The full text of the release is after the jump.

Today, the White House announced President Obama will travel to Copenhagen on Dec. 9 to participate in the United Nations Climate Change Conference, where he is eager to work with the international community to drive progress toward a comprehensive and operational Copenhagen accord. The White House also announced that, in the context of an overall deal in Copenhagen that includes robust mitigation contributions from China and the other emerging economies, the President is prepared to put on the table a U.S. emissions reduction target in the range of 17% below 2005 levels in 2020 and ultimately in line with final U.S. energy and climate legislation.

This announcement was promptly met with strong support from a diverse group of leaders, representing Congress, business and environmental organizations.

Key quotes are highlighted below:

Former Vice President Al Gore:

“President Obama took an important step today with the announcement that he will attend the global warming treaty talks in Copenhagen.

This action is another example of the significant change in policy on the climate crisis.…Those who feared that the United States had abdicated its global responsibility should take hope from these actions and work towards completing a strong operational agreement next month in Copenhagen and guidelines for negotiators to complete their work next year on a comprehensive treaty.

It is my hope that the Senate will support the President and move quickly to pass climate and energy legislation early next year in order to ensure that the world moves toward speedy solutions for the climate crisis.”

Senator John Kerry:

“This could be one hell of a global game changer with big reverberations here at home. For the first time, an American Administration has proposed an emissions reduction target and when President Obama lands in Copenhagen it will emphasize that the United States is in it to win it. This announcement matches words with action. The Obama Administration is now undeniably mustering bona fide leadership on climate change, not merely departing from Bush Administration intransigence and ideology,” Kerry said. “By announcing a provisional target, contingent on the support of Congress, the President has defined a path to an international agreement that challenges the developed and developing nations to fulfill their obligations. It lays the groundwork for a broad political consensus at Copenhagen that will strip climate obstructionists here at home of their most persistent charge, that the United States shouldn’t act if other countries won’t join with us. It is an enormous shot in the arm for those of us working overtime to get a comprehensive bill passed in the Senate. And the fact that the President will attend the Copenhagen talks underscores that the Administration is putting its money where its mouth is, putting the President’s prestige on the line.”‪‪

Senator Barbara Boxer:

“I am so pleased that the President is going to Copenhagen to address one of the most pressing issues of our time – global warming. The goal he announced today, in the range of 17 percent, reflects the work that was done in the House of Representatives and in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. It is realistic, it’s smart, and it’s credible.”

Senator Joe Lieberman:

“Obama’s announcement of an emissions goal “has laid the groundwork for productive negotiations in Copenhagen, including a significant commitment by China to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions.”

Representative Ed Markey:

“By putting a serious number for U.S. emission reductions on the table, the President just called the world’s bet and then raised it for our negotiating partners. The President’s attendance in Copenhagen demonstrates his personal commitment to getting a deal that is good for the U.S. and good for our clean energy future. It’s a powerful statement that the U.S. is back, ready to lead the world….In the effort to protect the planet from climate change, these are the most significant travel reservations ever made. With one trip to Copenhagen, President Obama will put U.S. leadership back on the map in the fight against carbon pollution.”

Lew Hay, Chairman and CEO of Florida Power & Light:

“We commend the president for his efforts and leadership as the world strives for agreement on reducing greenhouse gases. Here at home, it’s critical that Congress act to cap and price carbon emissions while providing financial protection to energy consumers,” said Lew Hay. “The U.S. energy sector is ready to lead the world into a low-carbon future, but we need the right price signals to point the way.”

Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy:

“I applaud President Obama’s travel to Copenhagen, demonstrating the United States’ commitment to action on climate change. His presence will help ensure a successful outcome at the global climate talks, driving new investment, strengthening our global economic recovery, and moving us forward in building a productive, competitive economy here at home. The rules that Congress is developing will complement Copenhagen’s global road map, supporting our business objectives to provide clean, efficient, affordable, and reliable energy to our customers.”

Frances Beinecke, President of NRDC:

“President Obama is taking the full power and prestige of the highest office in the land to Copenhagen. He goes with a serious climate protection proposal from the United States that shows we mean business. It shows we’re ready to lead. And it will help advance efforts to secure commitments for action from other countries around the world. We urge Congress to support the President and pass clean energy and climate protection legislation that will put millions of Americans back to work, reduce our reliance on foreign oil and create a healthier future for our country and the world.”

Jonathan Lash, President of the World Resources Institute:

“President Obama’s willingness to go to Copenhagen and put numbers on the table are two necessary pieces to make a binding global agreement possible. The 17 percent number is consistent with what Congress has been debating and we hope legislation eventually reaches an even higher target. The President’s leadership in Copenhagen will have an even greater impact if he is able to give the world a timetable for when he expects a bill on his desk.”

