Year 3, Month 3, Day 7: Don’t Criticize Our Coffee; You May Be Old, Weak and Bitter Yourself Some Day.

I knew all that weird-ass weather was good for something. More on the “Everybody’s getting a clue” story, from the L.A. Times:

After several years of finding that fewer and fewer Americans believed in man-made climate change, pollsters are now finding that belief is on the uptick.

The newest study from the National Survey of American Public Opinion on Climate Change, which is a biannual survey taken since fall 2008 and organized by the Brookings Institute, shows that 62% of Americans now believe that man-made climate change is occurring, and 26% do not. The others are unsure.

That is a significant rise in believers since a low in spring 2010, when only about 50% of Americans said they believed in global warming, but still down from when the survey first began, when it was at around 75%. The pollsters talked to 887 people across the country.

What’s caused the sudden rise? Mostly the weather.

“People, for good or for bad, are making connections in what they see in terms of weather and what they believe in terms of climate change,” said Christopher Borick, co-author of the survey. He is an associate professor of Political Science and director of the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion in Pennsylvania. His co-author is Barry Rabe, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and a professor at the University of Michigan.

So I wrote this and sent it on March 1:

Learning that more Americans accept the scientific factuality of global climate change is a problematic sort of good news — like watching a cherished friend start to realize that the warnings he’s receiving from his cardiologist are genuine.

Of course, recognizing the seriousness of a problem is a long way from actually doing something about it. Your old friend may have gotten a medical alert, but he’s still smoking two packs a day. Similarly, while Americans are waking up to the dangers of climate change, we’re a long way from changing the way we live.

Because our modern economy developed when energy was “cheap,” it was easier to consume than to conserve. Now that the true cost of all that fossil fuel is emerging, it’s clear that protecting ourselves from the consequences of a runaway greenhouse effect is going to be expensive and inconvenient. Unless we consider the alternative.

Warren Senders