ENSO and public concern over climate change

Hypothesis: Americans are not very bright.

Hence we predict their level of concern about global warming will vary quite a bit with the short-term flucuations in warming, despite the strong, persistent long-term trend.

The most important driver of temperature variability, in the short term, in ENSO (El Ninos and La Ninas):

A similar but less powerful short-term influence is the phase of the solar cycle:

So giving people a year or two to process news stories about temperature records, extreme weather, ice cover losses and the like, we might expect to see the levels of concern rising in 1999-2000 after the big El Nino, with a rise starting in 2004-2005 related to the second large recent El Nino, with concern falling in 2009-2010, related to a La Nina event.

The phase of the solar cycle would make the peak in concern from 1998-2002 slightly higher, while the lower solar activity after that, as well as the lack of a similarly intense El Nino event, could be expected to make the peaks of concern lower, and the troughs deeper. In late 2011 we saw the next solar cycle finally start to wake up, but this will not have had a big impact yet.

So how did we do? Here's the gallup polling on concern for global warming:

Not bad. We don't see the brief 2009 El Nino in the data, but it may be too early (the polling stops in May 2011), or it may be the rapid return to La Nina conditions blunted the effect.

Of course, this is all fun and games with graphs, and if we were attaching any seriousness to it it would come dangerously close to mathdurbation. It's just as easy to come up with a different correlation, for example:

Hypothesis: Americans care about global warming only when they are not much more worried about the economy:

 When people felt relatively better, in 2008, concern about global warming was high. When economic worry spiked in 2009, concern about global warming fell. The slight increase in economic confidence recently may show up in 2012's climate polling, especially if the economy continues its still painful slow but accelerating recovery.

Should we expect these short-term reactions to subside as the long-term warming continues to push the earth's climate further out of the Holocene range? Unfortunately, we cannot assume that. Gradual changes and shifts over time are difficult to perceive. This is often described via the (apocryphal) anecdote of the frog placed in lukewarm water that is slowly boiled alive. People rapidly normalize their present experiences, unless there is a readily identifiable shift. The gradual erosion of my paycheck by inflation is not as striking as being swindled out of some portion of my savings, even if they cost me the same amount of money. That is one reason we as a society are prepared to invest huge amounts in speculative measures to reduce tiny risks (dying in a terrorist attack, for example) but not, as yet, to invest significant amounts of money, time, or even attention to the overwhelming likelihood of the less vividly imagined but far more globally destructive process of climate change.

Roy Spencer: the unacknowledged legislator of the world

This quote has been making the rounds, but for anyone who missed it:

Roy Spencer: “I view my job a little like a legislator, supported by the taxpayer, to protect the interests of the taxpayer and to minimize the role of government.”

Seriously. He said that. He doesn't even deny saying it. And is apparently deaf to the irony.
This the guy who raged:

Politicians formed the IPCC over 20 years ago with an endgame in mind: to regulate CO2 emissions. I know, because I witnessed some of the behind-the-scenes planning. It is not a scientific organization. It was organized to use the government-funded scientific research establishment to achieve policy goals.

Now, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. But when they are portrayed as representing unbiased science, that IS a bad thing.



The most vocal climate scientists defending the IPCC have lost their objectivity. . . .
ClimateGate doesn’t prove their science is wrong…but it does reveal their bias.

 This is a classic terrorist/freedom fighter cognitive blind spot. Spencer sees his mission in science as defeating the campaign for certain policy choices . . . specifically emissions cuts. Yet he does not see his own explicit political goals as making him "biased." They did it first! You are hysterical, he is passionate! Roy destroyed scientific objectivity in order to save it!

"I don't have the votes. Time for a filibuster!"

It's a common cognitive glitch, but it is still surprising to see it developed to the point at which he would be denouncing scientists for (supposedly) trying to "achieve policy goals" and then be calling himself "a little like a legislator."

"Seriously, dude, you went too far."

Nothing says scientists can't or shouldn't participate in the public debate. They are citizens, and the democratic ethos, since Athens, has held that whatever your day job, you have the right, and sometimes the responsibility, to be part of the discussion. But you shouldn't see that as your job, "supported by the taxpayer." The only people paid by the taxpayer to be policy advocates are politicians. Roy Spencer is paid by the taxpayer to do science. One wishes he would work a little harder at that, even at the expense of his legislative ambitions.

Idiot comment of the day: listing right, ctd. Anosognosia edition.

Bruce | August 20, 2011 at 2:21 pm | Reply

I used to read 2-3 newspapers a day. Now that most are left-wing rags peddling AGW, they don’t get my money. I don’t have cable and don’t watch the MSM propaganda.

Now what do you think about Obama’s 20 years of hate-filled indoctrination?

Wikipedia has a good list of cognitive biases. We are all affected by them. Bruce, like many deniers, is suffering from an advanced case of the hostile media effect:

The hostile media effect, sometimes called the hostile media phenomenon, refers to the finding that people with strong biases toward an issue (partisans) perceive media coverage as biased against their opinions, regardless of the reality. Proponents of the hostile media effect argue that this finding cannot be attributed to the presence of bias in the news reports, since partisans from opposing sides of an issue rate the same coverage as biased against their side and biased in favor of the opposing side.

Usually by the time someone rejects all printed news and television as biased, they recognize that advertizing that delusion makes them appear crazy and discredits them. But Bruce is not big on the insight.