A recent USA Today article by Dan Vergano raised the supposition that climate scientists have misread the recent polls showing that the public is not all that concerned about global warming. Certainly the decline as documented by the polls has been very steep as compared to just a few years ago. Almost twice as many people classify climate change "not a problem" today as compared to 5 years ago.
Mr. Vergano suggests that the underlying reason for this decline is not that people have stopped believing that climate change is a problem but that other more pressing problems have for the moment forced them to put climate change on the back burner, so to speak. I've made this point before, which merely reinforces its status as a "duh" moment.
Of course people are more worried about the economy that is definitely affecting them severely today as opposed to climate change which may affect them severely 20 or 30 years from now. When you are out of work you are faced with the immediate problem of paying next month's rent. Thinking about how you will afford to put your kid's through college goes to the back burner until it is time.
Unfortunately, dealing with climate change is like paying for college. The sooner you start putting money into the college fund, the easier it will be to pay the bills when the time comes. Same thing with climate change. Taking corrective measures now will lessen the impact of whatever changes may be coming our way.
What most people don't see is that it would take almost unimaginably massive measures to really avert the risk of even moderate climate change. Lou Grinzo writing in the Energy Collective takes a look at just how hard it will be to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by the year 2050. Using the dreaded scenarios, he concludes that taking the most draconian measures imaginable barely gets us halfway home.
Updated text:
Scenario 5: Scenario 1 + 100% more nuclear + 33% reduction in elect + 33% reduction in trans adds a 33% reduction in all transportation emissions. You can make whatever assumption you want about how we get there–much greater use of public transit, more people walking and bicycling, a conversion of a large swath of private vehicles to EV’s, or some combination thereof.
After all that–NG conversion, doubling nuclear power, 33% reduction in emissions from non-nuclear electricity generation and 33% reduction in transportation emissions–we’re still at only a 40% CO2 reduction (1990), 50% (2008).
The end result is that when it comes to climate change, the difficulty of achieving meaningful greenhouse gas reductions coupled with the current unwillingness of people to grapple with those choices means that whatever forces are driving climate change won't be affected by anything we do, except of course to the extent that our actions are making things worse.
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