Political Climate is a new blog to me. I chanced upon their article about the media's interest in climate change (or the lack thereof), and was struck by this graph.
Amusingly the uptick in 2009 appears to be ascribed to the Copenhagen conference rather than anything else that may have been happening at the time.
The hypothesis advanced in the article is that the problem that AGW subscribers have is declining public interest rather than declining climatological credibility. I'm not sure I'm convinced. For a start you could interpret that graph as a peak in 2006/7 driven by the Fourth Assessment Report and another for Copenhagen/Climategate, with a baseline level of interest that is largely unchanged. But even if we accept a decline from 2006 onwards, is it due to weariness with the endless propaganda, or is it a function of the declining credibility of climatology? What is the root cause here?
Some clues are to be found in this article at the Houston chronicle (H/T GWPF), which records a strong shift in opinion on global warming in the periodic survey of public attitudes to science. I've graphed the results to make the shift clearer. The pink line is this year's results, with less concerned being at the left of the graph. The yellow line is the results from 2004. (Note I haven't recorded "Don't knows", the figure for which is broadly unchanged.
But there's more:
For more fun, check out the response to question Q10K, in which 75 percent of respondents deemed themselves as “very well” or “fairly well” informed about climate change. That was higher than every other scientific category measured, including vaccinations (74 percent), nuclear power (45 percent) and clinical trials (33 percent).
Now let’s say you’re a scientist concerned about climate change. (Despite what you may have read, a lot of them really are). Here’s the challenge you’re facing: Not only does the public not presently believe you, but 75 percent of them think they already know enough about the issue to not need any further lecturing from you, thank you very much