General Debate 23/03/11

The number of Americans who are worried about global warming has fallen to nearly the historic low reached in 1998, a poll released Monday showed. Just 51 percent of Americans – or one percentage point more than in 1998 – said they worry a great deal or fair amount about climate change, Gallup’s annual environment poll says.

In 2008, a year after former US vice president Al Gore and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the Nobel Peace Prize, two-thirds of Americans were concerned about climate change. The rate of concern among Americans has fallen steadily since then to 60 percent in 2009 and 52 percent last year.

The poll also found that for the first time since the late 1990s, a minority of Americans – 49 percent – believe global warming has already begun to impact the planet, down sharply from more than six in 10 Americans who three years ago said climate change was already impacting the globe.

“The reasons for the decline in concern are not obvious, though the economic downturn could be a factor,” Gallup analysts say, citing a poll from two years ago that shows that in the minds of Americans, economy takes precedence over environment.

The pollsters also found that a plurality of Americans – 43 percent – think the media exaggerates the seriousness of global warming, and that how Americans view climate change and its impacts varies widely depending on their political beliefs.

Just over a quarter of Americans believe reports in the press about climate change are generally correct, while nearly three in 10 believe the US media understates the effects of global warming.

Conservative Republicans are three times as likely as liberal Democrats to think the media is exaggerating the severity of global warming, while Democrats are roughly twice as likely as Republicans to be concerned about climate change and to think it is already impacting the planet.

The year that Americans’ concern about the effects of climate change hit its lowest point, 1998, was the year that the Kyoto Protocol, the UN treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, was open for ratification. Eighty-four countries ratified the treaty. The United States was not among them.

Gallup’s poll was based on telephone interviews conducted March 3 and 6 with 1,021 US adults.

6 thoughts on “General Debate 23/03/11”

“In 2008, a year after former US vice president Al Gore and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the Nobel Peace Prize, two-thirds of Americans were concerned about climate change. “

I wonder if it was the Nobel Prize or their propaganda film that caused the spike in numbers. A prize is a prize is a prize, but a little propaganda spruiked by a well-rehearsed and generally not-hateable spokesmuppet goes a hell of a long way with the MTV generation.

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Yeah well, its not for the mainstream media that the popularity has dropped. They’re still failing to do their job and propagandising for it as hard as they ever have. This perversion of journalism into an advocacy operation is one of the most repugnant dimensions of the left’s takeover of our institutions. If only they’d subjected Al Gore to half the skepticism they did Ken Ring.

BTW- WordPress server is down. Unable to make posts.

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When you constantly promise armageddeon and it fails to arrive people tend to stop taking you seriously…

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“Conservative Republicans are three times as likely as liberal Democrats to think the media is exaggerating the severity of global warming, while Democrats are roughly twice as likely as Republicans to be concerned about climate change and to think it is already impacting the planet.”

Which just goes to show what most Conservatives have known for a long time: Liberals are –
• more gullible
• less in touch with reality
• unable to distinguish between fact and myth
• refuse to question Liberal governments or their stooges

Like I’ve said before, Liberalism/Progressivism is a mental illness – what else can you attribute such a complete disassociation with realisty to?!

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Gee, that was “lucky”.
Evidence of “chance and lots of time”, or of a Master Designer?

In the Blink of Bird’s Eye, a Model for Quantum Navigation

European robins may maintain quantum entanglement in their eyes a full 20 microseconds longer than the best laboratory systems, say physicists investigating how birds may use quantum effects to “see” Earth’s magnetic field.

Quantum entanglement is a state where electrons are spatially separated, but able to affect one another. It’s been proposed that birds’ eyes contain entanglement-based compasses.

Conclusive proof doesn’t yet exist, but multiple lines of evidence suggest it. Findings like this one underscore just how sophisticated those compasses may be.

“How can a living system have evolved to protect a quantum state as well — no, better — than we can do in the lab with these exotic molecules?” asked quantum physicist Simon Benjamin of Oxford University and the National University of Singapore, a co-author of the new study. “That really is an amazing thing.”

Many animals — including not only birds, but some mammals, fish, reptiles, even crustaceans and insects — navigate by sensing the direction of Earth’s magnetic field. Physicist Klaus Schulten of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign proposed in the late 1970s that bird navigation relied on some geomagnetically sensitive, as-yet-unknown biochemical reaction taking place in their eyes.

Research since then has revealed the existence of special optical cells containing a protein called cryptochrome. When a photon enters the eye, it hits cryptochrome, giving a boost of energy to electrons that exist in a state of quantum entanglement.

One of the electrons migrates a few nanometers away, where it feels a slightly different magnetic field than its partner. Depending on how the magnetic field alters the electron’s spin, different chemical reactions are produced. In theory, the products of many such reactions across a bird’s eye could create a picture of Earth’s magnetic field as a varying pattern of light and dark.

‘N@C60 is quite a sexy, interesting, promising molecule.’

However, these quantum states are notoriously fragile. Even in laboratory systems, atoms are cooled to near–absolute-zero temperatures to maintain entanglement for more than a few thousandths of a second. Biological systems would seem too warm and too wet to hold quantum states for long, yet that’s exactly what they appear to do.
[…]
To put this in perspective, Benjamin introduced an exotic molecule called N@C60, a geometric cage of carbon with a nitrogen atom inside. This molecule is one of the best-known laboratory systems for maintaining entanglement. “The cage acts to shield the atom, which is storing the information, from the rest of the world,” Benjamin said. “It’s considered to be quite a sexy, interesting, promising molecule.”

But at room temperature, even N@C60 only holds entanglement for 80 microseconds, or four-fifths of what birds appear to be doing.

“I think this is a very nice paper that attacks the problem from an interesting angle,” said Schulten, who was not involved in the work. “They use a hugely simplified model, but they make an interesting point. Entanglement could stay protected for tens of microseconds longer than we thought before.”

“The bird, however it works, whatever it’s got in there, it’s somehow doing better than our specially designed, very beautiful molecule,” Benjamin said. “That’s just staggering.”