Let's ignore this graph and talk about climate change

[King]

What caused this?

[tik 🪀✨]

Climate change denial and a hatred of lefty environmentalism. I guess.

But just to widen the scope of discussing this graph, I wish Gallup would change their color scheme. They're clearly in the pockets of Big Green.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

1. Economic growth becomes more of a concern in hard economic times, and environmental concerns take a back seat.

2. Changes in party ID. 

3. Environmentalism seen as an increasingly demanding, with local and/or immediately felt sacrifices for global, uncertain benefit.

[Simfan34]

Of course economic development is more important than the environment! What kind of question is that?

[SUSAN CRUSHBONE]

Of course economic development is more important than the environment! What kind of question is that?

That's very short-sighted of you.

[Goldwater]

So Republicans from 1998 to 2001 valued the environment over economic growth? I never would have guessed that...

[SUSAN CRUSHBONE]

So Republicans from 1998 to 2001 valued the environment over economic growth? I never would have guessed that...

well, this is people identifying as republicans rather than republican politicians.

[Meeker]

It seems to track very closely with the overall state of the economy... things were good in the late 90s, then things turned bad after 9/11... things got a little better in the mid-2000s... and then the Great Recession started.

[Reginald]

Here's the Democrats' graph, for comparison:



So you see a similar pattern here, though it's obviously not as dramatic.

So Republicans from 1998 to 2001 valued the environment over economic growth? I never would have guessed that...

The economy was doing just fine in the late 90s, so inducing more growth wasn't nearly as much of a priority.

[7,052,770]

The global warming denial movement didn't really get fired up until the early 2000s, and Fox News started, when, 1997 or so?

[DemPGH]

I'm not sure exactly when, but at some point the Right really started to attack climate change and global warming as "hysteria" made up by scientists and Marxists (they're usually the bad guys, right? ). I'm not sure that climate change was really a big issue prior? I know Reagan was skeptical but agreed to ozone regulations and Bush Sr. just poked fun at Gore (Ozone Man), but what would be interesting to see would be if the issue kind of built up steam or momentum by the late '90s, which would have caused the right wing reaction against it.

Point is, the issue was around in the'80s. Something caused a reaction against it circa 2000. Might be that it was packaged for the first time with far left stuff (over regulation, overly costly) by the Right.

[AggregateDemand]

What caused this?

Republicans support environmentalism when real GDP growth exceeds federal deficits. When the dotcom bubble burst and the 9-11 terrorist attacks occurred, Republicans shifted their focus to economic development. Naturally, support for environmental issues fell even more steeply as the subprime lending crisis unfolded.

[Redalgo]

If I were to guess, the Republicans were generally on-board with conservationism but took interest in energy independence once the wars off in West Asia following 9/11 go underway -- perhaps motivating some of them to want oil from here on the home front rather than from places that are (seemingly to some) unstable and populated by anti-American Islamists. Climate change is also now the central focus of the environmental movement, which doesn't play well with the anti-intellectual crowd and people who were fine alright with environmentalism only so long as the regulation was not going to meaningfully affect their traditional ways of life. Reintroduction of wolves hasn't gone over well in some rural areas, either, really.

Among Democrats the trend seems more in step with whether economic times are bullish or bearish.

[Ban my account ffs!]

Al Gore ran for president in 2000.  And we know his views on the environment:  That nothing matters except 2 things:  atmospheric CO2 and the global surface temperature anomaly.

The alarmists ruined environmentalism and made it completely unpalatable to the right and much of the center.

Now people who bring up serious environmental problems are labeled "deniers" unless they say it's happening or getting worse or will happen more because of "global warming".

Also keep in mind the planet was still warming in the '90s.  It stopped warming around 2000.

But because the alarmists can co-opt weather variations with myriad and unknown causes as part of their alarmist message, people are convinced global warming is still happening.

I'm sure folks like Harry keep their Gore books right next to the Bible on the coffee table.  BELIEVE!  HAVE FAITH!  APPEAL TO AUTHORITY AND CONSENSUS!  RELY ON MODELS AND MODELED "DATA", NOT OBSERVATIONS!  DO NOT QUESTION.

[muon2]

The issue began in 1997 with the Kyoto accords. The Senate used the weak scientific evidence rather than the highly favorable terms for China and India to reject the treaty. Frankly the evidence in 1997 was marginal at best though it improved greatly by 2003. However during that period there was a recession driven by tech stocks that overpromised and Dem candidate strongly associated with the accords. That cemented the technology and politics of climate at it existed in 2000 in the narrative of many Pubs.