One example of how the divergence squeezes candidates came in 2000, when most voters approved of President Bill Clinton’s work, but most had an “unfavorable” view of his post-impeachment character. That flummoxed Al Gore’s campaign when it thought about how to handle Clinton. According to Gore campaign vets like Bob Shrum, Clinton was toxic in states that he’d won twice and where the economy was booming, like Iowa.

Since Sarah Palin doesn’t have a job outside of her book tour, her “favorable” rating is all she has. Not only is it lower than Barack Obama’s favorable rating, it’s lower than a credible national candidate can really stand — Republicans argued that Hillary Rodham Clinton might be unelectable as a presidential candidate when her “unfavorable” rating was a good 10 points lower than Palin’s.

SuperFreakonomics and Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) (HarperCollins, WDCpix)

The early reviews for “SuperFreakonomics” have been harsh. The book, wrote Brad Johnson in The Guardian, is a “super freaking mess.” According to environmental journalist Joe Romm, it contains “many, many pieces of outright nonsense” and “major howlers.” In The New Republic, Brad Plumer attacked the book for “garden variety ignorance.” And all of those pans appeared before the book actually hit the shelves this week.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

Authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner didn’t face anything like this three years ago when they published “Freakonomics,” a surprise smash that sold 4 million copies. Unlike that book, which was based entirely on Levitt’s economic research from the University of Chicago, “SuperFreakonomics” is a guided tour of other peoples’ contrarian research and ideas. The final chapter deals with global warming, characterizing the beliefs of pessimistic environmentalists as “religious fervor,” and arguing that the climate change solutions proposed by Al Gore and many Democrats are ineffective and unworkable. It repeats claims that environmental journalists have debated or debunked for years. As a result, the authors are getting some early support from climate change skeptics who feel that attitudes toward their stances are getting brighter.

“It reminds me of what happened when Michael Crichton wrote ‘State of Fear,’” said Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy at the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, which gets some of its funding from the energy industry. “The problem for the left is that there are still some people who don’t toe the party line who have megaphones. And anyone who has a megaphone, they’re going to go after.”

Ebell’s reference to “State of Fear” demonstrated just how meaningful “Freakonomics” could be to people who challenge conventional wisdom about climate change. The late author’s novel, published in 2004, cast as villains environmentalists and eco-terrorists who were perpetrating hoaxes to maintain their power. Coming after Crichton had made some well-publicized and much-maligned remarks skeptical of climate change science, the book was pilloried by environmentalists. It sold more than 1.5 million copies anyway.

In the years since, many climate change skeptics feel that the environmental movement has lost ground culturally and politically. A Pew Research poll released on Thursday found that the number of Americans who believed that man-made global warming was occurring, or that a hotter planet was a serious problem, had fallen precipitously. In April 2008, 71 percent of Americans said that global warming was happening, and 47 percent said it was man-made. In the new poll, only 57 percent of Americans said any global warming was happening, and 36 percent said it was man-made. Many skeptics are taking that poll as a sign that their message is getting through.

“There’s just so much … skepticism now,” said Matt Dempsey, a spokesman for Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the ranking member of the Environmental and Public Works Committee and one of the most prominent skeptics of climate change in Washington. In making the case that Americans are growing more skeptical, Dempsey said, “the Pew poll is one data point. This book is another data point.”

Levitt and Dubner have engaged their critics in the environmental movement, accusing them of “smears” for suggesting that the climate change chapter of “SuperFreakonomics” makes them “global warming denialists.”

“I think anyone who actually reads that chapter will come away with a better fact-based understanding of the actual issues surrounding global warming,” Levitt told TWI. “That said, I also think that partisans love to cherry-pick, regardless of what side of the aisle they sit on.”

Indeed, the climate change skeptics who are excited about “SuperFreakonomics” and the environmentalists who are criticizing the book are focusing on some of the same material. The controversial chapter opens with ironic quotes from Newsweek and New York Times articles from the 1970s that published frightening, if slapdash, research about “global cooling.” That phony scare is a favorite of climate change skeptics, who have attempted to bring it back from obscurity in books and in films like the just-released “Not Evil Just Wrong.”

“The man who came up with that theory, Stephen Snyder, is now one of the people scaring everyone about global warming,” said Martin Hertzberg. The retired meteorologist, who lives in Colorado, has been skeptical of man-made global warming for decades. He has converted the liberal journalist Alexander Cockburn to the belief that, as Cockburn quoted him saying, “the greenhouse global warming theory has it ass backwards,” while getting into scraps with environmental journalists like George Monbiot.

