Public Opinion Driven Largely by Media Coverage and Cues from Politicians and Other Authorities.  Obama’s Silence Matters “Very Much.”

The Climate Change Threat Index (CCTI) aggregates data from 6 different polling organizations gauging how much people worry about global warming

A must-read study published Monday in the journal Climatic Change debunks some pervasive myths about public opinion and climate change.  The lead author, Dr. Robert J. Brulle of Drexel University, gave me an exclusive interview.

Stanford’s Jon Krosnick told me this paper was an “exciting contribution to the growing literature in this area.” He said, “the results he produced line up very closely  with the results of our surveys and with my thinking on the issue, with a couple of caveats,” which I discuss below.  He believes, “this paper represents a terrific amount of excellent work and is a great contribution to the literature using a well-established method.”

Here are some of the key findings from “Shifting public opinion on climate change: an empirical assessment of factors influencing concern over climate change in the U.S., 2002–2010″:

• “… media coverage of climate change and elite cues from politicians and advocacy groups are among the most prominent drivers of the public perception of the threat associated with climate change”
• “The greater the quantity of media coverage of climate change, the greater the level of public concern.”
• “New York Times mentions of An Inconvenient Truth significantly boosted the public’s perception of the urgency of climate change (P≤.001). The number of mentions in the New York Times is a proxy for the extent of overall media attention to this film.”
• “Articles in popular scientific magazines do reach significance” in terms of influencing public concern, but it is a modest effect

Media coverage of climate change  accounts for almost half of the variance in the CCTI, which isn’t terribly surprising when you compare the top chart with a graph of media coverage:

This finding shouldn’t surprise anyone.  I just started reading the best-seller Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who won the Nobel prize in economics.  He explains:

People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory– and that is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media.  Frequently mentioned topics populate the mind even as others slip away from awareness.

Brulle’s study also finds that the public’s relative concern about global warming is affected by “structural economic and political factors play a major role”:

An increase in the unemployment rate significantly decreases the CCTI, and conversely, an increase in GDP significantly increases the CCTI. The number of U.S. war deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan significantly decreases public concern about climate change (P≤.05). These findings suggest that when there is a shock to the economy or intensification in the wars, the general public may reduce their level of concern about climate change.

I interviewed Brulle, whom the NY Times has called “an expert on environmental communications,” about his paper.  Here are some of his comments:

• “I think this should close down forever the idea that Al Gore caused the partisan polarization over climate change.”
• “The fact that Obama isn’t talking about the issue or even using the word matters very much.”
• “Popular scientific magazines and the release of major reports (NRC and IPCC) do have a statistically significant effect.”
• “The only messaging campaign that works is one that is consistent. It has to be, especially since it is facing an opposing campaign that is much better funded.“

I have previously pointed out that extensive polling data simply doesn’t support the widely-held myth that Gore polarized the debate (see “Polarization on Climate Jumped in 2009 — Long After Gore’s 2006 Movie“).  I’ve asked many leading experts on social science and public opinion — including McCright and Dunlap, authors of “The politicization of climate change and polarization in the American public’s views of global warming, 2001–2010″ — and they all agree the data don’t support this myth.  I just asked Krosnick the same question, and he also agrees there is no data to support it.

Indeed, the data actually suggest the reverse, that, if anything, Gore’s movie and his “We Campaign” to bring together well-known figures on both sides of the partisan divide, actually decreased polarization temporarily:

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Less Summer Arctic Sea Ice Cover May Mean Some Colder, Snowier Winters in Central Europe [For Now]

[T]he probability of cold winters with much snow in Central Europe rises when the Arctic is covered by less sea ice in summer. Scientists of the Research Unit Potsdam of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association have decrypted a mechanism in which a shrinking summertime sea ice cover changes the air pressure zones in the Arctic atmosphere and impacts our European winter weather. These results of a global climate analysis were recently published in a study in the scientific journal Tellus A.

That’s the news release for yet another new study examining what will inevitably be the huge implications for extreme weather from the massive amount of heat released by the declining Arctic sea ice cover.

Arctic sea ice in September 2007 reached its lowest extent on record, approximately 40% lower than when satellite records began in 1979. Sea ice loss in 2011 was virtually tied with the ice loss in 2007, despite weather conditions that were not as unusual in the Arctic. ”Such a large area of open water is bound to cause significant impacts on weather patterns, due to the huge amount of heat and moisture that escapes from the exposed ocean into the atmosphere over a multi-month period following the summer melt.”  Image: Cryosphere Today.

