Resistant to "Change"

Michael Barone highlights a poll demonstrating what you already know: despite years of professional handwringing, documentaries, academic papers, congressional testimony, PSA's, marches, portentious news reports, and pictures of polar bears on tiny chips of ice, the average voter doesn't think global warming is a big deal: On_Guns And Climate The Elites Are Out_of Touch

Over the past decade, the Gallup organization has been asking Americans whether the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated or generally correct. From 1998 to 2007, except for the run-up to the 2004 election, they said it was generally serious by roughly a 2-1 margin -- 66 to 30 percent in 2006, for example. But in March 2009, that margin slipped to only 57 to 41 percent, with two-thirds of Republicans and nearly half of independents saying concern is exaggerated.

Similarly, last month, pollster Scott Rasmussen found that only 34 percent believes that global warming is caused by human activity, while 48 percent said it is caused by long-term planetary trends. That's almost exactly the opposite of what he found 12 months before -- 47 to 34 percent the other way around. However, 48 percent of the group Rasmussen calls the "Political Class" -- in other words, the elite -- continues to believe global warming is man-made.

What causes such a disconnect between the polity and the politicos? Perhaps it's because the elites are largely urban and suburban types who know just enough science to be dangerous, but not enough to actually look at, and comprehend, the "settled science" that is put under their noses. It doesn't inspire confidence that so many of global warming's most fervent proponents were liberal arts majors in college. Such people may think of themselves as smarter than the rest of us, but they are also easily susceptible to doom-mongering propaganda from greens (see here for a story about a particularly egregious example from an ex-Greenpeacer) and statements of absolute moral/scientific authority from technocrats.

Global warming (or "climate change, or better yet the "climate crisis") is yet another "crisis" for which we must be stampeded into confronting or we're doomed, doomed I tells ya. Yet, the average person is well aware that the climate has gone through extreme changes - from Ice Age to topical warming perriods that allowed for sizable human settlements in now-inhospitable places like Greeland - all without human agency or carbon "footprints." The skepticism about global warming is, in truth, much more rational than the apocalyptic senarios spun by our ostensible leaders.