[Indy Texas]

There was also the rise of the "sound science movement" in the mid-2000s, largely bankrolled by big industrial firms funding "independent" think tanks and institutes to peddle spurious research.

Basically, they want to hold climate change to a standard that no other scientific phenomenon is held to - that until there is 100% likelihood that global warming exists and is human-caused, anything less than that is "insufficient evidence."

[muon2]

There was also the rise of the "sound science movement" in the mid-2000s, largely bankrolled by big industrial firms funding "independent" think tanks and institutes to peddle spurious research.

Basically, they want to hold climate change to a standard that no other scientific phenomenon is held to - that until there is 100% likelihood that global warming exists and is human-caused, anything less than that is "insufficient evidence."

One problem is that evidence for global warming was always much weaker scientifically than climate change, and both are weaker on evidence than a statement that humans have significantly added to atmospheric CO2. Evidence is improving, but many leaped at early results to draw policy conclusions. Science works better when it is used to confirm that a particular policy will mitigate a problem rather than using it to claim that one policy should be elevated over others. In reality an economist might be as valuable as a climatologist to analyze some of the proposed policies.

[7,052,770]

Al Gore ran for president in 2000.  And we know his views on the environment:  That nothing matters except 2 things:  atmospheric CO2 and the global surface temperature anomaly.

The alarmists ruined environmentalism and made it completely unpalatable to the right and much of the center.

Now people who bring up serious environmental problems are labeled "deniers" unless they say it's happening or getting worse or will happen more because of "global warming".

Also keep in mind the planet was still warming in the '90s.  It stopped warming around 2000.

But because the alarmists can co-opt weather variations with myriad and unknown causes as part of their alarmist message, people are convinced global warming is still happening.

I'm sure folks like Harry keep their Gore books right next to the Bible on the coffee table.  BELIEVE!  HAVE FAITH!  APPEAL TO AUTHORITY AND CONSENSUS!  RELY ON MODELS AND MODELED "DATA", NOT OBSERVATIONS!  DO NOT QUESTION.

Are you talking about Harry Reid or have I gotten inside your head that much? You can hardly post on this issue without throwing my name out there, as if I'm some kind of ringleader...

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

What caused this?

Republicans swung far to the right since then, especially with the two Texas oilmen we had as President and VP.

[Ban my account ffs!]

There was also the rise of the "sound science movement" in the mid-2000s, largely bankrolled by big industrial firms funding "independent" think tanks and institutes to peddle spurious research.

Basically, they want to hold climate change to a standard that no other scientific phenomenon is held to - that until there is 100% likelihood that global warming exists and is human-caused, anything less than that is "insufficient evidence."

Hardly the case at all.  I'd like to see climate change held to the same standards as other, more established, branches of science.

Every time a weather event occurs, you have reporters, John Q. Public, and "climate scientists" trotted out to pin that particular event on global warming.

These are the climate scientists people like Jfern and Harry cite to back up their views on climate change.

But every time, months later, a quiet press release by the appropriate government agency, which will have analyzed the weather event much more thoroughly, inevitably comes out and says "climate change had nothing to do with that event."  And then lest the alarmists literally flip their sh**t, they have to finish it off with "but that doesn't mean these things won't happen much more often and be much worse in the future 'as temperatures rise'".

But temperatures aren't rising.  They haven't risen since before some posters on this forum were born.  That is to say:  There are more and more posters on this forum every day who have never experienced global warming in their lifetimes.

The walkback on the alarmist message is occurring in the scientific community and many scientists who not so long ago parroted the alarmist message that warming would be catastrophic without drastic action NOW, are now quite reluctant to make further comments on the issue.

Interestingly, since the alarmists have become unhinged and decoupled from the science, a large amount of new published work on actual climate science (not the impacts of unrealistic amounts of warming) is being done by these "deniers".

What have they found?

Climate sensitivity... that is, the amount the planet would warm from a doubling of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere all other things being equal, is somewhere between 1-2*C with a likelihood around 1.5C.

Richard Lindzen (maligned as a stupid denier by non-climate scientists like Dana Nuccitelli et al) predicts that future warming due to carbon dioxide will be negligible.  Perhaps up to 0.5C.

This is because we've already baked in the majority of the warming that can occur from further increases in CO2.  Once we start getting beyond 600ppm in the atmosphere, no further warming will occur.  This is because the ability of CO2 to keep re-reflecting heat back to the surface becomes saturated.  It's all "used up" as it were... so even if you add more CO2, the amount of reflected heat will not increase.  This is difficult for alarmists to wrap their head around and they drum up fear and alarm in the masses by carefully omitting this.  They are perfectly content in having the masses believe that the relationship between CO2 and warming is linear, rather than logarithmic.

