Global Warming's Icarus Flying Too Close To The Sun?

A new Gallup survey suggests that public skepticism is on the rise:

Americans generally believe global warming is real. That sets the U.S. public apart from the global-warming skeptics who assembled this week in New York City to try to debunk the science behind climate change. At the same time, with only 34% of Americans saying they worry "a great deal" about the problem, most Americans do not view the issue in the same dire terms as the many prominent leaders advancing global warming as an issue.

Importantly, Gallup's annual March update on the environment shows a drop in public concern about global warming across several different measures, suggesting that the global warming message may have lost some footing with Americans over the past year. Gallup has documented declines in public concern about the environment at times when other issues, such as a major economic downturn or a national crisis like 9/11, absorbed Americans' attention. To some extent that may be true today, given the troubling state of the U.S. economy. However, the solitary drop in concern this year about global warming, among the eight specific environmental issues Gallup tested, suggests that something unique may be happening with the issue.

Certainly global warming has received tremendous attention this decade, including with Al Gore's Academy Award-winning documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." It is not clear whether the troubled economy has drawn attention away from the global warming message or whether other factors are at work. It will be important to see whether the 2009 findings hold up in next year's update of the annual environmental survey.

My guess would be that there are a couple different things going on.

One is plain ol' overreach of the doomsday predictions, the "If you don't start using eco-friendly lightbulbs, Manhattan's going to look like Venice in five years" sort of thing. From what I understand, this has always been a deliberate tactic of the advocacy crowd. Were they to say "If you don't start using eco-friendly lightbulbs, the average sea-level might rise 10 cm in 100 years!" nobody would give a flying rat's patooie. People just get sick of that sort of thing after a while.

Another, as the article suggests, is that people have more important things to worry about at the moment. You know, like paying for groceries. Vaclav Klaus has been saying for years that eco-fussing is a luxury item, and I think that as they are forced to eliminate luxuries, people are beginning to realize this.

A third, which is harder to pin down, might be that people are beginning to recognize the whole green movement as just another of the damned bubbles that have plagued us for the past ten to fifteen years. A lot of people are on the green bandwagon for a lot of different reasons. Aside from the visionary fringe hellbent on dragging us back to the Stone Age and the usual band of fellow travelers looking for another jolt to animate the dead corpse of Marx, a good many folks see it as a golden opportunity to grab political power. Many others are trying to make a fast buck. And fellahs like the Goreacle appear to be going for both. One would hope that we've been burned enough times already that we're becoming quicker to spot a scam in the making.