The Daily Background
| Why doesn’t the public agree with scientists on global warming?
by Arlen Parsa
From a McClatchy (formerly Knight Ridder) article earlier this week titled “Scientists, American public disagree sharply over global warming“:
Most scientists believe that humans and their machines are mainly responsible for the 1.4 degree Fahrenheit rise in the world’s average temperature in the last 100 years. Most Americans think otherwise.
Last Wednesday, a group of 18 climate scientists, including two Nobel Prize winners, submitted an affidavit to the Supreme Court declaring that they’re 99 percent certain that “greenhouse gas emissions from human activities cause global climate change, endangering human health and welfare.”
Only 41 percent of those polled last summer by the Washington-based Pew Research Center, however, accepted the argument that climate change is due primarily to human activities, such as burning fossil fuels in cars, trucks and factories.
Of course, both the media and corporations like ExxonMobil are to blame for this disparity in opinion between scientists and the public.
In An Inconvenient Truth (out on DVD on November 21), Al Gore recounts a study which examined hundreds of peer reviewed scientific papers on the subject of climate change, and hundreds of news items about climate change. They found that while 100% of the scientific peer reviewed papers they randomly selected backed up the premise that global warming is man-made. Meanwhile, only about 50% of news items (like television news reports or newspaper articles) asserted that global warming exists and is man-made.
And of course corporations like ExxonMobil spend millions of dollars every year to fund right-wing thinktanks and front organizations that come up with bogus studies from bogus “scientists” (more bogus “experts” exposed here) to try and cast doubt on legit scientists and legit studies.
Scientists have hit back at ExxonMobil for their anti-science propaganda.
Recently, ExxonMobil secretly funded an attempt at making an online ‘viral video’ which makes fun of Al Gore and global warming science. They tried to make it seem as though it was created by a regular person in their basement, whereas it was actually produced by a slick right-wing media group whom they paid.
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