In this Aug. 16, 2005 file photo, an iceberg melts in Kulusuk, Greenland near the arctic circle. By John McConnico, AP
By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY
"If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you," then, with apologies to Kipling, you might not be a climate scientist.
Well-publicized troubles have mounted for those forecasting global warming. First, there was last year's release of hacked e-mails from the United Kingdom's University of East Anglia, showing some climate scientists really dislike their critics (investigations are still ongoing). Then there was the recent discovery of a botched prediction that all Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 in one of the Nobel-Prize-winning 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. Instead, the glaciers are only shrinking about as much as glaciers everywhere, twice as fast as they did 40 years ago, suggest results from NASA's GRACE gravity-measuring orbiter.
The recent controversies "have really shaken the confidence of the public in the conduct of science," according to atmospheric scientist Ralph Cicerone, head of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Cicerone was speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting last month on a panel calling for more communication and release of data to rebuild lost trust for scientists. IPCC chiefs have made similar calls in the handling of their reports.
Scientists see reason for worry in polls like one released in December by Fox News that found 23% of respondents saw global warming as "not a problem," up from 12% in 2005. Also at the AAAS meeting, Yale, American University and George Mason University released a survey of 978 people challenging the notion that people 18 to 35 were any more engaged than their elders on climate change. Statistically, 44% in that age range — matching the national average — found global warming as either "not too important" or "not at all important," even though they grew up in an era when climate scientists had found it very likely that temperatures had increased over the last century due to fossil fuel emissions of greenhouse gases.
But what "if" (apologies to Kipling again) scientists are misreading those poll results and conflating them with news coverage of the recent public-relations black eyes from e-mails and the glacier mistake? What's really happening, suggests polling expert Jon Krosnick of Stanford University, is "scientists are over-reacting. It's another funny instance of scientists ignoring science."
Krosnick and his colleagues argue that polling suggesting less interest in fixing climate change might indicate the public has its mind on more immediate problems in the midst of a global economic downturn, with the U.S. unemployment rate stuck at 9.7%. The AAAS-released survey of young people, for example, finds that 82% of them trust scientists for information on global warming and the national average is 74%.
"Very few professions enjoy the level of confidence from the public that scientists do, and those numbers haven't changed much in a decade," he says. "We don't see a lot of evidence that the general public in the United States is picking up on the (University of East Anglia) e-mails. It's too inside baseball."
So to try to see what is happening, Krosnick and colleagues tried a new approach to a standard polling question, "What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?" In a September survey of 906 adults, they asked the question in different ways:
•When asked, without being given any examples of problems, 0% mentioned global warming, but 52% mentioned jobs or the economy.
•When asked — with problems such as stopping crime, terrorism or global warming mentioned — 6% selected the climate concern, and 34% mentioned jobs or the economy.
•When asked, "What do you think will be the most important problem facing the world in the future?" global warming moved to 9%, with 24% saying jobs or the economy.
•And when asked, "What do you think will be the most serious problem facing the world in the future if nothing is done to stop it?" global warming moved to 15%, with jobs or the economy falling to 13%.
In a follow-up December Associated Press/Stanford University poll of 1,005 adults, they found simply asking the last question bumped global warming up to 12% of the responses, up from 1% for problems today, effectively a statistical tie with the September poll.
It could just be that people think that global warming is a problem the government will solve in the future, Krosnick suggests, so today they are worried about their jobs instead. The part of the population already deeply opposed to climate change science likely has been inflamed further by the recent controversies, he adds, but that may be about as far as it goes. "It is certainly possible that public confidence in climate scientists has declined since our last survey in December, but it's not likely, since little time has passed, and there has been no huge news of huge dissemination of the old news."
American University's Matthew Nisbet, part of the team behind the youth attitudes poll, says that even if polling doesn't show the brouhaha about the IPCC glaciers affecting the general public, there is the chance that it could affect "elite" opinion-makers and then trickle down to the public. "Elected officials are most inclined to react to and respond to what Americans believe are the pressing problems today not in the future, since these are the priorities they are most likely to be evaluated on in the next election," he adds.
One example came Thursday, when Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D.- W. Va., rolled out legislation to bar the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gas emissions from power plants burning West Virginia's coal. Rockefeller didn't cite new doubts about climate science, notes Daniel Lashof of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, but jobs. "At a time when so many people are hurting, we need to put decisions about clean coal and our energy future into the hands of the people and their elected representatives, not a federal environmental agency," Rockefeller said in a statement.
"No senator I've spoken to has mentioned the e-mails in their thinking about climate," Lashof says. "The focus is much more on the economy, national security, clean energy jobs."
One Senator who has complained loudly is Sen. James Inhofe, R.-Okla., who in 2003 famously called climate change a "hoax." But Inhofe has already convinced the people he is going to convince, Krosnick says. "Public opinion changes when leaders who previously held one opinion, suddenly switch."
Arguments about science do obscure news and television discussions over steps to take in dealing with climate, from investing in nuclear power to regulating coal plants, Lashof adds.
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