Year 4, Month 1, Day 1: She Said She Said

Delaware Online recycles the idiots-are-waking-up story:

Something rather cataclysmic has being happening among anti-global-warming enthusiasts. A growing number admit they’ve been wrong. An Associated Press poll found four of every five Americans said climate change will be a serious problem for the United States if nothing is done about it. That’s up from 73 percent three years ago.

Personal experience, not the complicated formula of science measurements is winning new converts. That includes extraordinary changes in the rise of sea levels as The New Journal has been tracking, accelerated patterns of wildfires that are destroying entire communities in the country’s western regions and shorter cold weather patterns during winter.

Debunkers of global warming usually target bad or imagined science by the environmental lobby and liberal Democrats. But “events are helping these people see what scientists thought they had been seeing all along,” explains Jon Krosnick, a Stanford University social psychologist and pollster.

Braindead media had nothing to do with this. Nothing, do you hear me? Nothing. Sent Dec. 26:

It’s good to learn that Americans are getting around to accepting the facts of global climate change, now that the consequences of an accelerating greenhouse effect are actually having an impact on their lives. Christmas day tornadoes, devastating superstorms, agriculture-crippling drought — all these and more have clobbered our nation over the past year, and it’s harder and harder for anyone to dismiss it as a temporary deviation from the norm.

But the fact remains that for decades the steadily more urgent warnings of scientists have been ignored, misrepresented, and often ridiculed. Climatologists have been predicting exactly this type of transforming weather since the 1970s, but our national news media have essentially abdicated their responsibility to the national conversation by choosing to “balance” scientific expertise with the dismissive rhetoric of oil-industry spokespeople. Unfortunately, the growing public awareness of the climate crisis may well be too late for effective policy action.

Warren Senders