I know it may sound far fetched for a country that hosts the most renown universities in the world but it is what it is.
But surely, they don't "believe" it. They must be somewhat educated to get elected to office. Surely they see the evidence of 97 scientists saying "yes" and 3 saying "no" who all have ties to big oil.
There is no debate about it any more, the scientific is as close to unanimous on the answer as it is possible to get.
How can they possibly deny it? Is it purely political? Is it bribes - sorry lobbying - money that blinds them? Is it religion? Is it just ignorance. I just cannot get my head round it.
There is no other comparable country with the same view that I am aware.
1) "The climate is not warming" — obviously false, unless you believe in dramatic conspiracy theories and falsification of evidence on a grand scale.
2) "The models are wrong" — this is on slightly stronger footing, since at least it's not attacking empirical evidence, but rather is discounting the extrapolations one can make from a highly simplified model of forcings and feedback effects.
3) "Warming is not chiefly caused by human activity, and thus we should not restrain our economy to stop it" — given the timing of recent warming this seems to go against the evidence, but there is also no counterfactual case against which to do real science. Once you get into the causal domain, things get muddier, leaving room for interpretation.
4) "Warming is happening, humans are causing it, but energy technology improvements + mitigation efforts will mean that ROI on carbon cutting measures today will be negative" — this is the most sophisticated argument I believe, and the hardest to refute. It comes down to how willing one is to roll the dice on the chance for catastrophic "runaway warming" in exchange for better quality of life today.
One reason I believe you see these arguments emerge chiefly in the US is the fact that most global warming reduction schemes seem, by necessity, to involve international cooperation and the ceding of national sovereignty to some minor degree. Many Americans find this idea to be an absolute non-starter, generally disliking things with a whiff of globalism about them.
What's the solution? Man, if I knew I wouldn't be sitting here commenting on a web forum...
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/425232/climate-change-...
Personally, my perception is that it is much, much, much warmer now than when I was a child 40 years ago, and I can't think of anyone I've ever talked to on the subject that disagrees.
And yet:
https://globalclimate.ucr.edu/resources.html#q3
Averaged over all land and ocean surfaces, temperatures have warmed roughly 1.33°F (0.74ºC) over the last century, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (see page 2 of the IPCC's Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report Summary for Policymakers (PDF)).
I could also imagine quite well that the perception gets distorted. One may be much less likely to notice a change from 24°C plus or minus 1°C in summer than to notice that there is less time with snow because the temperature that used to be just below freezing point got pushed just slightly above it.
Especially in places where the temperature used to hover just around freezing point for a long time, even a pretty small increase in temperature might easily shorten the perceived duration of winter as indicated by snow lying around by weeks.
I also wonder whether growing up on itself makes a difference. Time speeds up as we grow older and a meter of snow looks certainly very different to me today than it look to me when I was a small child.
We can probably stop philosophizing about 'when I was young' etc.
To be nit picky, the belief is no longer in global warming, but climate change. Those who promoted global warming got their predictions terribly wrong, and that's why we refer to it as climate change today. They got it right this time I'm sure.
In some places that change results in a wetter (and perhaps cooler) climate, so climate change is easier to talk about. But I guess here we all understand the difference between local and global effects, and between climate and weather, right?
Right, but only 0.74ºC in the last 100 years, which may very well be a normal variance. So original projections were wrong, and they had to change the claim being made.
The majority of the 0.74C is in the second half of that 100 years, just like one would expect.