Lack of knowledge leads to fear and panic. Having knowledge leads to understanding and comfort.

As for Global Warming, the more we know the less it makes sense!

I find it interesting that the above headline states something entirely different from what the article says. It would seem to give a negative connotation to people who are informed about AGW that I think is unwarranted.

Informed people do not care less about GW, they are less concerned. The reason they are less concerned is that they understand that the entire basis of AGW as reported is based upon wild estimates of incomplete data sets. Further, they understand that the supposed "problems" of GW are based more upon imagaination than reality. Beyond that, they have come to the understanding that the "dangers" of a warming world as reported by those who promote AGW have been becoming more catastrophic at nearly exponential rates.

Beyond even that, they come to the quick realization that this topic is entirely more political than it is scientific. We have several longtime posters herein that are quite well informed yet continue to be concerned. It is in the body of those posts that a reader can come to the quick realization that politics plays as important a role in their posts as the sceince.

Generally, therefore, the more informed a person is, the more they understand that there really is nothing to be concerned about for the vast majority of the world. Delving deeper, you can certainly see a vast array of benefits to the planet relative to a cooling world.

Here is a paper that will allow us to know more about the Sun's actual influence and care less about CO2.

http://www.fel.duke.edu/~scafetta/pdf/opinion0308.pdf

Excerpt:
[...] Thus the average global temperature record presents secular patterns of 22- and 11-year cycles and a short time-scale fluctuation signature (with apparent inverse power-law statistics), both of which appear to be induced by solar dynamics. The same patterns are poorly reproduced by present-day GCMs and are dismissively interpreted as internal variability (noise) of climate. The nonequilibrium thermodynamic models we used suggest that the Sun is influencing climate significantly more than the IPCC report claims. If climate is as sensitive to solar changes as the above phenomenological findings suggest, the current anthropogenic contribution to global warming is significantly overestimated. We estimate that the Sun could account for as much as 69% of the increase in Earth's average temperature, depending on the TSI reconstruction used. Furthermore, if the Sun does cool off, as some solar forecasts predict will happen over the next few decades, that cooling could stabilize Earth's climate and avoid the catastrophic consequences predicted in the IPCC report.

I respectfully suggest that the more we know about alarmist or agenda-driven subjects the more we understand them for what they are. If the matter is of great concern, then we research the subject and become less concerned because it is greatly overblown. It has nothing to do with a 'Deficit Model' and more to do with an informed public.

Perhaps the more people know about AGW, the more they realize that individual, or even national action is futile. There is serious discussion among the more a pessimistic part of the climatological community, that by now, even global action would be futile.

I certainly found that interesting--the more we know, the less we care. If this is something that you'd like to know more about...

Do you mean "If this is something you'd like to care less about"? Sorry--I couldn't resist. : )

Fear of the unknown is a great human motivator. Once a person knows more about any subject, much of that fear is alleviated.

Regarding global warming and/or climate change specifically, the more a person knows about it the less susceptible that person becomes to hype and propaganda.

I don't know if it is more information or the quality of information that causes people to "care less." We are bombarded daily with negative reports about our world and admonitions from enviros that blame us for all of the problems. We are powerless to change natural occurrences so we simply file these alarmist claims in the waste basket. After a while people become numb to the threat du jour.

There is a huge credibilty gap between predicted catastrophes and reality. The more one investigates these claims the more one realizes that they are based mostly on computers not observations. Then there are the data manipulators like Hansen and Mann whose sloppy work has been challenged and found to be full of errors.

You can only cry "wolf" so many times before people stop listening. Educated people will not accept the AGW hypothesis as a null hypothesis. The burden of proof is on those who claim its validity not the other way round.

1) I seriously question their definition of well informed. If people do not understand the link between their consumption and climate change, then they are obviously misinformed;

2) The major source of information for most people is a mass media that has an aversion to the notion of personal responsibility and taking action. As a consequence much of the popular media information on climate change is couched in terms that either make no link to individual behaviour, or outright deny that any such link exists.

