Global warming: different views

Last month the Brookings Institution issued a paper on factors influencing Americans' perceptions of global warming. Major surveys were taken in Michigan and Pennsylvania. The five factors presented to respondents as affecting their belief in global warming:

• Declining glaciers and polar ice
• Higher temperatures in local area
• Computer modeling
• Hurricane Katrina
• "An Inconvenient Truth"

The authors found the first two factors to be significant in Americans' belief in global warming; the last two less so.

But there are significant differences in responses of various subgroups divided by place of residence, partisanship, gender, and age, suggesting that no across-the-board consensus on climate change has emerged at the time when federal institutions are giving unprecedented attention to this issue.

A Reason to Believe: Examining the Factors that Determine Americans’ Views on Global Warming (pdf, 14pp/240kB), July 2008


Just in at the Library...

Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, Updated and Expanded, by S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery, presents the theory that current global warming is part of a natural 1500-year cycle, and we are 150 years into a Modern Warming that will last for centuries. The authors state, "The message from the ice cores is clear: global warming is natural, unstoppable, and not nearly as dangerous as the public hysteria over it." The greater concern, they say, is the next Big Ice Age.
(QC981.8 G56 S55 2007) (ISBN-13:978-0-7425-5124-4, paper) (ISBN-10:0-7425-5124-5, paper)
See press release