“The idea of man-made global warming is fear-mongering and hysteria,” said Hertzberg. “There are a large number of know-nothing journalists and environmental lobbyists working hard on this, and they’re completely wrong. Al Gore is not a meteorologist. He knows nothing about science.”

Levitt and Dubner do not challenge all of Gore’s arguments about climate change science. What they do challenge is the idea that man’s use of carbon is speeding along a major catastrophe, and that something like cap-and-trade could be the answer. “It’s illogical,” they write, “to believe in a carbon-induced warming apocalypse and believe that such an apocalypse can be averted simply by curtailing new carbon emissions.” Prominent skeptics told TWI that such an argument, from such high-placed experts is long overdue.

“They’re absolutely right,” said Patrick Michaels, a senior fellow in environmental studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “Look at the numbers. If every nation that has obligations under the Kyoto Protocols adopted the restrictions of Waxman-Markey [cap-and-trade legislation], you’d see a 7 percent drop in warming by 2100, about 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit.”

Michaels, who has not read the book but is planning to pick it up, saluted Levitt and Dubner for tackling an issue that few popular economists touch. “It’s about time that people who do popular economics tell people the truth,” he said. “Fortunately, the planet is not warming.”

While Levitt and Dubner do not actually argue that the planet is not getting warmer, some skeptics are hopeful that the book could direct people to studies that suggest that. “I think it is very important to question the [environmentalist] true believers,” said Patrick Moore, an early member of Greenpeace. Now, as the chairman of Greenspirit Strategies, he does some work for energy companies and supports new nuclear power. “[It's important] as they display all the qualities of doomsday fanatics. There is ample reason to be skeptical, including the fact that the world has been warmer than today for most of the history of life, and the fact that CO2 has been much higher than today through most of the history of life.”

The controversial phrasing and criticism in “SuperFreakonomics” is in the book to make another point. Levitt and Dubner present research into geoengineering, a Gordian Knot solution to a warming planet that, for example, would replicate the effect that a massive eruption of volcano ash can have in making the planet cooler. It’s not a popular idea among some skeptics, who argue that bogus data is responsible for much of the global warming panic. One of those skeptics is Ross McKitrick, a professor at Canada’s University of Guelph whose research suggests that numbers suggesting a spike in global temperature are out of whack. He was hopeful that “SuperFreakonomics” could cut through the “groupthink and political correctness” and expose environmental journalists such as Joe Romm as dishonest activists who can’t accept criticism.

“He’s a former Clinton staffer who runs an attack blog funded by Soros money,” said McKitrick of Romm, whose ClimateProgress blog is a project of the Center for American Progress. “He’s only respected by people who approve of his inflammatory tactics and relentless politicization of the issue.”

Climate change skeptics are excited by the prospect of the general public reading Levitt and Dubner, but they’re expecting the authors to remain targets of an active and desperate green movement. “It will make people think and say, yeah, that’s right, it doesn’t make sense to do this,” said Ebell. “But that will just make the environmentalists even angrier.”

Phelim McAleer, the director of “Not Evil Just Wrong,” said his movie had begun to inspire protests and interruptions. His advice for the authors: Develop tough skin.

“Be prepared for it to get worse before it’s going to better,” said McEleer. “They don’t like questions, as Al Gore showed. Enviromentalist journalists are environmentalists, and they will always side with the environmental establishment. Don’t expect fairness from journalists.”

noteviljustwrong.com

On October 7, Phelim McAleer joined the Society of Environmental Journalists. Three days later, he took advantage of his new membership to attend former Vice President Al Gore’s speech to the group in Madison, Wis., and to rush up to the microphone afterward to ask a question. Reading from a small scrap of paper, an assistant filming the whole thing, McAleer asked Gore about a court case brought by British parents who challenged the veracity of nine facts in Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” and argued that the film should be taken out of schools.

“Do you accept the findings,” asked McAleer, “and have you done anything to correct those errors?”

Image by: Matt Mahurin

Gore had heard this before. McAleer, a journalist-turned-documentary filmmaker, was promoting an upcoming documentary, “Not Evil Just Wrong,” which takes aim at environmentalists in general and Gore in particular. The film’s official premiere was only a week away. So Gore tried to move on. “Well, I’m not going to go through all of those,” he said. “The ruling was in favor of the movie, by the way. The ruling was in favor of showing the movie in schools.”

But while dismissing the question, Gore joked that one of the controversies in his documentary was whether polar bears were endangered. “Word didn’t get to the polar bears,” he chuckled.

McAleer saw an opening and took it. “Well, the number of polar bears have increased, and are increasing.”

Gore raised an eyebrow. “You don’t think they’re in danger, do you?”

“The number of polar bears have increased.”

“Do you think they’re endangered?”

“The number of polar bears have increased.”

