What event would you deem the most influential in changing the way that AGW has been perceived by the national or international public since 1995?
Would it be the release of a certain IPCC report? An Inconvenient Truth? Kyoto? Climategate? Something else?
Note that I'm just asking about what made the biggest splash, be it good or bad.
Dana1981
Favorite Answer
Tough call. I think because the public is so in tune with the media, it has to be either AIT or Climategate. Kyoto barely registered with most people (at least Americans). And most people don't take much notice of scientific reports, even those as significant as the IPCC reports.
But millions of people watched AIT, and it raised public awareness on the subject. It also made Al Gore the face of AGW, which is why deniers constantly engage in ad hominem attacks on him. And because of the massive media (mis)covereage of Climategate, millions of people were influenced by that as well.
It's possible to compare the two by looking at some polling numbers. AIT came out in mid-2006, and Climategate happened in late 2009. After AIT's release, the percentage of Americans believing global warming is anthropogenic increased just 3%. After Climategate, it decreased 8%.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/126560/Americans-Global-Warming-Concerns-Continue-Drop.aspx
Of course these weren't the only events during the periods in question influencing the public perception on global warming. For example, if you look at the Gallup data asking Americans when they think the effects of global warming will begin to happen, the percentage saying 'now or within the next few years' dropped more from early 2008 to early 2009 than it did from early 2009 to early 2010. But there was also no significant increase from early 2006 to early 2007.
Based on those poll results, I'm going to have to go with Climategate. Considering that Climategate was a media-manufactured controversy and all the scientists involved have been exonerated, it's a pretty sad indictment of the American public that it appears to have had the largest impact on their perception of AGW. You know how public perception works - guilty until proven innocent, and even after proven innocent, you still carry the perception of guilt. An apparent scandal has more influence on the public opinion than decades worth of scientific research. That's just sad.
*edit @ bz* "An Inconvenient Truth...has been largely reversed by climategate and other revelations."
WTF did Climategate have to do with AIT? Geez deniers are just so crazy, you would think I'd be used to it by now, but the bizarre things they say just never cease to amaze me.
Bob's answer is interesting. It's the lack of things which weren't predicted to happen happening. I guess that means no matter what happened, people like Bob would not be convinced that AGW is correct, because he expects a 3.9°C warming to happen in just a few years, rather than approximately a century as climate scientists actually predict.
Rio
Economics and efficiency, is going to have a more profound effect. Though nether is tied to Climate directly.
Edit: Directly that would be "The Inconvenient Truth" or the Media, the average person hasn't a clue what the IPCC or Kyoto, or the Montreal agreements are.
My biggest splash came from the incompleteness of BVOC studies. Arguably droughts play a part but that's not a coherent factor, so if your looking for specifics. Obviously the Supreme ruling that CO2 is a pollutant has the upper hand, if its litigated your screwed.
Anonymous
It was the exposure of UN ambitions for a global governance structure, hidden in the draft texts for a global climate treaty , that was discovered by Willie Soon, and publicized by Christopher Monckton last year, that woke the public up to what was really going on in their name.
The subsequent revelations about large scale scientific advocacy , when seen in this light, were then enough to shatter the blind faith in science and the reluctant trust in politicians to do the right thing.
Earl Grey
The rise of Fox news.
People who trust Fox can use it as a misinformation hub and echo-chamber. Anything that disagrees is liberal bias.
A perfect example was when everyone on Fox went on and on about the statement by a scientist that there had been "no statistically significant warming in 15 years", when not one effing commentator spent a second explaining to the audience what the term "statistically significant" means in statistics (which totally changes the meaning of the statement). The term was twisted into oblivion by these Fox "news" liars and enemies of truth. It went from "Statistically significant" to just "no significant warming" then finally right down to just, "there has been no warming in 15 years". Then I watched in amazement as the show "Fox and friends" ran a headline saying, "scientist takes U-turn on global warming", when in fact the scientist in question said flat out in the interview that he agreed with the IPCC report, agreed that most of the warming in the last 50 years was anthropogenic, and the misleading headline was aired despite the actual interview being posted for all to see online.
This was another typical Sherrod moment, where Fox ran with the precise opposite of what was said, literally ridiculing GW science and a man who was directly saying that there is almost a 95% chance that the warming seen in the last 15 years was *not* due to random signal noise, but to anthropogenic causes.
Fox also took every chance it possibly could to consider the snow storms in D.C. as direct evidence of the impossibility of GW, despite that winter being one of the warmest recorded.
I rest my case. Fox news gives the uninformed a reason to stay that way.
All Black
Climate-gate proved once and for all that the IPCC was being fed doctored papers, fraudulently authored and peer-reviewed by a small group of climate scientists with a green agenda and an axe to grind. Not objective seekers after truth. This was the tipping point for me after dozens of nagging inconsistencies in the AGW theory had already alerted me to be skeptical of IPCC conclusions.
Combine that with the Himalayan Glacier lie - they are not contracting/melting, the Sea Level Lie - no change this century to the long term trend, the Sea ice lie - melting icebergs don't effect sealevels, the Ice Cap Lie - they are not melting, and the CO2 lie - yes it's a greenhouse gas, but one that gets weaker the more of it there is! The warming effect has always been known by Climate Scientists to be proportional to the Log of the concentration; that is, the warming effect of the first 20ppm is the same as that of the next 400ppm. Why didn't they tell the IPCC and the Public that instead of bleating about completely imaginary "tipping points"????
I repeat "absorption of infrared radiation - is a logarithmic function of concentration. This curve is the familiar Beer's Law." This means if it is getting warmer, and that is now doubtful, it cannot be fixed by reducing CO2.