Front Cover News: Global Warming Movement Cooling? Yes

The Global Warming movement is cooling. The cover story, on USA Today March 11, 2010, is chillingly accurate to its description of a climate change skepticism and doubt. A US national poll of 1,000 likely voters revealed that 35% of respondents believed global warming was caused by humans (Rasmussen Reports, 2010); in April 2008 the percentage was 47%. This drop in climate change confidence comes at a time immediately following Climategate and an admitted error of the IPCC Report, which inaccurately stated the Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035. The Himalayan incident the was most damaging of the two to climate change credibility. Michael Mann, whose scientific research was featured in the the Nobel Prize winning report as well as Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth, says of the error: "I look at it like this: Let's say that you're in your car, you open the owner's manual, and you discover a typo on page 225. Does that mean you stop driving the car? Of course not. Those are the kind of error we're talking about here. Nothing has fundamentally changed." To compare, the IPCC report is several thousand pages long; typo in this climate change manual is apparently enough to forsake an entire planet.

Proud Skeptics: "We've all been kind of giggling as we watch this thing fall apart," says Leighton Steward of the once "invincible" climate change movement. Steward is a geologist and global warming skeptic. A more prominent skeptic is Senator James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, that has a website listing 700 scientist who disagree with the IPCC report. Those scientists can mostly agree that the world is warming, but place the blame on solar flares or ocean temperatures instead of carbon emissions. Inhofe has also recently used the heavy snowstorms in the US Northeast to add fuel against climate change, despite NASA's widely published finding that the past decade was the warmest in man's recorded history.

An unfair fight: Tom Wirth, former senator and now president of United Nations Foundation defends the IPCC, which he says has a small budget of $3 Million and a large portion of the over 3000 scientists involved were volunteers. Wirth also points out that "K Street (Washington) PR firms... are hired to examine every (detail) of the IPCC report and find problems and then get them out into the public domain... It's not a fair fight, the IPCC is just a tiny secretariat next to this giant denier machine."

The consequences of the Denier Machine: when public opinion and perception shifts, so does the political agenda. With lessening concern over climate change and growing opposition to its solutions to replace fossil fuels the consequences have been hard hits. John Kerry, Senator of Massachusetts, "has set aside legislation that would limit greenhouse gas emissions from factors and other business nationwide." The USA may "now pursue a more narrow strategy, State Department climate change envoy Todd Stern said last month. He said future talks might be limited to a smaller group of major polluters such as the USA and China - and leave out small countries that blocked a deal at Copenhagen, such as Sudan. More problems are piling up for the upcoming COP16.

Photo Credit: Truthout.org