Gingrich's Limbaugh troubles spell out climate divide

— -- Tired of debates? Poor political folks. Even politicians don't seem to like each other much these days, judging from their commercials.

So, why do folks keep listening to them? Especially about science. Especially about global warming.

"Scientists and scientific studies have a minimal effect on public opinion," says Drexel University sociologist Robert Brulle, lead author of a new climate attitude study in the Climatic Change journal. "What really drives public opinion on climate change are the ways that political elites describe the science."

What do those scientists and those studies that people are ignoring have to say? Well, a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences two years ago found that more than 97% of working climate scientists agreed that the globe was warming. Burning fossil fuels is the likely leading reason for the rise, they agreed, an increase of about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit in average global surface temperatures over a century, according to the U.S. National Academy of Science. That's just how it looks, whether we like it or not.

No matter. Public opinion nationwide has ebbed and flowed about climate change, with one recent national poll showing 50% of people still don't know all this. Instead they believe that there is a lot of disagreement among scientists about climate change.

Why? In the current Climatic Change journal, Brulle and colleagues looked at 74 public opinion surveys from 2002 to 2010, in a bid to figure out the contradiction in opinions between experts and everyone else.

Maybe heat waves in some years and bad winters in others, for example, explained yo-yo's in public opinion? Nope, extreme weather events "had no effect" on overall opinion. Scientific studies themselves didn't move the needle much either.

How about those awful news reporters? News reports did affect public opinion, Brulle says, but the news stories were just the tail wagging of the dog, where about 85% of the time reporters were just reacting to fights about climate science already making waves elsewhere, not delivering any real news. "They were just reflecting events, not driving them."

What really mattered? You guessed it. Politicians.

"The two strongest effects on public concern are Democratic Congressional action statements and Republican roll-call votes, which increase and diminish public concern, respectively," finds the study. Not that people are paying attention to those statements and votes, C-SPAN junkies aside, but they are the concrete expressions of the "political polarization" over climate change that finds an outlet in commercials, news stories, speeches and everything else, that the study suggests, in turn, is really shaping how people think about global warming. In short, we don't like politicians much (Congress now enjoys an approval rating around 11.5%, down around telemarketer levels) but we are happy to let them think for us.