The event’s organizers mobilized, cutting the sound on McAleer’s microphone as he continued to pose questions. Moderator Tim Wheeler called it a “Warholian moment,” implying that McAleer had wrought 15 short minutes of fame out of the encounter. He had a point. Within 48 hours, McAleer had appeared on “Fox and Friends,” “Your World With Neil Cavuto,” and “Lou Dobbs,” and video of the encounter had appeared on “The O’Reilly Factor.”

Phelim McAleer on Fox News (YouTube)

This is shaping up to be a big week for McAleer and his co-director Ann McElhinney, and a celebratory moment for climate change skeptics everywhere. Two years ago the pair of Irish journalists broke the mold for conservative documentaries with “Mine Your Own Business: The Dark Side of Environmentalism,” a look at a Romanian town’s battle against foreign environmental activists who wanted to stop the building of a local gold mine. That portrait of poor, benighted Europeans flummoxed by jet-setting elitists set the stage for “Not Evil Just Wrong: The True Cost of Global Warming Hysteria,” which was funded, according to McAleer, by less than $1 million from wealthy real estate investors. The slick documentary, by turns sardonic and grim, could do for opponents of the green movement what “No End In Sight” did for Iraq War opponents or — ideally — what Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” did for McAleer’s foes.

“The strengths of the climate change skeptic movement, the ‘let science be science’ movement, have always been intellectual,” said Fred Smith, the president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank that goes after greens. “The strength of the alarmist movement has always been emotive. This movie brings the human element in. It’s the first attempt, of a serious type, to put a human face on disastrous environmental policies.”

The film’s publicity campaign has targeted the conservative activists who should be most interested in watching Al Gore get ripped to shreds. Its promotional team includes movement new media pros like Danny Glover, formerly of National Journal, and Elizabeth Terrell, formerly of the David All Group. They’ve held pre-screenings for bloggers and brought the film to every major conservative conference of 2009, including the Values Voter Summit and Americans for Prosperity’s Defending the American Dream Summit. At the Conservative Political Action Conference, McAleer and McElhinney spoke right before Rush Limbaugh, whose presence helped them fill the Omni Shoreham’s ballroom in Washington.

“The left has figured out how this is done,” said Andrew Breitbart, the conservative new media mogul who anchored the CPAC panel. “This is primary tool they use to influence political debate: one-way communication using film and television. We need to get into this game. Here you have a movie that is fact-based, that tugs at the heartstrings.”

The 90-minute documentary alternates among interviews with climate change skeptics, embarrassing encounters with environmentalists, and emotional looks at people whom McAleer and McElhinney say are being victimized by well-meaning greens. Some of its content will be familiar to conservatives who’ve long considered Gore, Greenpeace, and other environmentalists nothing but hoaxters.

Patrick Moore, a founder of Greenpeace who has become a critic of the group, appears in several interviews to make the case that environmentalists are hyping a non-existent threat of man-made global warming. “I don’t think it would be a bad thing for this earth to warm up,” says Moore, arguing that man-made warming might be staving off the effects of an ice age. In a brutally sarcastic narration, McAleer says that “environmentalists claim, and children believe, that melting glaciers and colder ice will cause catastrophic sea level rise.” To bring that point home, he interviews schoolchildren in Northern Ireland who’ve been convinced by Gore-style propaganda that sea levels are rising and polar bears are dying.

McAleer and McElhinney quickly move on to more obscure topics. In interviews with conservative civil rights leader Roy Innis and Ugandan activists, they argue that Rachel Carson’s campaign to ban the pesticide DDT was a case of junk science winning out over facts, and one that has led to the death of millions of Africans from malaria. A white American scientist is made to look like a buffoon who is horrified by the prospect of a DDT-soaked Uganda with more people and fewer birds. “Imagine Elton John without a piano!” she says.

That isn’t the only trick the directors borrow from Michael Moore. The case against cap-and-trade legislation is made with visits to Vevay, Ind., a small midwestern town with a profitable coal plant that employs thousands of people. McAleer found the location, he told me, because the energy company went to Vevay instead of a town in Spain after that country passed stricter environmental regulations. Vevay residents like Tim and Tiffany McElhany are shown fretting about the jobs they’d lose if coal was banned. The film ends with Tiffany McElhany trekking to Al Gore’s Tennessee mansion to deliver a letter, begging him to look again at the science and reconsider his ways. It’s a perfect illustration of the film’s message: Not only are environmentalists misguided, they’re ruining the lives of ordinary people of whom they know nothing.

“I hear a lot about clean coal,” McAleer said at a Washington screening of the film. “I don’t know the science but I think clean coal is crap. That guy in the film, Tim McElhany, has a white car, and he lives beside a coal plant.”

