Shorter RP Jr.: “Accepted can only mean accepted in the most limited sense, not accepted enough to do much about it.”

Let’s see: “My neighbor Bob makes too much noise at night. Those who make too much noise at night should be dealt with harshly.”

It seems to me that such phrasing, even stated as directly as I have here, means clearly that I’m referring not just to Bob, but an entire class of noise-making miscreants, *all* of whom should be treated harshly. It’s even unambiguous of interpretation, I’d say.

But it is nice to see that the old journalistic personal loyalty still holds, although I must say it causes me to lack confidence in the veracity of pretty much anything I see in the mass media unless I have independent verification of it.

BTW, there is absolutely no problem with Pachauri making such a comment. Good for him. At this point we’re a little past needing to be polite. Denialism is killing people already, and it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

When you write: “Sherwood suggests that, as was the case with the other theories, anthropogenic warming will eventually become largely accepted throughout society. But will it come too late?”

I wonder what you and Sherwood would define as “largely accepted” and what that would mean practically? In my view the science already is “largely accepted” pretty much everywhere around the world (see TCF for data) …

Thanks!

Let’s start with a recent poll by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. It finds that acceptance of the fact that there is solid evidence for warming has grown over the past year, to 63% of those surveyed. But only 38% in that survey responded that they felt it was because of human activities. I’m sure you can point to other surveys that show a higher percentage of belief in the anthropogenic nature of warming. But I don’t believe any survey shows it much above 50%. I take a smidgen more reassurance in that number than some other people I know. But it doesn’t come even remotely close to reflecting what the climate science community has found.

Compare public beliefs with the 97-98% of climate researchers most actively publishing in the field who say humans are causing warming and other climatic changes. And in the recent Climate Change in the American Mind survey, just 13% of respondents knew just how overwhelming that consensus is among climate scientists.

So rather than saying acceptance of AGW among the public has been “slow,” maybe I should have said that there remains a fairly large mismatch between what the public thinks about anthropogenic climate change and what climate scientists think. Also, that mismatch has persisted for many years. Let’s chalk it up to writing at 2 a.m.

Of course, this doesn’t say much about the lack of policy action. I am not arguing that the percentage of Americans who believe that anthropogenic climate change is real and significant must rise before we can get meaningful action. (Although don’t you think it would help?) This post was a fascinating article that describes a number of historical precedents — heliocentrism and relativity — to explain why major scientific paradigm shifts take a long time, and frequently involve vituperative debate and attacks on scientists.

So Roger, do you take exception with the general thrust of the article? Or with some of the particulars?

Question for you, can you substantiate this statement with data?

“the slow acceptance of anthropogenic climate change by the public”

However, this particular piece was none of the above. It was a seemingly traditional reported story. Someone was there, reporting on what transpired. At least that’s how I took it. So the bar is higher for that kind of journalism, to my mind.