JOHN HOCKENBERRY: The message here is that man-made global climate change is a myth, a hoax. This conference is an annual pilgrimage for the key skeptics. We came here to understand how they have made their views a mainstream fact of American politics.
The Non-Issue of ‘Climategate’ and The Real Issue of Climate Change
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FRED SINGER, Founder, Science and Env. Policy Project: Climate, to me, has become a non-issue. It's a phantom issue. There's nothing wrong with climate. It will change no matter what we do. It'll get colder. It'll get warmer. We just have to wait a little.
Sen. JOHN KERRY (D), Massachusetts: There was an uneasy consensus, but the people who have always objected to change had not yet really engaged. And because of the consensus, because there was a sense that there was going to be movement, that galvanized the action of the people who oppose it.
JOHN HOCKENBERRY: Events like these fertilized the growing public doubt about climate change that was beginning to register with senators. With widespread anxiety over a shrinking economy, cap-and-trade was tabled in the Senate. The momentum towards action on global warming was vanishing.
JOHN HOCKENBERRY: Against the backdrop of all the pressure from skeptic groups, Congress ordered a comprehensive review of climate change research by the National Academy of Sciences. The findings came back even stronger on human-caused climate change, and a subsequent study showed 97 percent of active climate scientists agreed.
And before that, he had real questions about whether humans were causing acid rain. And he didn't think that nuclear winter was sound science. And he really criticized the work that connected secondhand smoke to health impacts. And now he doesn't think global warming is an issue.
Texas A&M scientist Andrew Dessler is an expert on how clouds relate to climate change. He became a target of the American Tradition Institute after one quote in a front page New York Times article. Dessler received a legal request for emails the next morning.
TIM PHILLIPS: One thing we've changed with AFP is we now have an army, too. And we can do calls and emails and letters and rallies, events and pressure, and I think that's made a big difference. Our side didn't have that five or six years ago on this issue. We do now. And I do think it's a new day for that reason.
CORAL DAVENPORT: Absolutely. Yes. But I should say that that does seem to be a change in Chairman Upton's views before he took on this leadership. Fred Upton, you know, has long been a moderate who's worked on this issue, who's reached across the aisle on these issues. Before he became chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, on his Web site he had the phrase that "climate change is a problem." That was deleted after he became chairman of the House Energy Committee. So we're definitely seeing a shift on this.
JOHN HOCKENBERRY: [voice-over] Chairman Upton declined FRONTLINE's request for an interview. But the congressman wasn't the only one not talking. In 2011, The National Journal tried to poll all GOP lawmakers on climate change.
CORAL DAVENPORT: I came up with the idea to ask every Republican member of Congress three simple questions about climate change. They were very simple. They were basically, you know, "Do you think that climate change is causing the earth to become warmer?"
JOHN HOCKENBERRY: Beyond Washington, in wave after wave, the skeptic tactic of fighting scientific warnings with doubt and delay was finding success. Tennessee passed a law allowing the views of climate change skeptics to be taught in schools. A Virginia state legislator cut the words "sea level rise" from an official request to study coastal communities, calling it a left-wing term.
STEVE COLL, Author, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power: The problem with climate change is that, I think, to many Americans, it has seemed like a threat not to living generations but to future generations. And with that uncertainty, and with the economic climate that we are in, Americans have been unwilling to impose a tax on themselves in order to protect generations as yet unborn.
Media coverage can have a strong influence both on setting the topics that the public considers and on public opinion itself (Soroka 2003, Hahn et al 2009, Brulle et al 2012). A media focus on contrarian viewpoints can reinforce and increase interest in the public's skepticism of climate change (Boykoff 2011, Feldman et al 2012). Thus, recent, high-profile media events such as the release of emails hacked from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (colloquially known as 'climategate') in November 2009 and the discovery of an error in projections of Himalayan glacier melt date in the IPCC Working Group II Fourth Assessment Report in January 2010, may have severely damaged public opinion of climate science (Cicerone 2010, Cogley et al 2010). Numerous subsequent inquiries cleared the scientists impugned in the email hacking and the IPCC acknowledged that the melt date was an error (Powell 2011). Nevertheless, media coverage of these two focusing events was quite intense and the long-term impact on opinion of climate change, although often alleged to be severe (Curry 2010), remains unclear (Maibach et al 2012).
