Irresponsible Journalism Using Opinion Poll Science.

If you went to CNN's Cover Story today here's what you'd see:

Be worried, be very worried

The climate is crashing, and global warming is to blame
Sunday, March 26, 2006; Posted: 11:27 a.m. EST (16:27 GMT)

Editor's note: The following is a summary of this week's Time magazine cover story.

(Time.com) —— No one can say exactly what it looks like when a planet takes ill, but it probably looks a lot like Earth.

Near the end of the article summary you'd come across this bit:

A 10—member House delegation did recently travel to Antarctica, Australia and New Zealand to meet with scientists studying climate change. "Of the 10 of us, only three were believers to begin with," says Rep. Sherman Boehlert of New York. "Every one of the others said this opened their eyes."

But lawmakers who still applaud themselves for recognizing global warming are hardly the same as lawmakers with the courage to reverse it, and increasingly, state and local governments are stepping forward.

The mayors of more than 200 cities have signed the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, pledging, among other things, that they will meet the Kyoto goal of reducing greenhouse emissions in their own cities to 1990 levels by 2012. Nine northeastern states have established the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative for the purpose of developing a program to cap greenhouse gasses.

So, by golly, the people will take things into their own hands if our federal legislators won't do anything about 'glow—ball vorming.'  And you can be sure that they are concerned, at least if they're Democrats or independents, according to the latest TIME/ABC News/Stanford University poll:

Six in ten Americans (62%) think much can be done to curb global warming and 52% favor government mandates. A majority (61%) say they would support a government mandate on lowering power plant emissions, and 87% support tax breaks to develop water, wind and solar power. But 81% oppose higher taxes on electricity, 68% oppose higher gasoline taxes and 56% oppose giving companies tax breaks to build nuclear power plants.

The partisan gap on global warming seems to be shifting, according to the poll. In 1998, 31% of Republicans and independents alike were sure that global warming was happening, compared with 39% among Democrats. Today, 46% of Democrats and 45% of independents are certain, but only 26% of Republicans feel that way, according to the poll.

You can't read the whole thing unless you're a Time subscriber. Personally, I wouldn't recommend taking the hit.

Why? Keep this one fact in mind when it comes to the question of global warming: the basic mechanism that forms the basis of the computer climate models used to predict global warming that is induced by human activities that emit carbon dioxide is not being observed. That is, the warming of the troposphere due to heat retained in the atmosphere because of the accumulation of CO2 is not occurring. Satellite observations indicate no overall warming of the atmosphere from between 5,000 ft. and the tropopause — the point at which the stratosphere begins, which in turn varies depending on latitude. See chapter 5 of the Cato Institute's 'Satanic Gases.' 

This does not mean that the earth's climate is not changing. What it means is that human activity may very well not be responsible for the warming if, in fact, it is taking place. Even if it's taking place at an accelerated pace as the Time article contends.

Perhaps we're still in the rebound phase from the end of the last ice age. Michigan, where I reside, is supposedly pushing ever upward as it springs back from the now lost overbearing weight of the glaciers. Remember that our ability to make long—term predictions regarding the earth's climate and weather patterns is severely limited if not practically non—existent.

And why is global warming necessarily a bad thing? Disaster movie science isn't much better than opinion poll science that tracks people's impressions of what the weather trends are in their respective individual counties, and is not something we should be using to formulate national policy. Policy that would definitely have dramatic impact on the economy and probably very well little on the climate

Dennis Sevakis   3 26 06