Some conservative films like last years “An American Carol” have been given mass releases that backfired when audiences failed to show up. “Not Evil Just Wrong” is bypassing that route, being sold directly over the Internet for $20, with buyers encouraged to wait until October 18 at 8 p.m. ET and press “play” at the same time. The website tells prospective viewers that the diffuse release plan can be a way to “have your own cinematic tea party.” According to McAleer, around 4,500 copies of the film have been distributed for screenings that could include dozens of people. McAleer, who is based in Washington will join Breitbart, Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund, and several conservative scholars for a special screening at the Heritage Foundation; on Tuesday afternoon, the conservative American Family Association forged a deal to stream the film live for anyone else who wanted to see it.

“We may at last be getting our Michael Moore,” said Fred Smith. “A virtuous Michael Moore!”

Good morning, everybody.  I want to just make a brief comment about the fact that the two young journalists, Euna Lee and Laura Ling, are safely back with their families.  We are obviously extraordinarily relieved.  I had an opportunity to speak with the families yesterday once we knew that they were on the plane.

The reunion that we’ve all seen on television I think is a source of happiness not only for the families but for the entire country.

I want to thank President Bill Clinton — I had a chance to talk to him — for the extraordinary humanitarian effort that resulted in the release of the two journalists. I want to thank Vice President Al Gore who worked tirelessly in order to achieve a positive outcome.

I think that not only is this White House obviously extraordinarily happy, but all Americans should be grateful to both former President Clinton and Vice President Gore for their extraordinary work. And my hope is, is that the families that have been reunited can enjoy the next several days and weeks, understanding that because of the efforts of President Clinton and Gore, they are able to be with each other once again.

So we are very pleased with the outcome, and I’m hopeful that the families are going to be able to get some good time together in the next few days.

Thank you very much.

Look! He didn’t deny that the former president’s diplomacy rewarded North Korean behavior!

Let’s see: the United States got back two imprisoned Americans. The North Koreans got a photo op with former President Bill Clinton. Right now, Clinton, former Vice President Al Gore, Lee and Ling are finishing up remarks on a Los Angeles tarmac. There is no sense in which this outcome is “better” for North Korea. If Bolton wants to sit down with the Lee and Ling families and tell them that their daughters’ freedom wasn’t worth a few snapped pictures, that’s his right, but I wonder what their response would be.

Perhaps a better way of thinking of the situation is that there really are cases where diplomacy can succeed at minimal cost. If North Korea feels like it won something by the Clinton visit, fine. No minimally serious cost/benefit assessment can result in a conclusion that the United States lost more than it gained here. Letting the North feel like it gained something when it didn’t isn’t rewarding bad behavior. It’s basic diplomatic savvy.

“I haven’t seen similar columns from you or, frankly, anybody else saying things like Al Gore should go back to Tennessee and Al Gore [is] somebody who is very vocal, very much out there,” she said.

Funny thing about that. Dick Cheney has been calling Obama a threat to national security since he took office. Here’s how Al Gore responded after 9/11 to a Democratic audience:

Resurfacing before a partisan crowd, former Vice President Al Gore declared tonight that ”George W. Bush is my commander in chief” and implored Democrats and Republicans alike to offer Mr. Bush their unwavering support.

The Times described that September 30, 2001 appearance as Gore’s “first major political appearance since he lost the White House.” Somehow, when Bush chose not to respond to, say, the U.S.S. Cole attack, Gore found a way not to accuse Bush of imperiling the nation, preferring such high-profile fora as teaching a journalism class at Columbia. Nor did he, after more Americans died from terrorism under Bush’s watch than under any other presidency, press a partisan attack. Because that would have proved he was a small man during a big moment. Strange how that works.

iStockphoto

As the Obama administration moves forward with its green agenda, climate change concerns have been elevated to a top priority. Yet in the midst of the deepening economic crisis, public opinion appears to be moving in the opposite direction.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

A Gallup poll released last Wednesday found a six percent drop from last year in the number of people who are worried a “great deal” or a “fair amount” about global warming, after that number had been increasing for the previous five years. It also showed that after a similar five-year climb, the percentage of respondents who believe that the effects of global warming have already begun had decreased by eight points over the past year. A record-high 16 percent of Americans now believe that global warming will never occur; in more than ten years of polling, no more than 11 percent of respondents had ever expressed this opinion.

The day after the poll was released, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and a leading climate change skeptic, took to the Senate floor and celebrated the results as a triumph of information. “You should never underestimate the intelligence of the American people,” he proclaimed. “Sadly, that is exactly what the promoters of man-made climate fears have been consistently doing, and the American people have consistently rejected climate alarm.”

