Thread: Canadians out number Americans (on AGW belief)

Climate change an issue in Canada: Poll - Politics - CBC News

I guess I find these stories particularly interesting because I don't see that much of a difference between the average American and the average Canadian. Maybe I'm wrong. Anyway roughly 80% of Canadians believe in global warming, while only 58% of Americans do. How can this be explained?



Also, 65% of Canadians believe that their government should do something to help fix the problem, while only 43% of Americans feel the same way. Are Canadians just a bunch of hippie beatnik good for nothing do-gooders?

US media sucks, they only care about making as much money as they possibly can. The US, compared to other countries on the same level, is very poorly educated. US politicians, in general, are possibly the least qualified and most corrupt compared to any other civilized world country. Many Americans have grown into believing everything should and does happen very quickly, so the idea of having polluted the atmosphere for a century and it only starting to have an affect over the past couple decades or really start to have an affect over the next few decades doesn't come into their scope of thought. That, for the most part, should be enough to explain the difference between the two countries. But there's also the non-human factor that it's very likely the affect of global warming is, at the moment, much worse in more northern countries, such as Canada.

It can be explained very easily. The energy industry lobbying groups in the US are extremely powerful, so the political class generally has either denied or tried to marginalise global warming as an issue. This filters down through the media and to the general public.

Agreed lobby groups are far too powerful in USA and Americans need to look at the rest of the world

Global warming is real and it is affecting the whole world. I'm just disapointed how more Americans are either uninformed or just don't care about it. I applaude all the countries that are taking steps to help minimize and reverse global warming for the future.

the answer is simple: The average Canadian is quite smart while the Average American is less than smart :)

LOL - The funny thing is a global warming thread was the genesis for the Brain Stew section:

http://www.torrent-invites.com/enter...tml#post172421

As for the USA vs Canada on global warming... Well that's a little harder to explain. Unfortunately, the USA is especially gullible to media hype (usually spurred on by political and/or corporate influence). So every 5 to 10 years the USA picks a new cause and runs around the world preaching to other countries that the world will end unless 'they' change their ways. Who created the movie "An Inconvenient Truth?" Yes, an American politician. Plus humans have a long history of feeling guilty about everything (premarital sex, making money, being happy, etc). Yes, we've all wondered if god, mother earth, or aliens were going to eventually judge and punish the human race. So these types of doomsday premonitions are extremely easy to sell. Preachers have been playing to our end of the world fears for thousands of years...

I think the USA is starting to outgrow the global warming hype because we were one of the first countries to fall for the propaganda. I remember watching "Captain Planet" (the Eco Hero cartoon) 20 years ago. Yes, according to those cartoons we should have all been killed by ozone holes, acid rain, nuclear fallout, and global warming by now. LOL

Take a look at the last 450,000 years before assuming humans are the cause of global temperature fluctuations:

Originally Posted by Vegas

LOL - The funny thing is a global warming thread was the genesis for the Brain Stew section:

http://www.torrent-invites.com/enter...tml#post172421

As for the USA vs Canada on global warming... Well that's a little harder to explain. Unfortunately, the USA is especially gullible to media hype (usually spurred on by political and/or corporate influence). So every 5 to 10 years the USA picks a new cause and runs around the world preaching to other countries that the world will end unless 'they' change their ways. Who created the movie "An Inconvenient Truth?" Yes, an American politician. Plus humans have a long history of feeling guilty about everything (premarital sex, making money, being happy, etc). Yes, we've all wondered if god, mother earth, or aliens were going to eventually judge and punish the human race. So these types of doomsday premonitions are extremely easy to sell. Preachers have been playing to our end or the world fears for thousands of years...

I think the USA is starting to outgrow the global warming hype because we were one of the first countries to fall for the propaganda. I remember watching "Captain Planet" (the Eco Hero cartoon) 20 years ago. Yes, according to those cartoons we should have all been killed by ozone holes, acid rain, nuclear fallout, and global warming by now. LOL

Take a look at the last 450,000 years before assuming humans are the cause of global temperature fluctuations:

Even if not man-made, It's a little scary to see every major ecological system on earth be in serious decline at the same time. Thats all I gotta say.

Vegas, it's actually pretty clear from the data you showed that humans are causing changes to the climate. You can see from the EPICA and Vostok data that only over the past small amount of time, hard to tell from the graph, that the temperature changes have leveled out. There is absolutely no reason for that to occur unless something new came into the equation. And that would be humans.

But that isn't the topic here. Considering that the US is the only country so far to not have ratified the Kyoto Protocol and that it had to be bribed into going to a UN climate change meeting a few years ago, it's a fairly sad state of affairs. Many US politicians still believe in the Frontier Ethic and if they keep in power there's going to be problems down the road.