Michigan House District 11 Candidate Nancy Skinner is making climate change a centerpiece of her campaign, going into next month’s primary, and has come out swinging with the piece you see above. She is in the running for Bill Maher’s #FlipADistrict effort.
Last week I posted a bit of distilled climate paranoia, in a video from a Louisiana congressional primary, where Sara Pailin clone Lenar Whitney laid out the complete conspiracist’s looniest fantasy of climate science as a global plot. The piece has appeared in a lot of places, and I think its an example of looney climate denial having jumped the shark in the American mind.
Now, hardly a week later, I can show you another view, above – one that every serious pollster tells us is true. Climate Change is becoming a winning issue.
Anthony Leiserowitz for the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication:
Today, we are releasing a special report on The Politics of Global Warming, based on our spring 2014 nationally representative survey. We find that registered voters are 2.5 times more likely to vote for a congressional or presidential candidate who supports action to reduce global warming. Further, registered voters are 3 times more likely to vote against a candidate who opposes action to reduce global warming.
Many Americans are also willing to act politically:
- 26% are willing to join or are currently participating in a campaign to convince elected officials to take action to reduce global warming;
- 37% are willing to sign a pledge to vote only for political candidates that share their views on global warming;
- 13% are willing to personally engage in non-violent civil disobedience against corporate or government activities that make global warming worse.
The study also finds that while Democrats are more convinced that human-caused global warming is happening and more supportive of climate and energy policies than Republicans, there are deep divisions within the Republican Party. In many respects, liberal/moderate Republicans – about a third of the Republican party – are relatively similar to moderate/conservative Democrats, while conservative Republicans often express views about global warming that are distinctly different than the rest of the American public.
For example, among registered voters:
- 88% of Democrats, 59% of Independents and 61% of liberal/moderate Republicans think global warming is happening, compared to only 28% of conservative Republicans;
- 81% of Democrats and 51% of liberal/moderate Republicans are worried about global warming, compared to only 19% of conservative Republicans;
- 82% of Democrats and 65% of liberal/moderate Republicans support strict carbon dioxide emission limits on existing coal-fired power plants to reduce global warming and improve public health, compared to only 31% of conservative Republicans.
Scientists already are observing climate changes in the United States. They will grow worse. Higher seas mean higher storm surges and more at-risk property along heavily populated coasts — $66 billion to $106 billion worth will likely be below sea level by mid-century. The annual national storm cleanup tab will balloon. As the country warms, the average American will likely see a month’s worth — or more — of days over 95 degrees. The South and Southwest will be much hotter than that. The analysis considered how many cold-related deaths further warming would prevent and concluded that heat-related deaths would outweigh the potential benefit. Similarly, farmers in northern latitudes might see longer growing seasons, but those farther south, in what has been prime farming country, will have to make costly adjustments, changing what they grow and developing crops that can adapt to climate extremes. In the long term, uncontrolled warming could even produce days in the United States in which humans literally could not survive long without air conditioning.
“Hope is not a strategy,” Mr. Paulson said to us. But that is the strategy that Congress, in its perpetual inaction, is taking: Hoping that the scientists are dramatically wrong — or at least that the country can deal with the problem later. If Congress were the board of a large company, ignoring such a serious risk would give shareholders ample reason to fire every head-in-the-sand director. Voters might want to contemplate the analogy this November.
Below, for comparison, the crazed climate denial porn of Lenar Whitney.
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