But Lindzen posits that not only have we used up 90% of Co2's ability to warm our atmosphere with the amount already in the air... but that the ultimate amount the planet warms from a doubling of CO2 is actually less than the 1.5*C that we would see if all other things are equal... because all other things are not equal.

With longer records now of weather balloons and satellites which measure temperatures, humidity, etc throughout the atmosphere rather than just at the surface, has found a pretty good correlation between decreasing tropospheric humidity above the surface and increased CO2.

The atmosphere is responding immediately by lowering humidity in the troposphere, thus reducing the warming since water vapor is by far the most important greenhouse gas.

This is achieved through increased global thunderstorm activity and convection.  Thunderstorms, namely in the tropics, have increased in frequency in correlation to increasing CO2 (interestingly, this actually follows CO2 better than global temperatures at the surface, which show 30 year periods of warming and cooling due to ocean changes).

In summary:  The entire premise the alarmists build their alarm on; namely, that CO2 doubling will cause 3*C of warming without even taking into account a massive increase in water vapor that could send warming up to 5-7*C... is not backed up by observations.  What we are actually observing is a warming that is not only manageable, but will likely benefit humanity because there will be increased greening in northern latitudes while, with proper land management, deserts could become more suitable for plantlife because of all the CO2 we pumped into the atmosphere.

It is accepted science that plants use water much more efficiently as you increase CO2 because the tiny openings on the leaves of plants that take in CO2 also release water vapor into the air... which must be replaced by water in the ground.  But because the openings shrink as CO2 becomes more prevalent, less water is lost.

A greener, warmer, better fed world... not a catastrophe.

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

There was also the rise of the "sound science movement" in the mid-2000s, largely bankrolled by big industrial firms funding "independent" think tanks and institutes to peddle spurious research.

Basically, they want to hold climate change to a standard that no other scientific phenomenon is held to - that until there is 100% likelihood that global warming exists and is human-caused, anything less than that is "insufficient evidence."

Hardly the case at all.  I'd like to see climate change held to the same standards as other, more established, branches of science.

Every time a weather event occurs, you have reporters, John Q. Public, and "climate scientists" trotted out to pin that particular event on global warming.

These are the climate scientists people like Jfern and Harry cite to back up their views on climate change.

LOL, of course I know the difference between a local weather event and global climate change. Globally, January 2014 was the 4th warmest January on record despite some interesting weather in the eastern USA.

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But it's also a mistake to say that a weather event and climate change are completely unrelated. It's really a can't prove or disprove situation.

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I bet you that at least 9 of the 10 warmest years on record are in everyone on the forum's lifetime (2002 and later). And I personally remember hearing of global warming over a decade before any of the 10 warmest years on record.

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Maybe some have been too alarmist, just like some have been deniers. Throw out the most extreme 3% on each end.

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LOL, more like the sane deniers became "alarmists", like Richard Muller.

[Ban my account ffs!]

January 2014 was the 4th warmest on record.  But the globe cooled 0.45C relative to average between January and February.  That kind of month to month swing is actually pretty remarkable.  What it suggests was that January was an anomaly.  And when you consider that most of the warmth that made January so "hot" was located where we don't have any surface stations, it actually becomes suspect.  In any case, January was a warm month globally.

  GISS doesn't use satellite data because James Hansen is an alarmist and satellite temps didn't support his belief that warming was dramatic.. so he removed it from the GISS series.  Instead, he gets out his red and brown marker (not anymore since he left to be a full time activist.. that should tell you something)... and fills in the Arctic with it to push the global temp up.  That's why GISS started to diverge from the other datasets after 2000.  He was fudging in warming that didn't actually occur as per the other datasets or satellite data.



Jfern:  Co2 emissions absolutely exploded after 2000... growing at a rate faster than any other time in human history.

The planet warmed 0.00C during that time.

It's not a matter of 3% on each side.  It's a matter of a hypothesis being proven wrong by observational data... and a desperate attempt by some to fit the data to the theory rather than changing the hypothesis to fit the observations.

[Ban my account ffs!]

Perhaps you can also answer this:  Why doesn't the global temperature record follow that CO2 line?  It follows it in the models... but not in reality.  What gives?

Notice that there was significant warming from 1979-1998 in the graphs above... when CO2 emissions grew moderately... then warming stopped after 2000 when CO2 emissions took off.

[Starbucks Union Thug HokeyPuck]

Coincides with the environment becoming a "social issue".  Today's GOP voters don't like being side by side with us p**** tree-huggers on anything.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The surprising part is that a majority ever favoured 'the environment' over 'economic growth'.