Public Cooling on Global Warming

Although Barack Obama's incoming administration has signalled a sense of urgency about dealing with global warming, public opinion is starting to move in the other direction, according to a new survey by the Rasmussen polling agency. "Forty-four percent (44%) of U.S. voters now say long-term planetary trends are the cause of global warming, compared to 41% who blame it on human activity," they report. And although 64% of voters now regard global warming as at least a somewhat serious problem, they rank it bottom on the list of 20 issues that the survey asked about, including the economy, jobs, terrorism, Social Security, education, energy, Medicare, health care and deficit reduction. The decline in public concern is occurring despite the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which reported it was "very likely" that human greenhouse gas emissions were causing global warming, and despite recent research showing that 2008 was the ninth warmest year since reliable measurements were first taken in 1880. One of the reasons for declining public concern, according to Kevin Grandia, is that "the majority of the mainstream media is unwilling to cover the nonsensical junk science of the right-wing think tanks and their cadre of scientists for hire. With this the case, the Internet is exploding with such information. And at the same time that we're seeing significantly more of this misinformation being spread about global warming online, we're also seeing more people than ever using the Internet as their main source of news and information."