You may recall the recent repost of the discussion by meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters (see “Our Extreme Weather: Is Arctic Sea Ice Loss Partly to Blame?” the source of the figure above):

“The question is not whether sea ice loss is affecting the large-scale atmospheric circulation…. It’s how can it not?” That was the take-home message from Dr. Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University, in her talk “Does Arctic Amplification Fuel Extreme Weather in Mid-Latitudes?”, presented at last week’s American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

Dr. Francis presented new research in review for publication, which shows that Arctic sea ice loss may significantly affect the upper-level atmospheric circulation, slowing its winds and increasing its tendency to make contorted high-amplitude loops. High-amplitude loops in the upper level wind pattern (and associated jet stream) increases the probability of persistent weather patterns in the Northern Hemisphere, potentially leading to extreme weather due to longer-duration cold spells, snow events, heat waves, flooding events, and drought conditions.

The new German study looks at the specific case of winters in central Europe.  The UK Independent story explains, “A growing number of experts believe complex wind patterns are being changed because melting Arctic sea ice has exposed huge swaths of normally frozen ocean to the atmosphere above.”

As cold weather hit much of Europe, the story describes the findings this way:

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Related Humor:

• Great Doonesbury Global Warming Cartoon
• Toles: “The denier’s defense against global warming”

Canada’s caribou population are in steep decline.  That’s due in part to the destruction of habitat through logging, expanding tar sands production, and other industrial development in the province of Alberta.

But rather than focus on habitat conservation efforts to protect threatened caribou populations in the province, Canadian officials are poisoning and shooting wolves that prey on caribou.

The practice is not new in Alberta. But the stunning decline in Caribou herds is forcing the Canadian government to ramp up culling efforts around Alberta’s oil sands — potentially resulting in the death of 6,000 wolves over the next five years, according to the Pembina Institute, a Canadian environmental think tank.

Government officials didn’t confirm those figures, but one Canada’s environment minister admitted it would be “very large numbers.”

Environmental organizations are hammering the Canadian government over the killing of wolves, saying that it is proof of the cascading environmental impacts of tar sands production. The National Wildlife Federation released a short report today on the issue:

Two particularly repugnant methods of destroying wolves – shooting wolves from helicopters and poisoning wolves with baits laced with strychnine – would be carried out in response to the caribou declines. Strychnine is a deadly poison known for an excruciating death that progresses painfully from muscle spasms to convulsions to suffocation, over a period of hours. Wildlife officials will place strychnine baits on the ground or spread them from aircraft in areas they know wolves inhabit. In addition to wolves, non-target animals like raptors, wolverines and cougars will be at risk from eating the poisoned baits or scavenging on the deadly carcasses of poisoned wildlife.

These methods have already been used in Alberta to kill hundreds of wolves. Now the Canadian government wants to use them to kill thousands more.

According to a report from the Alberta Caribou Committee, it is very possible that increased industrial activity in Alberta — much of it driven by expanding tar sands mining — will cause the complete collapse of caribou populations living in the Boreal forest:

Boreal caribou will not persist for more than two to four decades without immediate and aggressive management intervention. Tough choices need to be made between the management imperative to recover boreal caribou and plans for ongoing bitumen development and industrial land-use.

The Canadian government agrees that caribou populations around Alberta and British Columbia are “very unlikely” to survive due to decades of sustained industrial development in fragile habitat. The dramatic expansion of tar sands is becoming a key driver of this habitat loss.

But rather than slow this type of environmentally-destructive activity to prevent Caribou (and now wolves) from being eviscerated, the Canadian government only plans to continue aggressive expansion of tar sands.

Coal, oil, and gas companies have contributed at least $1.2 million to Restore Our Future, the super PAC supporting Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, a ThinkProgress Green analysis reveals.

The super PAC Restore Our Future has fundraised $30 million to Romney to the White House. The super PAC spent $800,000 on pro-Romney ads, but it has flooded his Republican opponents with attack ads totaling 17 million. Restore Our Future’s war chest comes from under 200 donors, 85 percent of whom had already donated the maximum amount to the Romney campaign.

