Dear Science: George Will reports from the kiddie pool
Back in February we kicked off a segment called Dear Science: a media watchdog category addressing an environmental enigma: The climate skeptic. If there were a lifetime achievement award given out in this category - George Will from Newsweek would win hands down. 
You have to give it up to him though, he's consistent. It reminds us of a line used to describe former president George W Bush taken from Stephen Colbert's White House Correspondents' Dinner speech from 2006: "The greatest thing about this man is he's steady. You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday. Events can change; this man's beliefs never will."
In his latest attempt to deny climate change science, Will takes shots at Al Gore, tries to scare people off of acting on climate change because it would diminish our freedom, and compares "climate change hysteria" to the sort of made up hysteria around shark attacks - fear, fear, fear.
Recent numbers that show a drop in people believing that global warming is occuring is indeed a reason to be having a conversation around the subject, but Will seems to be the only one mistaking this poll as blood in the water. In reality, "Public opinion about global warming, it turns out, has been remarkably stable for the better part of two decades, despite the recent decline in expressed public confidence in climate science. Roughly two-thirds of Americans have consistently told pollsters that global warming is occurring," this from an opinion piece from Yale Environment 360.
But don't mistake that as a good thing, in fact, it opens up a whole other can of worms: What is arguably most remarkable about U.S. public opinion on global warming has been both its stability and its inelasticity in response to new developments, greater scientific understanding of the problem, and greater attention from both the media and politicians. Public opinion about global warming has remained largely unchanged through periods of intensive media attention and periods of neglect, good economic times and bad, the relatively activist Clinton years and the skeptical Bush years. And majorities of Americans have, at least in principle, consistently supported government action to do something about global warming even if they were not entirely sold that the science was settled, suggesting that public understanding and acceptance of climate science may not be a precondition for supporting action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Read the rest of this opinion piece HERE.
