001,” according to Gallup.
Gallup’s second poll on threats to the environment was also conducted in early March and concluded that concerns over global warming or climate change ranked last among those threats. Americans’ greatest concern, according to Gallup, is the threat of polluted drinking water. Said Gallup, since the early 2000s, “Americans’ worry has fallen, with concern dipping to record lows on most issues.… The current level of worry on each issue remains at or near those record lows.”
This has occurred despite decades of warnings by various entities about global warming (initially) and then, when the weather didn’t cooperate, “climate change.” Noted Gallup, “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.”
This bodes ill, according to Gallup, for those proposing more environmental regulations to cure a problem that increasingly isn’t perceived to be worrisome: “Because Americans are less concerned about environmental matters in general, they may be less willing to support policy changes to make those regulations even tougher.”
Despite the barrage of propaganda emanating from the media, the EPA, and the United Nations, more and more Americans simply aren’t buying it. More and more Americans are not only becoming more skeptical about the whole global-warming charade, many are becoming “climate change deniers,” which is having the happy effect of beginning to slow the juggernaut of mandates and regulations designed to solve a problem fewer and fewer Americans think exists.
In an attempt to neutralize the growing resistance against those mandates and regulations so favored by the Obama administration, the website BarackObama.com has issued a “call out” of some of the most prominent and vociferous ones. Its attempt fails, however, when the list of those “deniers” in just the House and Senate is more than 150 names long!
All the latest from Germany’s Max Plank Institute and from Gallup does is to confirm that the global climate-change movement continues to lose credibility. As Aesop told the story: “There once was a shepherd boy who was bored as he sat on the hillside watching the village sheep. To amuse himself he took a great breath and sang out, ‘Wolf!'”
A graduate of an Ivy League school and a former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at www.LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics.