Inhofe attributed the shift in public opinion to new studies from prominent scientists that he said contradicted the prevailing climate change arguments embraced by former Vice President Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “A steady stream of peer-reviewed studies, analyses, real world data and inconvenient developments have further refuted the claims of man-made global warming fear activists,” he said.

Gallup (click to enlarge)

On the other side of the climate debate, the Center for American Progress’ Joseph Romm, an acting assistant secretary of energy under Bill Clinton and an influential environmental activist, also chalked the changing attitudes up to a change in propaganda, albeit with a different slant.

“Objectively, in the last two years, the science makes painfully clear that climate risk has grown sharply,” he wrote on his blog, Climate Progress. “That means if the public has come to the reverse view, it must be due to the messaging and the media and the misinformers.” While “the vast majority of scientists are consistently bad at messaging,” he explained, global warming skeptics have “never stopped their single-minded disinformation campaign.”

Yet public opinion experts have a different explanation for the poll results.

Michael Dimock, associate director of the Pew Research Center, argues that the economic downturn has trumped all other concerns. “In a time of economic crisis, people are less willing to focus on an issue like global warming because they see other, more pressing issues,” he said.

A similar phenomenon took place after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Dimock explained. “In January 2002, a few months after 9/11, the public’s sense of priority on a whole host of important issues just fell through the floor,” he said. “They expected the government, almost to the exclusion of other important things, to focus on this issue.”

Karlyn Bowman, who studies public opinion at the American Enterprise Institute, published a comprehensive report in April 2008 that tracked polls on the environment and global warming over the past several decades. Her data showed that in the three years following the 9/11 attacks, fewer people said they were worried about global warming than in any other year in the past decade.

Similarly, she argues, the economic crisis has now pushed environmental considerations aside. “The economy is just swamping all other issues right now,” she said. “Nothing else comes close.”

According to Paul Mohai, a professor of environmental policy and public opinion at the University of Michigan, this trend fits into historical patterns. “It’s not unusual at all that when there are economic problems in the country, concerns about the environment drop off,” he said.

Pew Research Center (click to enlarge)

The current economic crisis, of course, is the most severe in decades, and the Gallup poll is not the first to show its effects on public attitudes toward climate change. Every January, Pew conducts a poll to assess people’s “top priorities” for the government to address. This year, global warming came out on the very bottom of the list.

“Out of the 19 things that we ask people to rank as priorities, it’s number 19,” said Dimock. Only 30 percent of respondents considered global warming a “top priority,” down from 38 percent in 2007 and 35 percent in 2008. Other non-economic concerns likewise tumbled down people’s list of priorities, including crime, immigration and “protecting the environment” generally.

While the economy is likely the leading cause of reduced concern about global warming, these experts also posit a number of other possible explanations. Bowman and Mohai argue that Americans tend to feel less worried about a problem when they believe that the government is addressing it. In this case, confidence in President Obama and the Democratic congressional leadership to tackle global warming has led people to feel less personally worried about the issue. “During Republican administrations, people’s concerns about the environment go up, and during Democratic administrations they go down,” said Mohai.

Bowman’s 2008 study backs up this claim. In every poll she recorded since 1971, people have had greater confidence in the Democratic Party to protect the environment. In the latest poll included in her study, a February 2008 Pew poll, 65 percent of respondents expressed greater confidence in Democrats on this issue, compared to just 21 percent for Republicans.

Dimock, on the other hand, points to Al Gore’s Oscar-winning 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” as a possible complement to the economic causes of the change in public opinion. He hypothesizes that as a highly polarizing figure, Gore may have solidified Democratic support for his environmental agenda while turning off some Republicans and independents. “You can imagine how, with people feeling like Al Gore was lecturing them on global warming, so to speak, they might have some sort of backlash, because it was no longer coming from a neutral source. It was coming from a political source.”

Nonetheless, Dimock believes that the struggling economy is far and away the primary cause of the shift in public opinion. “The 800-pound gorilla is this economic crisis,” he said.

Inhofe’s claim that the change stems from the propagation of new scientific studies that cast doubt on man-made global warming theories garnered little support from these experts. “If that is indeed happening, I haven’t seen it on the news, and I follow it pretty closely,” said Mohai.

So what might cause Americans to renew their global warming concerns? In the lingo of Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, it’s the economy, stupid.

“If and when people feel more comfortable about the economy turning around, their focus can turn to other issues,” said Dimock.

Just as President Obama has tied his economic agenda to an environmental one, it appears that Americans’ global warming concerns will rise and fall with their 401(k)s.

