> This is a subtle point; not as easily grasped as climate change
> veterans (and gung ho newcomers) typically suppose. A related issue
> is that we're talking about a planet wide event which will manifest in
> different ways in different locales. In Tasmania, you're seeing
> decreased rainfall. Armed with years of area experience and the
> anthropomorphic climate change POV, you reach logical conclusions.
> Others, living on a different spot on the planet and seeing different
> effects (and not sharing our opinions regarding climate) reach
> different conclusions.
While the diffused and slow effects of the problem are a barrier to accepting it, I'm not so sure that this quite explains the gap shown in the thread's original post.
Consider ozone depletion. The cause-effect is, in its full detail, looks only less complicated than climate insofar a billion is less than a trillion. But it still can be boiled down to "we need to stop using these chemicals or we're going to get hit with more UV radiation". Nobody much north of Sydney could reasonably claim to have been affected by it, but enough people in the right places took it seriously to make the necessary changes. Granted that that the remedy means banning relatively replaceable chemicals, as opposed to the very stuff of combustion. The point is that it took something less than manifest everyday evidence to spur effective action, and the science is about as rock-solid as a couple of decades can make it.
And yet you can still hear about ozone depletion and the banning of those chemicals as a case of the eco-freaks running rampant. I would be curious if any polling has been done recently about public perception of the subject, and how different they would be from those of the climate problem. It hasn't been long since I've heard the sobriquet "Ozone Al", like that's supposed to be some kind of dig.
Recall my intelligent and otherwise informed libertarian coworker who shook his head, in the late-mid 90's, at the banning of all those useful chemicals over what he imagined to be an unsettled issue. I recently saw another example of this sort of collision. A couple of officemates and I and recently took a prospective oceanography grad student out to lunch. One of my officemates is what I've thought of as among the last sane Republicans, somebody I can sometimes talk down out of the tree (as I did regarding the balance of responsibility of mortgage holders and their creditors). Normally the only sign of how he swings is his steady diet of O'Reilly.
At lunch, our guest, something of an outsider to the field, asked if what we do goes into the global warming issue, and we kind of shuffled and said not directly (most of what we work on is more short-term dynamics, like the weather). He seemed to be trying to get an opinion out of us, and as I recall my officemate muttered and chuckled something about Nancy Pelosi. Our guest, puzzled, said, "you mean Al Gore?" I was too startled for any effective response and punted to the subject to the geo department, which is far more involved that we are. My officemate shrugged and said something like "yeah, for *paleo*oceanography", and later muttered something about "getting grants".
Maybe it's my defensiveness, and maybe I read too much into it -- I've been wondering about how to approach my officemate for a clarification. But it seemed like he just bounced over a bunch of bullet points that needed no explanation or defense: Democrats, unpredictability, grant whoring. He's perfectly intelligent and has better resources than 99% of the population to understand what's going on. His adviser takes the subject very seriously. He should know from direct experience that nobody gets rich off of NSF grants (at least in this field), and you don't get funding from them for demonstrating what everybody already thinks is true.
Popular perceptions about the climate issue in the US aren't quite the outlier they are with evolution, but as I recall not many other industrialized countries have been nearly as steadfast in their attachment to Business As Usual. The complexity of the subject and its effects don't adequately explain this. The US has far more spectacular events that have been attributed erroneously or otherwise to climate change than say, Germany, yet Germans are comparatively nuts for this stuff, both at a popular and policy level.
Also, the division along party lines in the US on the subject is stark, as I recall. At the representative level I think the correlation is close to one. That cries out for explanation.
I've sometimes wondered what people will think of it all in a couple decades, when the effects are supposed to become too stark to ignore for too many people. I suspect Kerry Emanuel provides a clue in his article in the Boston Review, now in book form ("What We Know About Climate Change"). After a lucid and level-headed explanation of the problem and the evidence for it, he moves on to the political and policy realms. The items that stood out for me were:
* suggesting that all this could have been avoided with nuclear power, if the environmentalists hadn't prevented that (as if they have a stranglehold on energy policy, and ignoring the financial black hole nuclear turned out to be)
* noting that arch-liberal Ted Kennedy has prevented a wind farm off the coast of Cape Cod (without noting that his wealthy and presumably not particularly left-wing neighbors are doing the same, seeming to suggest this is a peculiarly liberal stance)
* vaguely suggesting it's scientists' fault for nobody taking them seriously on account of their political tropisms.
Perhaps we're seeing the ground laid for a future Dolchstosslegende.
-- Andy