More on learning about the reality of the issue.

This is entertaining and enlightening:

Cirque de Solar Power: New York Conference Puts Lie to 'Consensus'
by Christopher C. Horner
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=25306#continueA

Excerpt:

A strange thing happened last year Down Under. A shark ate a kangaroo.

That wasn�t the odd part. Inexplicably, the media found themselves unable to blame the event on global warming.

This is bizarre because �A brief perusal of stories from the last several years reveals that warming has been blamed for a huge array of problems, including increased teenage drinking, stray cats, poison ivy, and sharks. More seriously, global warming has also been blamed for widespread malnutrition and outbreaks of disease, Hurricane Katrina, and the crisis in Darfur.� Don�t forget impoverished fashion houses, hard times for Bulgarian brothels and attacks by big cats.

Hi Paul,

While I appreciate your efforts, I am going to have to throw in that I find the recent censorship to be stifling and nearly incomprehensible.

Mike Kaulbars:

"If people do not understand the link between their consumption and climate change, then they are obviously misinformed"

It strikes me as either naive or arrogant in the extreme to assert that you understand the link between your behavior and climate change. To suggest that anyone who doesn't purport to understand this link is "obviously misinformed" is patently absurd.

Mike,
Where have you been? Not a day passes when some scientist, activist, or politician reminds us that our actions are responsible for artic ice melt, coral bleaching, increased droughts, increased floods, increased tropical cyclones, and heatwaves. You cannot even watch any of the so-called educational channels without being bombarded by AGW Alarmists. It's on the local news, newspapers,included in church sermons, shown on cable TV, and plastered everywhere on the internet.

If you wish to berate someone, berate ALGORE -the post-child of AGW hypocrisy. How can the average person take this alarmism seriously when he has a carbon footprint the size of Texas.

Mike:
(1)You have it backwards. The fact is that the more people become educated on AGW the more they DO understand the link between their consumption and climate change and they come to the conclusion that that link is much less significant than they were led to believe.
(2) Initially the less informed have as their major source of information the mass media who have an interest only in alarmism, (to tell everyone that things aren't so bad doesn't sell) and films such as "Inconvenient Truth" which are full of wild predictions that are grossly exaggerated. When they do begin to investigate further, they find that they have been lied to and the resultant reaction is what we are seeing. Why do you think the AGWers don't want debate and try to censor any dissenters?

Mike:

Can you tell me the sources of MSM that do not assert personal responsibilty relative to GW?

Cause every single news source I look at, from local TV, national TV, and national internet tells me that I'm a "bad" person for not thinking of AGW first in all my actions at least once in every broadcast.

I would love to watch the news and not hear about the evil american humans killing the planet.

And don't even go into the fact I drive an SUV.

"Scientists still do not appear to understand sufficiently that all earth sciences must contribute evidence toward unveiling the state of our planet in earlier times, and that the truth of the matter can only be reached by combing all this evidence. . . It is only by combing the information furnished by all the earth sciences that we can hope to determine 'truth' here, that is to say, to find the picture that sets out all the known facts in the best arrangement and that therefore has the highest degree of probability. Further, we have to be prepared always for the possibility that each new discovery, no matter what science furnishes it, may modify the conclusions we draw."

Alfred Wegener
1915

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/wegener.html

FYI, Paul, Brett blogged about this very recently.

As I noted in a comment on that post, Brett's summary of it made the same (understandable) mistake you did, which is to confuse self-perception of being informed with actually being informed. Unfortunately, there's a huge gap between the two.

To illustrate this, note that Rush Limbaugh tells his listeners that he's giving them all the information they need to be fully informed about AGW, and that anyone who tells them anything different (the IPCC, Gore, etc.) is lying. Well, climate change is a complex scientific topic with some large implications for the future, and the tactic is effective since it's very comforting to believe that one knows enough to decide that it has an easy solution or isn't a problem at all.

