The American 'allergy' to global warming: Why? (it's that "faith" thing)

"The desire to disbelieve deepens as the scale of the threat grows," concludes economist-ethicist Clive Hamilton.

He and others who track what they call "denialism" find that its nature is changing in America, last redoubt of climate naysayers. It has taken on a more partisan, ideological tone. Polls find a widening Republican-Democrat gap on climate. Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry even accuses climate scientists of lying for money. Global warming looms as a debatable question in yet another U.S. election campaign.

From his big-windowed office overlooking the wooded campus of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., Broecker has observed this deepening of the desire to disbelieve.

"The opposition by the Republicans has gotten stronger and stronger," the 79-year-old "grandfather of climate science" said in an interview. "But, of course, the push by the Democrats has become stronger and stronger, and as it has become a more important issue, it has become more polarized."

The solution: "Eventually it'll become damned clear that the Earth is warming and the warming is beyond anything we have experienced in millions of years, and people will have to admit..." He stopped and laughed.

The basic physics of anthropogenic — manmade — global warming has been clear for more than a century, since researchers proved that carbon dioxide traps heat. Others later showed CO2 was building up in the atmosphere from the burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels.
"As a physicist, putting CO2 into the air is good enough for me. It's the physics that convinces me," said veteran Cambridge University researcher Liz Morris.
Or as Al Gore put it, it's "high school physics." Well, let me tell you an experience I had in high school physics.
It's quite natural for pedagogues to want to "relate" to jocks, so I understood exactly why the HS physics book addressed the topic of why the spin of a curve ball causes the path of the ball to curve. It's quite simple, you see: the spin of the ball causes the relative velocity of the ball in the air to be be higher on the advancing side of the spin and less on the retreating side of the spin. The Bernoulli Principle will tell you that the side with the higher relative velocity will have the lower pressure.
Viola! Except for the minor detail known as experience, a.k.a. "experiment." The jock who may not know anything about this Bernoulli guy has conducted the "experiment" of throwing a curve ball - and that "high school physics" explanation of the curve of the ball's path predicts the wrong direction for the "break" of the throw. Whatever causes the curve which the jock observes is not explained in "high school physics," and it overcomes whatever force the Bernoulli Principle predicts will be imposed on the ball.

But she said work must go on to refine climate data and computer climate models, "to convince the deeply reluctant organizers of this world." Weather stations then filled in the rest: Temperatures were rising.
Except when they aren't. Temperature measurements taken next to air conditioner exhausts are not representative of the climate.
We have seen those computer "models," and we aren't impressed by the obvious tendentiousness of some of the Hockey Stick humbug you are pleased to call "analysis." You can't explain the Little Ice Age or the prior Ice Ages - nor the "global warming" which followed each of them. Until you can do that, you are not in the hunt as far as convincing me that my exhaled breath is causing the rocks to melt.
(More on the curve ball: the phenomena of curve balls is seen very clearly when the ball is a light, flimsy beach ball. My wife was astonished to see the dramatic effect when I demonstrated it to her; she remarked that she had had the understanding that "science" said that curve balls were just an optical illusion. Extreme caution is the only logical approach when listening to people who are paid to talk and who have the opportunity to change the subject when their predictions don't pan out.)

It’s “green” everywhere you look, every day, the drumbeat of guilt, the fear — the need to instinctively *think* — Will this product or my behavior HURT the environment and destroy the world? Perhaps the need for “green” push back, like this article, signals that we have slowed their advance.

It is hard to be Pavlovian when you're too thirsty to drool. Things are tough out there and getting tougher for many, and eventually people will look at the critter of the week as food, not something to 'save'.

That change in perspective can snatch even the most feverent back from the abyss of cultural insanity.

Your Mexican neighbor is a “low information” voter. The Democrats love these people. They vote on the basis of an emotional pitch. This is why Chuckie Schumer is always inventing and repeating buzzwords and catch phrases. Same as other Democrats come up with buzzwords that are repeated endlessly. Like Obama always using the words “sustainable” and “unsustainable”. The low information voter is impressed and thinks “This Obama is a really smart guy just look at the words he has at his command”

All in a pitch to the low information voter

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