Global Warming, Anyone?

A recent Pew Center poll reveals some interesting statistics about who believes global warming is mostly because of human activity.

There is a large partisan gap in views about the causes of global warming: 51% of Democrats and 40% of independents say the earth is getting warmer mostly because of human activity. But only 19% of Republicans say rising temperatures are mostly attributable to human activity. Of course, if you add all these numbers up based on the percentage of the US population who are Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, you find out that most people do not believe that global warming is mostly because of human activity.

Remember, this question is not about just "solid evidence of global warming" -- we already know the earth has warmed and cooled for billions of years -- its about "do you believe the earth is getting warmer mostly because of human activity".

What conclusions can we draw from this? Well, one obvious one is that either a lot more Democrats and Independents are dumber than Republicans, or a lot more Republicans are dumber than Democrats and Independents. I've done a lot more in-depth research on this subject than your average Joe; I don't like being called dumb -- and I'm a Republican.

Let's do some simple math based on the current number of each kind of voter:

Democrats 42 million 51% = 21.42 million
Republicans 30 million 19% = 5.7 million
Independent 24 million 40%= 9.6 million
( 96 million total)        (36.72 million total)

Overall, only 38 percent of voters think that the earth is getting warmer mostly because of human activity. Not very encouraging news for your average global warming alarmist.

This signals the end — probably for decades, if not forever — of a trivial pursuit that began 14 years ago with the Kyoto Protocol that the U.S. Senate would not even bring to a vote. The pursuit was for a 194-nation consensus obligating a few nations to transfer enormous wealth to many other nations’ governments, to be politically distributed by them, with the supposed effect of ending global warming, if such proves to be.

Comments

  1. Luc Morin3:57 PM

    One has to be naive to think that the percentage of people who believe in X is a valid indicator of whether X is true or not.

    Don't forget that at one point in time, almost 100% of earth population believed that it was flat.

    Now I'm not saying that warming is caused by humans, and I'm not saying it's not. Just saying that popular belief is a very poor indicator of truth.

    Luc

    ReplyDelete
  2. peterbromberg7:42 PM

    @Luc It's not really a question of whether X is true or not. What's important is the change over time in what most people believe. If you have a majority who don't believe, then conferences like Durban cannot hope to accomplish much.

    In my opinion, that's perfectly fine. I suspect of course that you disagree.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Luc Morin10:10 PM

    @Peter,

    I guess I read your post from a different perspective than what you had intended.

    I definitely agree that people's belief in general is something that changes over time.

    Too easily if you ask me.

    Just so you know, I usually agree with your posts, so keep 'em coming.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Some observations on Script Callbacks, "AJAX", "ATLAS" "AHAB" and where it's all going.

I've taken a more than cursory interest in the whole Remote Scripting (.NET species) vs. AJAX and now ATLAS discussion, mostly because I started using Remote Scripting since Microsoft first released it, and because I continued to refine it after seeing Brent Ashley's excellent work with JSRS, which was one of the first "real" cross-browser solutions back in 2000 (that's the turn of the Century for you history buffs). Now Bertrand Leroy, a Microsoft guy whose work I like , has authored some very interesting ASP.NET 2.0 script callback stuff that he points to on his blog, and he is obviously (at least, to me he is) involved quite heavily in the development of this new ATLAS infrastructure that they'll preview at PDC. Leroy's most recent post brings to the surface what I agree are the major differences between the "AJAX a - la .NET" approach as popularized by Michael Swartz with his AJAX.NET library, and Leroy's RefreshPanel, the ASP.NET 2.0 b
Read more

IE7 - Vista: "Internet Explorer has stopped Working"

Image
This one was a bitch. All of a sudden for no reason at all, out of the blue, I get this dialog "internet Explorer has stopped working". I didn't install any new software, crap- I didn't do anything! So here I am using FIREFART to go on the internet and find out what to do! Damn! Good thing I've got the sucker on the same machine (I'm not "anti-Firefox", i just don't use it that much except to check my page renderings). The Fix The fix (at least for me): 1) Go into Control Panel, and choose "Internet Options". 2) Under the "Advanced" tab, press the "RESET" button at the lower right: Don't ask me why this happens, or why the fix works. That's a BUG, D00D - I don't care how you slice it!
Read more

FIREFOX / IE Word-Wrap, Word-Break, TABLES FIX

One of the most annoying things a developer (who would normally delight in writing code, not futzing with markup) can have is getting rendering issues between different browsers. The two biggest players are of course Internet Exploder and Firefart (as I lovingly like to refer to each). In most cases that's going to take care of 98 percent of your total site traffic. IE has had a proprietary "word-break" style attribute for a long time, and this made it into the CSS 3.0 spec. But that doesn't necessarily help you with Firefox right now. Firefox literally - (and I consider this completely idiotic, since it's been in their bug database for FIVE YEARS) does not have a reliable CSS style element to force table cell content to break in the middle of a word in order to stop the content from expanding your table / div off the page or over other content on the page. Here's a partial fix, which will work for most tables and browsers. The style declaration (I call it m
Read more