On first glance, the numbers from the Brookings Institute's new study on belief in global warming shows a country waking up out of a Dark Ages of scientific incredulity: belief in global warming is rising, quickly and appreciably, from its 2010 low (man that year sucked).
Belief in the phenomenon had been falling rapidly from what Kevin Drum called its "post-Inconvenient Truth peak." In 2008, 72% of respondents believed in global warming, while only 17% did not. But just two years later, those numbers had fallen to 52/36. The numbers are polarizing again, with 65% now believing in global warming and 24% objecting:
[Graph via Mother Jones]
No one will be suprised at party correlation: 42% of Republicans believed in global warming one year ago, 42% do so now, while Democrats increased in belief by eight percentage points, from 73 to 81.
Instead, the statistical increase in aggregate belief is due almost entirely to independents, whose belief in the phenomenon has gone up 20 percentage points, 52 to 72, in the past two years. You will know independent voters as those asswads who are always up for grabs in important elections, because apparently political morality is outcome-based.
So what's pushing these indys into believing in global warming? The evidence in favor of man-made climate change simply became overwhelming, right?
Nope:
The growth in the percentage of Americans who see evidence of global warming. appears to be related to individual perceptions of weather conditions and events. The NSAPOCC has regularly included a question that asks respondents to rate the effect that mild winters in their areas have on their view that global warming is occurring. During the cold and snowy winters of 2010 and 2011 the percentage of respondents who indicated that their experiences with milder winters had a very large effect on their views about global warming was relatively low with 19 percent and 17 percent of respondents selecting this response. Conversely, about twice as many respondents in the latest NSAPOCC reported that the mild winter had a large effect on their view that planetary temperatures are rising.
[...] The effect of the milder winter conditions were also evident in many of the openended comments that respondents provided to the question regarding the primary factor behind their belief that global warming was occurring. For example, a middle-aged male from Connecticut stated that “there was no winter this year,” and a young woman in Maryland noted that “the seasons are abnormal with no snow and cold.”
When asked to provide the key factor behind her view that global warming was occurring a middle-aged woman in Wisconsin said that her “garden was already growing in March.”
(For your daily dose of ignorance porn, read the corresponding paragraph on why people don't believe in global warming. There's Bibles.)
So in other words, belief in global warming rose since last spring because of a mild winter (the same mild winter that caused the cock-tease inflation in the employment rate). Sure enough, 2010 and 2011 were bad winters (Snowmageddon!), and sure enough, belief in global warming from those years sunk to modern lows. In short, belief in global warming correlates exactly to the severity of the winter preceding the poll. For contrast's sake, only 14% of respondents said scientific research had an impact their change in opinion:
[Graph via Mother Jones]
There's something almost admirable in the extent to which respondents of this poll don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. At the same time, Jesus Christ on sale, people! Global warming is a decades-long phenomenon in the making, one that is affecting long range shifts in temperature and causing erratic weather patterns. You can't just stick your head out your window and go, "It's hot, global warming!" A winter with heavy snowfall, like 2010 dropped belief in in the phenomenon, especially among independents, who were close to flipping on the issue, despite the fact that Snowmageddon's unprecedented snowfall was in fact an example of global warming.
In short, independent voters approach science the way they approach voting. Just as we all get the sense that indys open their wallet before going into the voting booth and vote on how much money is in there ( > $20 incumbent, < $20 vote the bums out), they approach long-range human effects on the environment by what temperature Siri tells them it is.
Here's Drum's conclusion:
Liberals need to stop nattering on about the latest research. It may gall us to do it, but anecdotal evidence (mild winters, big hurricanes, wildfires, etc.) is probably our best bet. We should milk it for everything it's worth.
He's right, I guess (though the "nattering on about the latest research" part is a li'l hard to swallow). If next winter is cold, belief in global warming will go right back down, research or no research. This entire issue of the long term solvency of our planet will be decided on a season-by-season basis. And Democrats should just go around and hand independent voters $20 bills on election day, and they'll be voted in by a landslide.
[Problems with this post:
a) the Brookings Institute didn't provide breakdown data that I can see, which means it's impossible to tell if independents were in fact changing their minds due to anecdotal evidence. But they were far away the lion's share of the increase in belief, and anecdotal evidence was the lion's share of the increase in reasons, so I assumed a correlation, and extrapolated a causation. Statistics!
b) I got issues with the Brookings Institute's methodology. A lot of their categories are not exclusive or even equitable. For instance, one of your choices for believing in global warming is "glaciers melting" and another is "scientific research." One of those is a cause of global warming, and one of those is an indication of it. Which contributes more to your belief? What if you believe the scientific research that proves the glaciers are melting?]
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