More Americans believe steps taken to reduce global warming pollution will help the U.S. economy than say such measures will hurt it. It’s a sign the public is showing more faith in President Barack Obama’s economic arguments for limiting heat-trapping gases than in Republican claims that the actions would kill jobs.
In an Associated Press-Stanford University poll, 40 percent said U.S. action to slow global warming in the future would create jobs. Slightly more, 46 percent, said it would boost the economy.
By contrast, less than a third said curbing climate change would hurt the economy and result in fewer jobs, a message Republican members of Congress plan to take to an international global warming conference in Copenhagen this week.
s word spreads about the Associated Press blind test examining the global cooling theory, which I wrote about earlier this week, I began to wonder how many times skeptics have tried to push this global cooling myth recently on the Internets.
So I perused the first 10 pages of results on Google for the term “global cooling” and discovered plenty of examples of skeptics hawking their global cooling theory on the usual suspect blogs and media outlets (with a few exceptions like the much-ballyhooed BBC News article earlier this month).
In a blind test, the AP gave temperature data to four independent statisticians and asked them to look for trends, without telling them what the numbers represented. The experts found no true temperature declines over time.
“If you look at the data and sort of cherry-pick a micro-trend within a bigger trend, that technique is particularly suspect,” said John Grego, a professor of statistics at the University of South Carolina.
The piece continues:
“The last 10 years are the warmest 10-year period of the modern record,” said NOAA climate monitoring chief Deke Arndt. “Even if you analyze the trend during that 10 years, the trend is actually positive, which means warming.”
The AP sent expert statisticians NOAA’s year-to-year ground temperature changes over 130 years and the 30 years of satellite-measured temperatures preferred by skeptics and gathered by scientists at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Statisticians who analyzed the data found a distinct decades-long upward trend in the numbers, but could not find a significant drop in the past 10 years in either data set. The ups and downs during the last decade repeat random variability in data as far back as 1880.
Thank you, Seth Borenstein, for this top-notch article.
I am generally a fan of Democracy. That is why I’m not pleased with Senator Schumer’s attempts to clear the field for incumbent Kirsten Gillibrand in next year’s NY Senate primary. With that caveat out of the way, I like what I’m seeing here from New York’s junior Senator:
In response to reports of trace amounts of pharmaceuticals, including estrogen and codeine, found in New York waterways and around the country, U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York announced legislative action to study the presence of these drugs in drinking water and their long-term health effects.Gillibrand will work to move her provision this week when the Senate considers comprehensive legislation to improve water infrastructure across the country, her office announced Tuesday.
“As a lawmaker and mother of two young children, I expect that America’s drinking water is clean and free of these kinds of pharmaceuticals,” the senator said. “As we upgrade our failing water infrastructure, it is important that we also address the safety of our drinking water.”
“Right now the federal government does not have adequate data on the long term health effects of these trace chemicals.,” she said. “Parents count on the government to ensure clean, safe drinking water for all our families.”
This almost certainly has to do with the ongoing study Associated Press has been conducting for the past several months.
