According to this recent Rasmussen poll, "just 35% of U.S. voters now believe global warming is caused primarily by human activity." This compares with 47 percent in a similar April 2008 poll. More revealing, however, is that " 47% think long-term planetary trends are mostly to blame for global warming."

While I can understand that the cold winter and less than knowledgeable "weathermen" have had an effect on public opinion, it hardly explains the public's fixation on planetary trends.  I doubt that the public has that much of an appreciation of the mathematics of interplanetary movements on climate, but if they did, they would understand that planetary trends have indeed been taken into account by climatologists, and that these trends alone cannot explain the global warming trends of the past century.

However, if you look at what the climate change deniers are saying, they have reduced the message to a few simple graphs that correlate historical variations in temperature with solar or planetary activity, ignoring the fact that climatologists have already analyzed these trends extensively as a part of their overall analysis. The deniers make it sound like the climatologists have ignored or distorted critical pieces of information.

Furthermore, the false talking points and distortions of the climate change deniers are repeated over and over again by right wing politicians and their media hosts, primarily Fox News pundits. They demand 100 percent perfection in the scientist's analyses, cherry picking any minor aberration or weather event that seemingly undermines the cause.  But they avoid subjecting their simple analyses to the peer review process that scientists use to validate their findings.  It's an "anything goes" mentality where important facts are dismissed or ignored and the contrary message is reduced to a few simple sound bites...false but effective.  And why?  Just follow the money as to which corporations are contributing to the climate change deniers' false messages and you get the answer.