Despite the increased political and rhetorical emphasis on climate change under the new administration, the survey found only 60 percent of respondents are worried a “great deal” or “fair amount” about global warming, down from 66 percent last year. Forty-one percent said that the media coverage of global warming is exaggerated — a record high in more than ten years of polling:

This increase in skepticism took place across the political spectrum — and most sharply among independents — although a much higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats believe coverage to be exaggerated:

Notably, respondents under the age of 30 showed no change here, while all age ranges over 30 showed a significant increase in skepticism of global warming coverage.

Now, as Gallup points out, it may be argued that concerns about the environment tend to decline in times of extreme economic hardship. Except that the number of people who are worried about other environmental issues stayed relatively constant, while fears of global warning decreased:

Another explanation, of course, is that the media really do exaggerate reports of climate change, and as a result people have grown increasingly skeptical. But given the airtime and print space devoted to global warming deniers and cap-and-trade critics, I have trouble buying this argument.

UPDATE 3:25 PM: Turns out there’s an explanation I hadn’t considered: People are becoming more skeptical because man-made climate change is a myth, and the truth is finally getting out. That’s what Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) will tell the Senate in five minutes. From an email just sent out by his press man:

Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., Ranking Member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, will deliver a lengthy speech about the public’s growing skepticism about man-made global warming fears. “These dramatic polling results are not unexpected as prominent scientists from around the world continue to speak out publicly for the first time to dissent from the Al Gore, UN IPCC and media driven man-made climate fears. In addition, a steady stream of peer-reviewed studies, analyses, real world data and inconvenient developments have further refuted the claims of man-made global warming fear activists,” Inhofe will state.

A Barack Obama barn painting in Ottawa County, Ohio. (flickr)

COLUMBUS, Ohio — A few days back, I was in the basement of the statehouse standing on a large map of Ohio, complete with its 88 counties, etched in the floor’s marble. I walked southwest and stood on Butler, a conservative red-meat county where I was born and my parents still live. It was home, or at least a representation of it. But looking over the remainder of Ohio seemed like staring at a foreign land, whose terrain, interests, habits and ways of life could be as far removed from life in Butler County as Zaire.

To really understand Ohio, you need a far-reaching anthropological knowledge that few possess. Sometimes, people “get it.” This would most certainly include the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama, now engaged in an all-out assault to win the state’s 20 electoral votes.

Obama’s forces have hunkered down in every part of Ohio, including the more conservative southwest and southeast regions. That’s not what Sen. John Kerry’s team did four years ago when it focused on only the state’s three largest cities — Cincinnati, Cleveland and Columbus. Today, in areas where Democratic volunteers haven’t been seen by voters in a generation, the party has field offices with paid staffers numbering in the hundreds. Two weekends ago, Obama volunteers knocked on the doors of 340,846 homes. The farthest distance separating Obama field offices is 38 miles. It is an unprecedented effort to win over a highly unconventional state.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

To some, this Ohio campaign looks like a microcosm of Obama’s 50-state strategy. In truth, though, it is a strategy taken from the playbook of Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, whose 2006 victory ended 15 years of Republican rule. Strickland, whose campaign manager Aaron Pickrell now heads the Obama effort here, deployed an all-inclusive 88-county strategy, as did Democrat Sherrod Brown, who won a U.S. Senate seat that year.

A series of state scandals involving GOP officials helped the Democrats — including “coingate,” in which millions of dollars from the state workers’ compensation fund were invested in rare coins. Of the $50 million invested by GOP officials, only $12 million was ever accounted for. Meanwhile, Gov. Bob Taft, scion of a celebrated Republican dynasty, was convicted while in office of not disclosing gifts from lobbyists. By the end of his term, Taft was the most unpopular governor in Ohio history, according to polls.

“Brown and Strickland ran a true statewide campaign and won, and we’re following that plan,” said Obama’s Ohio deputy communications director Tom Reynolds, who was sitting in a former church in Columbus that has been converted into the Democratic Party headquarters.

Yet Brown’s and Strickland’s statewide approach most likely will not translate into a landslide win for Obama in Ohio. While Obama leads Sen. John McCain by a slim margin, all indications are that this election will be as close as the previous two presidential contests. That’s because there are districts that will not elect a Democrat. Trust me on this. If Obama can get even a toehold in a Republican district or, at the very least, contain his margin of defeat in it, he simply has a better chance in a race that promises to be tight.

“We’ve got people running the campaign … who helped Strickland crack the code in this state,” said David Wilhelm, Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign manager and former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. “They understood you’ve got to campaign everywhere. … Strickland ran a campaign that talked about bread-and-butter issues where he spoke plainly to everyone. Sherrod ran on this idea of economic populism that is central to his image as a public servant.”

The Obama team has also adopted some of the tactics used by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton,  who crushed him in the primary here.

“They’ve learned a lot from Hillary’s campaign,” Wilhelm, an informal adviser to the Obama campaign, acknowledged. “In order to win Ohio, you have to campaign in little patches and be willing to do tours of the Ohio River Valley. You can’t skip that. They’ve learned those lessons well.”

