Climate Change Advocates More Numerous Than Gun Rights, Pro-Choice/Life, Pro/Anti-Immigration Activists

I'm sure you've seen denier trolls like Anthony Watts and Bjørn Lomborg try to pretend the public doesn't care about climate change. Nothing could be farther from the truth, according to a report from a couple years back by the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies entitled Global Warming's Six Americas. As people flood into the voting booths tonight across the US, often to decide very tight races, I think it's a brilliant time to remind everyone how out of touch with, not only the science, but the pulse of the nation the ignorant deniosphere is.

"And the first of those [groups of Americans we researched] is what we call 'the alarmed.' It's about 18% of the public. Uh, these are people who, uh, are absolutely convinced climate change is happening, it's human-caused, it's a very serious threat, it's happening now. They're already taking action in their own lives to try to reduce their own carbon footprint, and they're really hungry to know what's the next thing I can do. This has been called, in political science terms, an issue public. This is the part of the public that is the most mobilized, and most engaged with this issue. And that's actually a very large issue public, compared to other issue publics, like, say, on, on gun rights, or pro-choice, or pro-life, or anti-immigration, or pro-immigration. I mean, those are all different kinds of issue publics out there that agitate or advocate for particular policies. Um, the climate change issue public is actually larger than most of those other ones."

- Anthony Leiserowitz, Yale University

If nothing else, the impressive turnout at the recent climate change march proves Leiserowitz is right, and clueless deniers are miserably and laughably lost once again.

Have a watch, and then make sure you run out to the polls tonight, if you haven't already. Your vote could be the difference between inaction and the adoption of meaningful policy on an issue upwards of 50-60 million Americans care deeply about, and many millions more are concerned about!

Oh, Hank, You Commie You

"At the end of the day, the only way we are going to solve the climate challenge and the environmental challenge is to develop and deploy, in-scale, on a cost-effective basis, new technologies."

- Henry Paulson

A couple weeks ago, I made mention of a number of influential politicians, bureaucrats, and financial sector luminaries participating in the release of a bipartisan report on the economic risks of climate change.

One of them, Henry Paulson, the 74th United States Secretary of the Treasury under George W. Bush, has decided to take things a step further and launch an initiative to fund research and push for more aggressive action on reversing global warming.

Careful, Hank. You've seen how the screwball denial machine has tried to disparage another vocal advocate of climate science from across the political aisle, I'm sure.

And I really hope Steven Goddard is sitting down, because Paulson is starting this program in — dun, dun, ddddduuuuuuuunnnnnnn — China.



This video made me realize there's a very, very important point that I don't quite drive home hard enough here at this blog: we need to find ways to reverse man-made climate change while preserving our modern way of life. The idea is NOT for everyone to move back into caves, and grunt, "Ugh, job well done, Grog." The idea is exactly what Paulson intends with this initiative: get our best and brightest to innovate our way out of this mess of our own making. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that that innovation needs to not only prevent a return to the Dark Ages, but also to advance our technology and society as well and propel us into the future. It needs to align our means of powering our civilization with other ambitious human goals.

Scientists and Advocacy, a Sticky Situation?

"It's important for people who know things not to cede the public sphere to people who don't know things."

-Gavin Schmidt

This is a talk given last year by Gavin Schmidt at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting about how scientific expertise and values should inform public awareness. Schmidt, if you don't know, was recently hired to head NASA GISS, a position previously held by James Hansen. He is a climate modeler, and this previous post may be a good introduction to him and his research, if you've never heard of him before.

Schmidt, as the quote above implies, argues in this video that advocacy, which often has the same effect on scientists that a cross does on a vampire, is not only important, but unavoidable. He further claims that it would be foolish for researchers to not advocate for science itself at a minimum, and that even staunch advocacy opponents inevitably end up promoting their own field and/or their own findings, whether or not they are willing to admit what these actions amount to. If they want continued funding, they must advocate to some degree. We're all human; we all have to go to the mat for ourselves at some point. And scientists are no different.

Schmidt does, however, strongly warn against uninformed or dishonest advocacy, declaring that your results represent a consensus in your field, and assuming that people who disagree with your personal policy choices are uninformed idiots who ignore the science. It's a scientist attempting to educate and persuade other scientists. It's like getting a peek inside the lab, or at least the break room down the hall, and it's good, heady stuff. Have a watch.



I want to follow up on Schmidt's point that people can have very different values and reach very different policy conclusions while accepting the same scientific results with an opinion piece from his GISS predecessor. Hansen advocates very strongly for nuclear power in this video. Notice how he admits that his affinity for the power generation technology is not necessarily shared by post-Fukushima governments and environmentalists who believe, like him, that something must be done to curb our emissions. People who believe in the science of human-caused climate change can and will advocate for different solutions. It's all part of healthy public discourse, not something to be avoided like the plague.