Wake Up People and Smell the Taxes
Both parties are pretending to ask for different things when in reality both are looking to raise taxes on the only real source of income – the middle class. These are the people who actually work and create wealth. The entire Plan A, Plan B, trying to make a deal is all an act to make us think they are doing something. My prediction is the tax cuts will expire and both parties will blame the other for letting it happen. - The Daily PaulAP-GfK Poll: Science doubters say world is warming
December 14, 2012AP - Nearly 4 out of 5 Americans now think temperatures are rising and that global warming will be a serious problem for the United States if nothing is done about it, a new Associated Press-GfK poll finds.
Belief and worry about climate change are inching up among Americans in general, but concern is growing faster among people who don't often trust scientists on the environment. In follow-up interviews, some of those doubters said they believe their own eyes as they've watched thermometers rise, New York City subway tunnels flood, polar ice melt and Midwestern farm fields dry up.
Overall, 78 percent of those surveyed said they thought temperatures were rising and 80 percent called it a serious problem. That's up slightly from 2009, when 75 percent thought global warming was occurring and just 73 percent thought it was a serious problem. In general, U.S. belief in global warming, according to AP-GfK and other polls, has fluctuated over the years but has stayed between about 70 and 85 percent.
The biggest change in the polling is among people who trust scientists only a little or not at all. About 1 in 3 of the people surveyed fell into that category.
Within that highly skeptical group, 61 percent now say temperatures have been rising over the past 100 years. That's a substantial increase from 2009, when the AP-GfK poll found that only 47 percent of those with little or no trust in scientists believed the world was getting warmer.
This is an important development
because, often in the past, opinion about climate change doesn't move
much in core groups — like those who deny it exists and those who firmly
believe it's an alarming problem, said Jon Krosnick,
a Stanford University social psychologist and pollster. Krosnick, who
consulted with The Associated Press on the poll questions, said the
changes the poll shows aren't in the hard-core "anti-warming" deniers,
but in the next group, who had serious doubts.
"They don't believe what the scientists say, they believe what the thermometers say," Krosnick said. "Events are helping these people see what scientists thought they had been seeing all along."Phil Adams, a retired freelance photographer from Washington, N.C., said he was "fairly cynical" about scientists and their theories. But he believes very much in climate change because of what he's seen with his own eyes.
"Having lived for 67 years, we consistently see more and more changes based upon the fact that the weather is warmer," he said. "The seasons are more severe. The climate is definitely getting warmer."More than half, 57 percent, of those surveyed thought the U.S. government should do a great deal or quite a bit about global warming, up from 52 percent three years earlier.
"Storms seem to be more severe," he added. Nearly half, 49 percent, of those surveyed called global warming not just serious but "very serious," up from 42 percent in 2009.
But only 45 percent of those surveyed think President Barack Obama will take major action to fight climate change in his second term, slightly more than the 41 percent who don't think he will act.
Overall, the 78 percent who think temperatures are rising is not the highest percentage of Americans who have believed in climate change, according to AP polling. In 2006, less than a year after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, 85 percent thought temperatures were rising. The lowest point in the past 15 years for belief in warming was in December 2009, after some snowy winters and in the middle of an uproar about climate scientists' emails that later independent investigations found showed no manipulation of data.
Broken down by political party, 83 percent of Democrats and 70 percent of Republicans say the world is getting warmer. And 77 percent of independents say temperatures are rising. Among scientists who write about the issue in peer-reviewed literature, the belief in global warming is about 97 percent, according to a 2010 scientific study.
The AP-GfK poll was conducted Nov. 29-Dec. 3 by GfK Roper Public Affairs and Corporate Communications. It involved landline and cellphone interviews with 1,002 adults nationwide. Results for the full sample have a margin of error of plus or minus 3.9 percentage points; the margin of error is larger for subgroups.
The latest AP-GfK poll jibes with other surveys and more in-depth research on global warming, said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of Yale University's Project on Climate Change Communication. He took no part in the poll.
When climate change belief was at its lowest, concerns about the economy were heightened and the country had gone through some incredible snowstorms and that may have chipped away at some belief in global warming, Leiserowitz said. Now the economy is better and the weather is warmer and worse in ways that seem easier to connect to climate change, he said.
"One extreme event after another after another," Leiserowitz said. "People have noticed. ... They're connecting the dots between climate change and this long bout of extreme weather themselves."Thomas Coffey, 77, of Houston, said you can't help but notice it.
"We use to have mild temperatures in the fall going into winter months. Now, we have summer temperatures going into winter," Coffey said. "The whole Earth is getting warmer and when it gets warmer, the ice cap is going to melt and the ocean is going to rise."He also said that's what he thinks is causing recent extreme weather.
Comments to this article at Yahoo!:"That's why you see New York and New Jersey," he said, referring to Superstorm Sandy and its devastation in late October. "When you have a flood like that, flooding tunnels like that. And look at how long the tunnel has been there."
When you CATCH the so called "emminent scientists" at the "emminent University" cooking the books to make their "scientific data" meet their Left Wing agenda, that is called a CLUE! East Anglia University in the UK ring a bell? Google: "global warming and NASA Terra satellites" and read the info.
Trying to link Climate change to humanity is like passing off hair growth cream on a bald baby and when the hair comes in in 6 months...viola...saying the hair regrowth cream worked. There isn't enough evidence to suggest man has anything but a remote connection to Climate Change....the system is to complex and diverse to come to any conclusion unless someone wants the conclusion. They have not even established whether or not if CO2 is a cause or an effect except "if it supports AGW, it must be so" kind of reasoning.
Whether or not the Earth is warming is not in question. The debate is whether humans have caused "global warming" or if it is part of a natural cycle.
FOLLOW THE MONEY TRAIL!
Not many people ever questioned the fact that it is actually getting warmer. The question has always been, and still is, exactly how much of the warming is due to manmade influence, and what the actual cost and effect of the proposed "fixes" will be. Neither of those has actually been answered yet.
There has always been global warming (or cooling).
NEWS FLASH: The ice has been melting for a least a thousand years!! If it hadn't melted, we'd only have about half of north America and Canada wouldn't exist!!
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