A broad array of survey data has quantified public opinion, interest, and skepticism of anthropogenic climate change over time (Krosnick et al 2000, Nisbet and Myers 2007, Leiserowitz 2010, McCright and Dunlap 2011a, Whitmarsh 2011). Such polling data can provide powerful insight into trends in interest and opinion, as well as the mechanisms driving these trends. However, proper collection of polling data is complex, time-intensive and costly (Weisberg et al 1996). An emerging tool, exploiting the availability of data on patterns of worldwide search term volumes, has the potential to complement survey data by providing rapid, low-cost, and spatiotemporally explicit assessments of public interest and opinion of climate change and climate-related media events (Brossard and Scheufele 2013, Proulx et al 2013); however, it remains largely unexplored.
We draw upon this novel tool, specifically the freely available data on worldwide web search volumes provided by Google Trends, to examine temporal patterns in public interest in climate change and an indicator of skepticism of climate change, including the effects of these two media events. Google Trends is one of the few open sources of high resolution search query data and Google accounts for >80% of global search engine use (Net Market Share 2013). Increasingly utilized for applications in public health (Ginsberg et al 2009), political science (Koehler-Derrick 2013), and economics (Goel et al 2010), Google Trends is considered a robust and valid indicator for tracking interest, attention, and public opinion over time (Ortiz et al 2011, Reilly et al 2012, Zhu et al 2012, Mellon 2013b) and has previously been used to quantify trends in public interest in environmental key words (McCallum and Bury 2013, Proulx et al 2013). Importantly, Google Trends data have been validated for the term 'global warming' relative to independent longitudinal polling data (Mellon 2013a). Specifically, we ask: (1) What language does the public use when searching for information about climate change? (2) How has public attention to climate change varied over the last decade? (3) Are there lasting effects of media events such as climategate or the glacier error on indicators of public skepticism of climate change? Addressing these questions can improve the efficacy of climate change communication by providing insights into how media events and ongoing narratives are recognized and perceived by the public both in real time and in retrospect.
To ensure that the specific search terms we used accurately reflected our questions, we adopted the approach developed by Mellon (2013b) for validating Google Trends data, whereby we ensured (1) that the search terms used were indicative of the issue of interest, (2) that the content returned by the search term was consistent with the issue of interest, and (3) that the search terms employed correlated to an existing measure of the issue of interest. For steps 1 and 2, we began with terms used in published studies (Mellon 2013b, Proulx et al 2013) and then ran many permutations of search terms for each research question and selected the search term that both returned content consistent with the issue of interest (e.g. public interest in climate change, climategate, or an indicator of public skepticism of climate change) and had the highest relative search volume among the given permutations (see section 3). For step 3, we use the validation against longitudinal survey data provided by Mellon (2013b).
To evaluate temporal trends in public interest of climate change, we examined the relative search volume of 'global warming' and 'climate change' searches from 1 January 2004 to present both globally and in the US. To quantify trends in relative search volume, we accounted for temporal autocorrelation by applying a seasonal trend decomposition procedure to monthly means of each time series in order to estimate the trend, the seasonal effect, and any remaining error contributing to the observed data (Cleveland et al 1990). Prior to applying the decomposition, data were log-transformed to account for changes in variance structure over time. We then summed the trend and random components determined by the decomposition procedure and performed ordinary least squares (OLS) regression. As the random component still possessed small, but at times significant autocorrelation, we also performed generalized least squares regression using maximum likelihood estimation and an explicit correlation structure based on either a first or second order ARMA model (Cowpertwait and Metcalfe 2009). The results were always qualitatively similar and we present only the OLS models.
While both search terms return content relevant to climate change, relative search volume for 'global warming' far exceeds that of 'climate change' both across the globe (figure 1(A)) and in the US alone (figure 1(B)), although this difference has narrowed over time. Ten-year global average volume was 32% (of the maximum weekly volume that occurred over the period) for 'global warming' and 12% for 'climate change,' but the most recent two year averages were 16% and 10%, respectively. 2ff7e9595c
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