Today’s Question: 


Will the effort to move climate change legislation gather momentum?


Michelle D. Bernard, president and CEO of the Independent Women’s Forum, said:

No, with unemployment still at 9.7 percent, the public will have no taste for legislation that they properly recognize as impeding recovery and discouraging job creation.  A recent Gallup poll showed that the public is increasingly skeptical about global warming.  Nearly half of those surveyed thought the seriousness of global warming is “generally exaggerated.” That’s an increase from 4 in 10 in 2009, and 3 in 10 in 1997. In 2003, 6 in 10 thought temperature increases were the result of man; now just 5 in 10 do.It seems the climate-gate scandals, and revelations of missing data and errors in the IPCC have taken a toll on public opinion and will hinder legislators’ efforts to pass a climate change bill.Americans are increasingly recognizing it’s not just a fringe that questions whether man is causing global warming.  It’s a growing, respectable segment of the scientific community.  For too long, the media and academia have pretended that there were no questions left about global warming, and tarred those who questioned the “consensus” as the equivalent of holocaust deniers.   That’s not a healthy way to conduct an important policy debate.  
 The Independent Women’s Forum has recently launched a campaign, Balanced Education for Everyone, which focuses on the need for balance when it comes to classroom discussions about global warming.  Too often, schools show students movies like An Inconvenient Truth, which exaggerates the threat of global warming, leaving kids ill-informed and plain scared. Students (like the rest of the public) deserve to hear competing views-not propaganda-about what’s going on so they can draw their own conclusions.