The Pew Climate Centre have shown that over the last year or so a decreased proportion of US citizens believe climate change is a serious public policy issue and a reduced number believe there is solid evidence that anthropogenic warming is occurring. Climate change delusionists might be credited with inducing these changed opinions but the role of the media is also important.
Andrew Revkin points out that climate change coverage in the US media peaked in 2007 – indeed it has become the greatest story rarely told. Part of the reason is the issue-attention cycle discussed in relation to the environment by Anthony Downs* in 1972. According to this theory an event occurs triggering public interest in an environmental issue and then – even though the problem is unresolved – other issues replace it as its novelty value wears off and boredom with the concern sets in. In addition, the effects of climate change are either gradual or, if potentially immediate (hurricanes, droughts), only ambiguously linked to anthropogenic global warming. Catastrophic outcomes are only an imperfect means of fostering public opinion to act on climate change issues particularly since climate delusionists are happy to sow the seeds of doubt about causation. Often too effects such as the breakup of sea-ice formations are geographically distant and understandable only in terms of elaborate scientific explanations. The gradualism of many changes means that we can ‘get used to’ living in a degraded environment. It becomes difficult to maintain climate change as a significant public concern.
In a democracy the media largely fashion public opinions which determine election outcomes. If the media can be corrupted by self-interested corporations or if the main competition they face is from Hollywood then public policy decisions will be poor.
* Downs is a significant public policy scholar. I have a particular appreciation for his “Still Stuck in Traffic” book which is one of the best discussions of traffic congestion I have seen. In the article cited Downs applies issue-attention cycle theory to the problem of addressing traffic congestion.
What may be causing a teensy weensy bit of doubt in people’s minds is how absolutely frigging COLD it is…. Here is a quote from Scotland “And Paul Michaelwaite, a forecaster for netweather.tv, believes the cold snap will last the whole month. He said: “It is looking like this could be in the top 20 cold winters of the past 100 years.”
Temperatures of -15°C are predicted in parts of Scotland over the next 10 days – colder than Alaska.”
Three Questions you should ask yourself
1. Is Co2 the main driver of climate
2. Can Computer models predict the future
3. Have the climate scientists “cooked the books”
It is all very well to “adjust” world’s temperatures but if there is eight foot of snow piled up outside then it may be a little difficult to convince people that there is a warming catastrophe looming.
By the way the elfstedentocht( skating in 11 cities) may be run for the first time in many years
The first part of your comment is accurate. People, in general, may become confused by the distinction between weather and climate. But the three questions you suggest I should ask myself suggest that you too are confused by this distinction. Of course even medium term periods of cooling – up to a decade are consistent with secular warming. See here. It is tedious to have to deal with this obvious nonsense.
This is a well-considered response by Joe Romm to this denialism.
” Of course even medium term periods of cooling – up to a decade are consistent with secular warming.”
That is a beautiful argument. If it warms,it is warming. If it cools, it is warming.
I am reminded of that visionary economist Steven Keen who claimed that house prices would drop by 20 per cent.In a neat bit of symmetry house prices over the last year went UP by 19 percent. Going by your logic he could rightly claim that medium terms of rising house prices are still consistent with a prediction of falling prices.
You avoid the issue chrisl. A time series of data can be decomposed into trend, cyclical, seasonal and random components. The trend in temperatures which no-one in climatology disagrees is upward seems to be driven by CO2 concentrations. Cyclical variations of up to a decade (as chronicled in the first link I provide) can be based on ocean temperature trends and such things as El Nino. Links between El Nino and secular warming may exist but they are not well understood.
How much effort should one expend trying to be reasonable with people who deny the veracity of modern science and who look for any facile, glib story – however obviously erroneous or inmplausible – to deny what it shows to be true? Quite frankly I am sick of it.
Congratulations Harry for getting back into the affray, it seems to me that the best way to describe the response from most the western world’s commentariat is a stunned silence. Which it shouldn’t be, there should have been a plan B and C, D etc, because China and India and the USA have essentially done what they said they would do, economy before mitigation of climate warming.
And while we enjoy the festive season and contemplate mildly what next, China and India are not waiting to be rolled by, as they see it, a vengeful Europe and angry developing world and a triumphant USA. Of the commentariat I think the likes of Hulme and Lomborg should feel the most satisfied with the value of their explanations of what is the reality of the social economic behavioural and scientific parameters of the phenomenon global climate change. An example an angry article from Qatar about Copenhagen being nothing more than a rich countries fiesta about climate change mitigation, a pointless exercise I read into the article, adaptation and food security being their major focus. That food security is about more than climate warming doesn’t matter, what matters is that there are people in need.
Speaking of silence I note that Secretary General Ki-Moon has been very busy on the phone to a selection of world leaders looking for? One is Rudd, did I miss his conversation with us about his ongoing involvement in curing the world of carbon pollution. And as I understand it nations have to advise the UN by the end of January what their specific offerings to the Accord will be. Other than it seems a waste of time when reading that China and possibly India want the UN knocked out of the game, what I wonder is our PM promising. Very silent with us he has been though I very strongly doubt that he will have been able to restrain his Good Shepherd to the world with Australia the price tendencies. Surely he can’t put up the same bill again? But then when has he had a novel idea?
Thanks for the post and the links. Useful and interesting, and led into further interesting stuff about science and the public’s response to the science, and fear narratives. Liked this
“Hogenboom and his colleagues maintain that the public no longer views science in celebratory terms but takes this knowledge as contingent and examines the relevance in specified situated contexts”
Of course most of what I read is very Eurocentric, and that science may be trending towards being about risk and regulation in the west, is not I think how it is seen in most of the rest of the world.
