Global warming doubts could hamper climate legislation

With more people expressing doubts about global warming, passing climate legislation in Congress will be more difficult.

New climate legislation: Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, I-Vt., are said to be readying a bipartisan bill on comprehensive climate change and energy independence legislation. Public doubts about global warming could hamper its support.

A recent poll suggests that high-profile controversies regarding climate science are weakening public confidence in the validity of global warming, And that could endanger congressional efforts to pass climate legislation.
In 2008, 71 percent of respondents said they thought global warming was happening, while 10 percent thought it wasn’t. This year, only 57 percent thought global warming was a reality, and the number of doubters increased to 20 percent, according to a poll conducted by the Yale Project on Climate Change and the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.

“We’ve seen some pretty significant changes over the past year,” says Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change. “We found a very significant drop in the percentage of Americans who think global warming is happening, and a significant drop in those who think humans are responsible. Generally speaking, we’ve seen a drop in public concern about the issue.”
The poll also asked respondents whether they think global warming is caused by human activities, natural environmental changes, or both. In 2008, 57 percent said it was caused by human activities. This year, only 47 percent think so.
That changing public opinion about climate change could affect current efforts to pass a bipartisan climate bill being sponsored by Sen. John Kerry (D) of Massachusetts, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (Ind.), of Connecticut, and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R) of South Carolina.
Ahead of the vote, Texas, Virginia, and Alabama officials have filed challenges to the Environmental Protection Agency’s finding that man-made greenhouse gases threaten public health. And Republican senators have cited controversial hacked e-mails from climate scientists and mistakes in reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as reasons to oppose a climate bill that would limit carbon dioxide emissions.
“In the US, it’s going to be more difficult [to pass climate legislation] than it might have been a year ago,” says Adil Najam, a lead author of two IPCC reports and the director of Boston University’s Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future. “The same legislation is going to find more opposition, because the political mood has changed.”
Dr. Leiserowitz attributes that change in political mood documented by his poll to a string of scandals and external factors such as the economy and the media.
“This is a perfect storm,” he says. “It’s been called the winter of climate science discontent.” Read more.