Informed Decisions
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, March 28, 2008 4:20 PM PT
Climate Change: Al Gore says that those of us who are skeptical that man is warming the planet have a flat-Earth mind-set. But if Gore would open his mind, he'd learn that more than likely the opposite is true.
In Sunday's appearance on CBS' "60 Minutes," Gore tells reporter Lesley Stahl that the skeptics of man-made global warming are "almost like the ones who still believe that the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona and those who believe the world is flat."
"That demeans them a little bit," he says, "but it's not that far off."
In addition to being gratingly sanctimonious, Gore is wrong. A study conducted by Texas A&M professors found that the more Americans know about global warming, the more likely they are to dismiss it.
"More informed respondents both feel less personally responsible for global warming, and also show less concern for global warming," the researchers write in "Personal Efficacy, the Information Environment, and Attitudes toward Global Warming and Climate Change in the USA," an article published in the peer-reviewed journal Risk Analysis.
The authors of the study and the accompanying article believe that Americans' strong confidence in scientists has made them less concerned about global warming. It seems the public believes science can solve any problems that might arise.
Just as plausible, though, is the probability that when Americans learn about the facts, they understand that the anthropogenic global warming theory is filled with holes. That would explain why the "more informed respondents . . . feel less personally responsible for global warming."
The study was no put-up job by oil interests. It was conducted by Paul M. Kellstedt, a Texas A&M associate professor of political science, who said the findings that were "just the opposite" of what they were expected out to be.
Co-authors were Arnold Vedlitz, the Bob Bullock chair in government and public policy at A&M's George Bush School of Government and Public Service, and Sammy Zahran, now an assistant professor of sociology at Colorado State University.
That sociologists tend to back candidates from the Democratic Party, such as Gore, is no secret. But the Nobel Prize/Oscar winner isn't running this time. He has, however, been nominated by columnist Joe Klein, who wrote in Time magazine last week that Gore would be "the answer to the Democratic Party's dilemma" that has been created by the Clinton-Obama brawl.
To Klein's suggestion we say: Run, Al, run. His candidacy would let us get this global warming issue aired out so we can finally be done with it. Maybe then the country will think back to this weekend's asinine Earth Hour, when we were all expected to turn off our lights, and realize it was a metaphor for the darkness that global warming alarmists have been operating under. |
