Gallup Poll: "What, Me Worry?" Not About Global Warming.

Gary North - April 01, 2015

This is a great April Fool's story. It's true, but the global warmers wish it were a trick.

Americans are not buying the global warming story. We have had 25 years of alarms from the anti-growth hypesters, but Americans have tuned them out.

"What, me worry?" Not lately.

The latest Gallup poll reveals no change since 2013. The upward concern -- not much -- in 2014 was an anomaly.

Here is Gallup's assessment.

The results are based on Gallup's annual Environment survey, conducted March 5-8. Gallup trends on many of these items stretch back more than two decades. Last year's increased worry has proved temporary, with the current level of worry on each of the problems back to about where it was in 2013.

Despite ups and downs from year to year in the percentage worried about the various issues, the rank order of the environmental problems has remained fairly consistent over the decades. Americans express greater concern over more proximate threats -- including pollution of drinking water, as well as pollution of rivers, lakes and reservoirs, and air pollution -- than they do about longer-term threats such as global warming, the loss of rain forests, and plant and animal extinction.

The amount Americans worry about the various threats tends to rise and recede in unison, with concern higher in the late 1980s and early 1990s during the revival of environmentalism, and in the late 1990s and early 2000s amid the economic boom. Since then, Americans' worry has fallen, with concern dipping to record lows on most issues in 2010 or 2011. The current level of worry on each issue remains at or near those record lows.

Then Gallup presented a chart of 26 years of concern over the environment. The long-term trend is down.

This is the case of the boy who cried "wolf" too often. For a while, voters cared about global warming. No longer.

Life hangs in the balance, Al Gore tells us. Voters don't believe it. Voters have not sent representatives to Congress who are voting to undermine economic growth by global warming legislation.

No President has ever bothered to submit to the Senate the Kyoto Treaty on carbon dioxide emissions. It was never ratified. The treaty died on the last day of 2012.

The global warming movement is a political corpse. It has cooled to room temperature.