Romney’s campaign has raised at least $500,000 from the oil and gas industry, according to Open Secrets. But his super PAC allows special interests another chance to exert their influence. While many of the super PAC’s donors come from the financial sector, coal, oil, and gas have also flocked to Restore Our Future:

Coal mining:
– Oxbow Carbon:$750,000

– Oxbow President Bill Koch: $250,000

– Consol Energy: $150,000

Oil and Gas:
– Ballard Exploration: $25,000

– Bassoe Offshore President Jonathan Fairbanks: $25,000

– Murphy Wade of Murphy Oil Corporation: $15,000

– Joseph Grigg of American Energy Operations: $5,000

– Total for oil, gas, and coal: $1,220,000

In total, coal, oil, and gas companies contributed at least $1.2 million to Restore Our Future’s $18 million haul in the last half of 2011. The coal company Oxbow Carbon, alone, contributed $1 million, including a $250,000 donation from billionaire Oxbow CEO Bill Koch — the brother of oil billionaires Charles and David of Koch Industries.

With Perry out of the race, Romney has received more money from mining and oil than any other presidential candidate. The pro-Perry super PAC “Make Us Great Again” took in an outstanding $1.3 million from oil companies and executives during the last six months of his run.

Although Restore Our Future has no “formal” ties to the candidate, the donations reflect Romney’s right pivot on energy and climate concerns. The Massachusetts governor that once supported regulations on coal pollution, has since questioned whether carbon is even dangerous. In addition to becoming a climate denier, he now blasts government support for cleaner energy — despite creating a state green fund as governor.

You can expect Romney to sound suspiciously like his rich polluting backers, as dirty money continues to flood Restore Our Future and Romney’s campaign stash.

EPA clean air rules will, each year, save up to $280 billion by preventing up to 34,000 premature deaths and avoiding countless health problems

by Daniel J. Weiss, Jackie Weidman, Rebecca Leber in a CAP repost

Today 16 states and numerous power companies that oppose new pollution-reduction rules must file their petitions with the U.S. Court of Appeals in D.C. In response to their initial suit, the court granted a motion to temporarily “stay,” or halt, the implementation of the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, or smog pollution rule, which the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, promulgated last summer. These “good neighbor” pollution-reduction standards will require power plants to slash their sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide pollution. These substances are the key ingredients in acid rain and smog, and they can travel hundreds of miles and contaminate other states.

Once implemented the rule will annually save thousands of lives and prevent thousands of illnesses. Not surprisingly, the 16 states that sued EPA to block these rules include 7 of the 10 highest-polluting states in the country. And their governors and attorneys general, who decide whether to file a lawsuit to stop these safeguards, received a combined $5 million in campaign contributions from big utilities and coal companies that benefit from higher-pollution levels.

This column reviews the rule and its benefits as well as the efforts of utilities and coal companies to block it so they can avoid or postpone investments in cleanup technology. EPA analysis demonstrates that the law’s benefits to public health and the environment are much greater than its costs. These governors and attorneys general should support EPA’s efforts to protect the residents of their states and people downwind from premature death, asthma attacks, and other respiratory ailments instead of bending to the will of dirty-money donors.

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“Spoil,” a 45-minute documentary by the International League of Conservation Photographers, highlights the potential environmental and social disaster that could result from the construction of the Enbridge Northern Gateway tar sands pipeline, through the eyes of some of the world’s top nature photographers. That pipeline would go from Alberta’s tar sands, over the Canadian Rockies, and through a fragile rainforest ecosystem in British Columbia to feed the energy-hungry Asian markets. The entire documentary is free to watch online:

Although Keystone XL advocates like to portray the flowing of tar sands crude to China as inevitable, the dangerous Northern Gateway pipeline is just as controversial.

“Renewable energy is a matter of Justice,” say Jewish leaders.

by Catherine Woodiwiss

In a ceremony in Manhattan today to celebrate the Jewish festival of trees, Tu Bishvat, 50 Jewish leaders from across denominations will sign onto to the Jewish Energy Covenant Campaign to protect the environment.

“Out of concern for the well-being of all nations, and with a particular concern for the poorest among them as well as for future generations, our support for more sources of clean, renewable energy and for energy efficiency is a matter of justice,” reads the declaration titled the ‘Jewish Environment and Energy Imperative.’ “Enlightened stewardship is not only a religious and moral imperative; it is a strategy for security and survival.”

The Covenant Campaign sets a bold vision for the Jewish environmental community. To support their commitment to cutting greenhouse gas emissions, signatories pledge to support clean technology innovation, encourage investment in Jewish environmental organizations, conduct energy audits, promote sustainability in their own communities, and advocate for the reduction by 83% of 2005 emission levels by 2050.

