Bad news for Nobel laureate Al Gore and his not-too-merry band of tree huggers. Rasmussen Reports has released the results of its latest opinion poll, and for the first time, a majority (51%) of Americans are not buying into the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) myth:   

Forty-four percent (44%) of U.S. voters now say long-term planetary trends are the cause of global warming, compared to 41% who blame it on human activity.

Seven percent (7%) attribute global warming to some other reason, and nine percent (9%) are unsure in a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.

The percentage who believe that global warming is the result of long term cyclical warming and cooling of the earth has jumped ten points since Rasmussen last polled on the issue:

In April of last year, 47% of Americans blamed human activity versus 34% who viewed long-term planetary trends as the culprit. But the numbers have been moving in the direction of planetary trends since then.

Dr. Stephen Chu, who will be Secretary of Energy in the Obama Administration, will no doubt take a dim of view these poll results:

Dr. Chu is a Nobel Prize-winning professor of physics and molecular biology and Director of the famed Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is quietly passionate about the challenge and dangers of climate change, and has reoriented his research to pursue work on the subject. He understands it is difficult for people to see climate change as a clear and present danger, and is trying to challenge conventional wisdom and teach people to see how global warming is a crisis for our society. He is disturbed that despite the highly publicized release of the most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for global warming education, the public’s grasp of the crisis seems weak.

The likely reaction of the new Energy Secretary and the other AGW true believers on Team Obama to the results of this poll, will be to better “educate” the “ignorant” majority. Expect a flood of public service announcements on television and radio warning the great unwashed of the impending climate “crisis.”

Remember, government always knows better than the citizens what is good for them, and there’s no limit to the amount of the citizens’ money it will spend to constantly remind us.

– JP