Why we're doomed

In a poll last month that asked Americans to rate 20 issues as top priorities, global warming came in dead last (at 30%), behind such pressing concerns as deficit reduction (53%) and moral decline (45%).  Hangnail removal wasn't included in the list, but it looks like it would have handily beaten planetary catastrophe.

And in a new poll focusing exclusively on the environment, global warming still came in dead last; far more people are concerned about pollution of drinking water (84%) and soil contamination (80%) than they are about the transformation of the planetary environment to something radically different from that in which human life evolved (60%).  The poll report notes: "Not only does global warming rank last on the basis of the total percentage concerned either a great deal or a fair amount, but it is the only issue for which public concern dropped significantly in the past year."

The poll also shows that the percentage of Americans who think the threat of global warming is exaggerated is at record levels:

As recently as 2006, significantly more Americans thought the news underestimated the seriousness of global warming than said it exaggerated it, 38% vs. 30%. Now, according to Gallup's 2009 Environment survey, more Americans say the problem is exaggerated rather than underestimated, 41% vs. 28%.

Compare this with the reality that nearly every official forecast of the effects of global warming has been exceedingly cautious (mainly thanks to heavy political pressure from the world's largest per capita carbon emitter), and the observed effects are regularly exceeding those estimates.  It just doesn't get any better, does it?

There's at least one bright ray in the gloom, though: puppies are still cute!

[ Previous trip to the land of poll-driven despair here. ]

Comments

[Thomas Daulton]

You missed your usual opportunity to point out that the recent decline in interest in Global Warming might be because a Democrat is in the White House. As in, people who are casually concerned about the environment, but not truly up on the facts, are thinking: "OK, we put Obama in the White House, he'll come up with a brilliant plan to take care of all that difficult esoteric international stuff," while things like drinking water and soil contamination really hit home in a concrete way.

Meanwhile, the denial factory is still churning out product overtime, whereas politico Democrats (as distinct from grassroots environmentalists) are still at the stage of "somebody oughtta do something about that sometime, hey I know, we'll all have cool Hydrogen cars someday in the future". So the net effect is, people are losing what little focus they had on this issue.

[John Caruso]

You're right that there are partisan effects on global warming, but I'm not sure if Obamaphilia has much to do with these results, given the content of the polls. They were asking about prioritization of issues—and though I know there are plenty of Democrats who think Obama will take steps to address the problem, I don't know that that would change their prioritization of it.

Thanks for prompting me to take a closer look, though, since I hadn't noticed that "moral breakdown" was rated higher than global warming by both Republicans and Democrats. Wonderful.

[SteveB]

I'm an admirer of the social-movement theorist Bill Moyer who claimed that all social movements, even the successful ones, go through a phase that he called "perception of failure", where activists feel that the movement is losing momentum, public interest is slipping away, and all before any real changes have been made. I don't know if that's going on here, but it's something to think about.

Also, I wonder if "Green Marketing" has had an effect on the number of people who believe warnings of climate change have been "exaggerated." Once the capitalists figured out that you could make a buck off of people's concerns about climate change, it was inevitable that we'd get flooded with commercial "save the planet" hype, and that this would act to discredit serious warnings about climate change.

[Thomas Daulton]

Credit where due, those are intelligent comments, SteveB, probably very applicable.

[John Caruso]

I'd agree that the conversion of "green" from a philosophy into a marketing strategy hasn't helped. And neither have things like this.