Led by the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life (COEJL), a network of nearly 30 national organizations and over 100 community groups, the campaign has brought together leaders from the Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, and Reconstructionist movements in a unified effort to protect the environment. “There’s a growing ecological consciousness in the Jewish community — a lot of concern about global warming, our energy policy, and energy security,” says Sybil Sanchez, director of COEJL.

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Go ahead, admit it: You stay up late studying the tax system, pouring over every line of the tax code so you can understand the details of exempt facility bonds, accelerated cost recovery systems, and carryback credits.

If you’re a tax geek, I’ve got a job for you. Help the rest of us non-tax experts out by contributing to a new wiki designed to track the broad range of subsidies going to the energy industry.

The Institute for Policy Integrity just rolled out an “energy tax breaks wiki” that will attempt to log every tax subsidy provided to the fossil and renewable energy industries. With all the political hand-wringing over permanent tax credits for oil companies, short-term tax credits for clean energy that are set to expire, and the differences between the government support provided to both sectors, this is a very important resource for helping uncover the opaque world of energy tax law:

The truth is, estimates range widely. With the federal deficit still a hot topic, and energy tax breaks playing a recurring role in budget negotiations, it seems important to have a handle on exactly how much energy producers get from the government. To gain a more precise accounting of these de facto subsidies, we are marshaling the expertise of lawyers, economists and tax professionals and compiling the information here in the Energy Tax Breaks Wiki. We are looking for any tax code section that specifically provides tax relief to energy producing companies.

Around 44% of government spending on energy in 2010 came through preferential treatment in the tax code. However, as CAP’s Richard Caperton recently pointed out, these expenditures do not often receive the same scrutiny as direct spending:

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Cleveland television meteorologist André Bernier, one of the weathermen exposed by the Forecast the Facts campaign as a climate science denier, believes in “global cooling.” Bernier, the chief meteorologist for Fox affiliate WJW-TV in Cleveland, OH, has an active American Meteorological Society Seal of Approval.

Linking to a mendacious Daily Mail article on his website, Bernier deliberately misrepresents the findings of the UK Meteorological Office that show the 2000s are the hottest decade on record:

Could it be that the very same climatic research group that gave us “Climategate” and researchers that appeared to be “cooking the books” when it came to global temperature records are now admitting that an even BIGGER issue is the global COOLING which is inevidible in the decades ahead? Could we start seeing a shorter growing season and frequent bitter cold in the winter? Could we even start seeing the River Thames freezing over like during the “Little Ice Age” of the Charles Dickens’ Scrooge era?

Bernier tweeted in January: “The day that @ametsoc (AMS) strong arms anyone to tow [sic] the AGW is the day I disown them.”

The American Meteorological Society has emailed its membership with a debunking of the Daily Mail article.

Bernier’s scientific training is a bachelor’s degree in meteorology from Lyndon State College. An evangelical Christian, he states that he presents “the wonderful world of weather from a God-honoring perspective.”

Fellow Cleveland television weatherman Mark Johnson — an AMS Certified Broadcast Meteorologist — is also an anti-science climate denier. The two million people in the Cleveland metropolitan area who watch these stations are being deceived about the civilizational threat of manmade climate change by ideologues, with the approval of the American Meteorological Society.

The Forecast the Facts campaign by the Citizen Engagement Lab, League of Conservation Voters, and 350.org is mobilizing citizens who believe that television meteorologists — the primary science communicators for most Americans — should promote scientific integrity, not fossil-fueled ideology.

Other stories below: With deep concerns over fracking, a Va. county says no to more gas drilling; Pollution spikes U.S. beach closures

China Bans its Airlines from paying EU Carbon Tax, ratcheting up Global Dispute

China announced Monday it will prohibit its airlines from paying European Union charges on carbon emissions, ratcheting up a global dispute over the cost of combatting climate change.

The charges are aimed at curbing emissions of climate-changing gases but governments including China, the United States and Russia oppose them. The ratings agency Fitch warned in December the conflict could spiral into a global trade dispute.

The Chinese air regulator said China’s carriers are barred from paying the charges or other fees without government permission, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. It said Beijing will consider unspecified measures in response to protect Chinese companies.

There was no indication there would be any immediate impact on flights between China and Europe or penalties for Chinese airlines. The charges took effect in January but money will not be collected until next year.

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