62% in U.S. support environmental movement, but 48% say global warming is exaggerated -- Gallup Poll

Most Americans support the environmental movement, a new Gallup Poll says, but support has fallen in the past decade, especially where global warming is concerned. Some 48% said global warming is exaggerated.

More respondents put a priority on energy over environment for the first time since Gallup started these environmental surveys 10 years ago. Exactly half favored development of fossil fuels over environmental protection, while only 43% put environment first.

Political polarization over global warming is one reason for the loss of environmental support, with climate skeptics, fossil fuel industries and some elected officials beating the drums of doubt. The recession and loss of jobs factors in too. People have much to worry about and are more easily scared by those who make dire warnings about the economic effects of regulations.

Political party, not surprisingly, makes a difference in people’s opinions. Asked if the environmental movement in general had done more good than harm:
• 74% of Dems said yes (down from 77)
• 59% of Independents agreed (down from 70)
• 51% of Republicans agreed (down the most – 13 points – from 64)

There was agreement about energy conservation, however. Across the board, 52% saw consumer conservation as a way to solve the energy problem.

Other findings:
• 61% were active or supportive of the environment movement (down 10% since 2000); 19% were active participants, 42% were sympathetic, 28% were neutral and 10% unsympathetic.
• 19% (and more women that men) were actively involved.
• 53% said global warming is real and the impact has begun or will soon.
• 46% rated the quality of the environment as good or excellent (up from 39% a year ago). That seems to go in tandem with “we don’t have to do so much about it.”

What was surprising (and frankly I don’t believe it) was the number of people saying they personally take steps to protect the environment:
• 90% said they have recycled.
• 85% said they’ve taken steps to reduce home energy use.
• 81% have replaced incandescent light bulbs with condensed fluorescent bulbs.
• 76% have bought products specifically because they are better for the environment.
• 70% have used reusable shopping bags.

This sounds like a case of telling the pollster what she wants to hear.

The poll results clearly send a warning that we need to educate the public more about global warming in order neutralize what the naysayers are telling them. Too many still don’t understand the damage fossil fuels are doing.

(Sources: Greenwire via New York Times )

Climate skeptics misread new global warming study

(Image from Flickr and photographer azrainman)

Oboy. The climate skeptics are having a field day with two studies released last week that suggest scientists don’t know all the factors involved in global warming. The contrarian blogospere is especially excited about research, published in Nature Geoscience, that concluded carbon dioxide only accounted for half of the extreme warming that occurred 55 million years ago. The sceptics’ conclusion? Science models showing warming related to CO2 are all wet. Ergo, we can stop worrying about throwing up all that greenhouse gas from burning fossil fuels.

That’s not the way the researchers saw it.

About 55 million years ago, they found, the Earth’s temperature rose between 5 and 9 degrees Celsius (9 to 16 degrees Fahrenheit) over a period of about 10,000 years. (If you're a Creationist, I guess you can stop reading here.) Based on seabed borings, scientists from Rice University, the University of Hawaii and U Cal Santa Barbara said things were already pretty hot when it all started (there was no surface ice) and they speculate some event, like methane deposits bubbling up from warm seabeds, caused a 70% increase of CO2 in the atmosphere over 10,000 years. (Most hydrate methane turns into CO2.)

If only half the temperature increase can be explained by carbon dioxide release, what caused the rest of it? No one's sure but authors of the study said it could involve feedback loops. And they say the unexplained causes don't mean we can stop worrying about climate change. Rather, future global warming could be worse than we thought, because feedback loops caused by melting tundra, changing ocean currents, and water absorbing more sunlight than ice may have caused more warming then than today’s models would explain. (BTW, the UN’s IPPC report on future climate change left out feedback loops because we don’t understand them well enough, though they realized the melting of Greenland, for example, could have a profound effect.)

Forecasts likely underestimate warming
In commentary published along with the study, scientist David Beerling of Sheffield University, UK, said climate forecasts “could be severely underestimating the extent of the problem that lies in store for humanity as greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere.”

An analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists agrees the study suggests warming is potentially worse than previously believed.

So don’t let anyone tell you this study throws the global warming theory out the window. More likely we don’t know the half of it.

Looking at warming on a scale we can relate to, say the lifetime of our grandchildren, predictions of catastrophic warming in this century still hold – and may be a lot worse than forecast.

Since the Industrial Revolution, CO2 in the atmosphere has grown from 280 parts per million to 390 ppm or about 40%. C02 in the atmosphere could grow more than 70% in just a century (not 10,000 years) this time, one study author said.

Sunspots and flares
Another theory for changing temperatures on Earth has been the influence of activity on the sun. A second newly published study, in the Journal of Science, links the two together for the first time, but concludes the cyclical activity is similar to that of El Niño and La Niña, in warming the Pacific, but has only about half as much impact on the temperature as El Niño. The differences in the 11-year cycles are “very small,” relative to the sun’s total energy and are short-term cyclical rather than a long-term trend. The study was done by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

(Sources: Reuters PlanetArk, Reuters blog, Science Daily, Nature Geoscience, Union of Concerned Scientists, ClimateWire)