That was quite a surprise to me a decade or so ago when I realized that was what had happened: <I find it extremely curious, and certainly statistically unexplainable, that virtually all of the posters on the left believe in AGW, while virtually all on the right do not. > I had always thought it was a matter of science. Politics would come into the situation over what to do about it; carbon tax, or the cap and trade thing, or nothing, or rich people not allowed to produce CO2 but poor people are, liquefy and pipe it under the ocean, freeze it and stack it as dry ice under polystyrene.
Your point is generally right that few people have more than a cartoon idea of how The Greenhouse Effect works and even less idea of how carbon moves around the liquid, gas and solid systems of Earth. But they certainly know very strongly that CO2 is a problem. In general, [not universally] the anti-CO2 crowd seem to have a better grasp of the physics of it all, and the economics and physics of doing something about it too.
Oddly, the politics have switched around. Back in the day, Maggie Thatcher was the one concerned about CO2, now it's the socialists.
Since CO2 is a political issue, people need to have an opinion so when a politician says "I will raise taxes on carbon to save the world", they vote to save themselves. The problem with democracy is that almost nobody has a clue, so they choose their leaders they trust and vote for what those leaders tell them is correct. So those who trust Al Gore go along with him and his second chakra, and Barack Obama who was going to save the world from CO2 by pouring $1 billion down a photovoltaic black hole.
After a while though, the lies and dishonest "science" start to show up, and losing money on photovoltaics ges tiring, so the politics shifts, even while ignorance abounds. Democracy is interesting and surprisingly successful in the midsts of ignorance. When people vote for their interests, they become fairly sensitive to what's good for them, even if they don't understand it much.
Being a VVV scientific puritan, CO2 seems unlikely to be a problem, but I'm keeping a weather eye on it. For now, my bet is on colder climate not warmer [because of my insolation/reflectivity cloud/snow/vegetation feedback loop theories combined with subduction of oceanic plates and the Gulf Stream. Subject to change without notice.
Mqurice |