So your headline should perhaps say instead: "We Care Less When We Mistakenly Think We Know More"

The paper has a footnote that makes it clear that the level of informedness they asked about is completely subjective, and indeed is largely unrelated to how informed the survey respondents really are:

"It should be noted that the information effects reported in this article are limited to self-reported information. Objective measures of informedness about global warming and climate change might produce different effects. And indeed there is some scholarly evidence to suggest that this might be the case. In their models of mass assessments of the risks of genetically modified foods, Durant and Legge(47) found that self-reported informedness and objective measures of informedness were almost entirely uncorrelated, and that their effects worked in opposite directions. Clearly, this is an area that is ripe for subsequent research."

When people are busy shoveling the snow out of their driveways day after day, they don't have a lot of time to worry about global warming.

This must be very disappointing to those in the scientific community and the media who are working so hard to convince everyone that it is hot and dry outside.

QUEBEC CITY, Quebec (Reuters) - Although Canada is one of the snowiest countries in the world, a series of violent "snow rage" incidents reveal that even the locals have their limits.

Police in the French-speaking province of Quebec said on Wednesday that people were fighting over snow clearing and even parking spaces.

Quebec City police said they had been called to a dozen violent disputes about snow from one property ending up on someone else's. The drifts outside some houses are 12 feet and higher.

http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUSGOR25761920080312?feedType=RSS&feedName=oddlyEnoughNews&rpc=22&sp=true

NASA refuses to publish study?

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=290213857214322

carbon dioxide did not cause the end of the last ice age, a new USC study published in Science suggests.

USC College researcher shows that deep-sea temperatures rose 1,300 years before the buildup of atmospheric carbon dioxide, ruling out CO2 as driver of the last ice age's meltdown.

http://www.usc.edu/uscnews/stories/14288.html

"The more we know the less we care" is patently not the case as proven by simple observation.

Just look at what's happening in the world. The more we know, the more we do! The mere fact you have a blog about it these days shows quite clearly that the more we know, the more we care.

It is ironic that the deniers are quite happy to cash in on the thing they like to claim doesn't exist and that we shouldn't care about by spending all their time writing about it! Lol. Clearly the deniers care about it! A LOT!

Bloom:

You know, you can replace Limbaugh with Gore, Mann, DiCaprio et al, and replace IPCC with the Heartland Institue and get exactly the same statement.

The very fact that one of the "leaders" of the AGW movement is a committed politico should really tell you that this is about nothing more than the politics and control of human society. And sure, if that's what they want, great, I just wish they'd be honest about it instead of hiding behind a made up catastrophe.

Here's a nice little series of Al Gore Debunking Videos compliments of our friends at Newsbusters and Youtube. Enjoy!

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2008/03/12/ad-campaign-address-dangers-al-gores-global-warming-policies

Despite the strength of our knowledge, skeptics are still small in numbers.

The media continue to overwhelm the masses with scare stories while providing daily green tips that they claim can help stem global warming and put the climate back on track. Meanwhile, the politicians and legislators seek ways to enact new taxes and regulations to show the masses they are "doing something" to battle evil global warming.

My hope -- and I believe it's our last hope -- is that the masses will wake up before they realize that "doing something" is going to dramatically alter their quality of life. The masses will begin to seek the knowledge the skeptics already have about this nonsense, and maybe, just maybe, there will be a collective HELL NO! shouted across the lands.

Why should the headline not read

"When all we know is from people using AGW to gain market share or gain funding, we tend to be more concerned."

Hi Jim Greene,

What exactly is it that "deniers" are denying? The correctness of a few computer models?

Perhaps you are denying the 17 feet of snow I'm looking at out the window?

S.B.

I can't remember who said it, but -

It's not what you don't know that hurts you. It's the things you know, that just aren't so.