Like the issue attention cycle explanation other than maybe it is not a failing of species Homo Sapiens, rather a necessary attribute.
A time series of data can be decomposed into trend, cyclical, seasonal and random components. The trend in temperatures which no-one in climatology disagrees is upward seems to be driven by CO2 concentrations. Cyclical variations of up to a decade (as chronicled in the first link I provide) can be based on ocean temperature trends and such things as El Nino. Links between El Nino and secular warming may exist but they are not well understood.
Techno-babble
You started your post asking why people are growing increasingly sceptical of global warming, Well above is your answer.
In the 90′s when the graphs WERE going up it was unequivocal. Temperature up.Co2 up. Correllation = Causation
In the 2000′s graphs flatline . Lo and behold “A time series of data can be decomposed into trend, cyclical, seasonal and random components etc.”
I don’t think you are going to win hearts and minds with that nonsense.
End of discussion as far as you are concerned Chrisl. It isn’t ‘technobabble’ – the description I made of a time series decomposition would be a part of most first-year statistics units.
I agreed people generally might be confused by cyclical changes that over-rode trend changes and stated this in my first comment. It was your self-evident belief in such nonsense that I was criticising.
Temperatures didn’t flatten out in the 2000s – it was the hottest decade for 160 years.
Your facts are wrong and any sense of logic is absent. Goodbye.
Whilst the debate continues to stupefy some indirect action may with with risk analysis and insurance. Should insurers raise premiums or even decline to insure those in high risk areas (fire, flood, storm, sea rise) market forces could prevail. A similar role could be played by regulators (building codes) and land use (zonings).
HC: can you say more about “first-year statistics”?, i.e., it would be helpful to point to a few texts, and maybe college courses that actually do this., i.e., teach people about the behavior of time series where the yearly noises is 5X+larger than the yearly trend.
I’m mostly trying to calibrate *when* one would expect various people to encounter this these days. I knew about it somewhat in high school, but actual formal exposure wasn’t until grad school, so I’m not sure when people do it. I once sat in on a class for 17-year-olds in Singapore that I think covered it later in the course, since, after all, this kind of analysis is absolutely crucial for things like manufacturing engineering, i.e., semiconductor yields, for example.
I’ve tried various approaches, from:
Regression SLOPE-charts of temperature data for differing intervals, avoiding statistical illiteracy of drawing lines between endpoints:
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/06/always_click_on_the_links.php#comment-1688982
And trying the simplest Excel model I could create, kindly animated by CapitalClimate:
http://capitalclimate.blogspot.com/2009/04/it-hasnt-warmed-since-1998.html
Not everyone understands this stuff, but it is clear that some simply do not want to understand.
John, I learnt this material in first-year in a basic statistics course. I still have the book!
M. Spiegel, Theory and Problems of Statistics, Schaum, 1972, Chapter 16.
In economics you learn to separate out the seasonal and random components. The cyclical component is then the deviation of this smoothed data from a trend line.
There is a much more advanced literature on applying time series analysis that is a part of econometrics. Googling ‘time series analysis climate change’ will give you lots of references on these approaches in relation to climate change.
“Temperatures didn’t flatten out in the 2000s – it was the hottest decade for 160 years.”
This statement does not make sense to me – temperatures most certainly did flatten out in the 2000s – see http://www.c3headlines.com/2010/01/satellite-confirms-that-global-temps-continue-decline-trend-a-minus-151f-per-century-rate.html
And it may well have been the hottest decade for 160 years, as you would expect coming out of an ice age. The unresolved question is how much of the warming is due to CO2, keeping in mind that most anthropogenic CO2 has been produced since about 1950. The longer the short term temperature trend is flat or down while CO2 concentration goes up, the less likely is the CO2 hypothesis to be true.
HC: thanks, that resolves the ambiguity:
I’d expect it to be in first-year course for *economists*.
It certainly wasn’t in the first formal Stats course I took, but that was co-labeled Psychology. We must have at least dozen statistics texts around, and
time-series” really doesn’t show up in most. It certainly shows up in my graduate course in stochastic processes.
I’ve had a campaign for a while to get more computer architecture people to take statistics, but it often turns out that the into stats class taught by Statistics really doesn’t fit what they need. They see a lot of design for medical or psych experiments, and don’t bother if it’s an elective. I’ve seen this at multiple schools, including world-class ones.
In some places, most statistics is taught by Statistics; in oth3egrs, at least some statistics is taught within a department or college, and tuned to their needs.
Anyway, I wouldn’t assume that if a person took one statistics class, they would necessarily do time-series.
John,
you’re right about time series stuff. I think it rarely gets taught in many areas of social sciences (typically people just analyze data with ANOVAs or simple regression because you usually don’t have enough time points to do more complicated stuff). Alternatively, almost everyone uses Tabachnik and Fidell as a main reference, and there are some chapters on it there.
Global Warming and Climate Change is the biggest environmental issue that we face these days. the long term effects of these environmental changes to a nations economy is quite damaging. there would be a shortage in food supply as well as on water supply too.
Hello Harry,
I know this is a personal project of yours, but I was curious if you ever consider guest posts or guest content on your sidebar. I’d love to chat with you about your environmentally-oriented readers. Shoot me an email if interested.
Thanks!
-Dan