Both Al Gore and Kerry had sought to increase turnout in such traditional Democratic strongholds as Cleveland. What was missing — particularly by Kerry — was any effort to campaign in culturally conservative areas, where George W. Bush won by margins of 2 to 1.

“The biggest mistake that national Democrats make when they look at Ohio … is that Hamilton, Cuyahoga and Franklin counties account for less than 30 percent of the general election voters,” Wilhelm said. “You tell that to somebody in Washington, and they say, ‘What are you talking about? Cincinnati, Columbus, Cleveland –  that’s the state.’ Well, it’s not the state, and it’s not even close to being the state.”

As state Rep. Ted Celeste, brother of the former Democratic governor, told me recently: “If you look at the map, one of the things you see are the number of medium- and small-sized towns. Kerry just simply did not do a good job in counties where Bush absolutely destroyed us — the smaller counties.”

It’s one thing to use someone else’s playbook. It’s another thing to execute it. Last Thursday when I sat down with Ohio Democratic consultant Greg Haas, who ran the state campaign for Clinton in 1992, he disputed the similarities between Obama’s and Strickland’s campaigns.

Haas pointed out — correctly — the effect, or lack thereof, of having a Democratic governor in office while running for president in Ohio. While Republican George Voinovich was governor in the 1990s, Clinton won Ohio twice.  With the Democrat Celeste in office in 1984 and 1988, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush won, respectively.

“The way Ted Strickland won is not the way Barack Obama will win,” Haas told me, recalling Strickland’s race against the African-American Ken Blackwell, who had become the state GOP’s darling.

“First of all,” Haas said, “race is the opposite factor here. In the small town where I grew up, where I’m from, I was stunned about how many people would say to me when I was back there, ‘I’m voting for one of your guys for the first time ever. I’m not voting for that black guy.’ And these were fundamentalist Christians, and as far as they were concerned, Ted Strickland was a baby killer.”

But Haas went on to say,”You cannot win Ohio by turnout alone. You have to run a battle on two fronts. You have to make sure you get your vote out — but you also have to convert.

“And conversion is not necessarily getting a Republican to turn over, or getting independents,” Haas continued. “It’s also running strong enough in Republican areas that you don’t motivate them to turn out. We make the assumption that every Republican votes, because so many of them do. But we’re talking about the difference between 78 percent turnout and 81 percent of the Republicans. Take that three percent away — obviously you have a significant factor in the race. For the average Republican who votes almost every single time … the day [may get] crowded, and all sorts of things are going on on Election Day. Do you feel like you just got to get out there and vote? Or, well, do you say, ‘It’s not so bad. I’ve got to go to the grocery store. My one vote’s not going to matter.’”

Gov. Ted Strickland (flickr)

While Haas takes issue with drawing parallels between Strickland and Obama, he marvels at the tactical approach the Obama campaign has taken. This includes correcting the big tactical flaw in Kerry’s Ohio campaign: He did not advertise on general broadcast radio, while Bush paid for a mighty presence on the AM dial.

This might seem trivial. But the fact is that a large chunk of voters get most of their news over the radio. These are the men and women living in the exurbs and outer rings of Ohio cities, people who travel 45 minutes to get to the office, then make the same long trek home at night. Like not putting people on the ground in GOP counties and towns, what Kerry essentially did was cede the airwaves and news cycle to Bush. In 2008, try driving in Ohio for 10 minutes without hearing an Obama ad.

“The Kerry campaign in 2004 on the ground did one of the best jobs to date,” Haas said. “It did a much better job than we did in ‘92. But their problem was the Republicans did a fantastic job, and the air strike, air campaign from the national folks was flawed. What the Obama folks are doing is second to none. It is exponentially greater than any Democrat or Republican campaign has done before. They have over 500 employees, and they’ve been on the ground since June. They’ve got paid organizers in Zanesville, Ohio…”

When I interrupted by pointing out the field office in my hometown, Haas continued, “Yeah, exactly. I was a field director for Celeste in ‘82. We sent in a volunteer organizer into Butler County for the final three weeks of the campaign. And no one had done that before. And we won the county — by the way. The fact is, we’ve got  level of activity on the Obama campaign that the McCain campaign cannot match.”

Should Obama win the election, it will be because his campaign sees Ohio as I did in the statehouse basement. Rather than see it as the monolithic land mass that changes color every time CNN national correspondent John King touches it, Obama’s team knows the state is more of a quilt — with each patch requiring careful tending.

Strickland and Brown knew this, and they might have shown Obama the tactics. They might have given him the path. Now he must make their terrain his own.