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Global Warming: Wouldn’t the followers of Scientific American have a pretty good understanding of what’s really going on with the climate? If a reader poll is any indication, they’re skeptical man is heating the planet.

For years we’ve heard that scientists have reached a “consensus” that the earth is warming due to a greenhouse effect caused by carbon dioxide emissions resulting from man’s use of fossil fuels. No use in discussing it further, Al Gore and others have said. It’s happening.

Not every reader of Scientific American magazine is a scientist. But the responses of the 7,000 readers (6,767 as of Friday morning) who’ve taken the magazine’s online poll strongly suggest that claims of a consensus are, at best, an exaggeration.

More than three-fourths (77.7%) say natural processes are causing climate change and almost a third (31.9%) blame solar variation. Only 26.6% believe man is the cause. (The percentages exceed 100 because respondents were allowed to choose more than one cause on this question.)

Whether climate change is man-caused or natural, most respondents don’t believe there’s anything that can be done about it anyway. Nearly seven in 10 (69.2%) agree “we are powerless to stop it.” A mere one in four (25.7%) recommend switching “to carbon-free energy sources as much as possible and adapt to changes already under way.”

It seems even some of those who would endorse changing energy sources don’t believe the benefits are worth the costs (which indicates they aren’t taking the alarmists’ claims seriously). Almost eight in 10 (79.4%) answer “nothing” to the question: “How much would you be willing to pay to forestall the risk of catastrophic climate change?”

A small but apparently hard-core 12.3% say they’d be OK with spending “whatever it takes.” Only 4.9% choose “a doubling of gasoline prices” while 3.4% don’t mind paying “a 50% increase in electricity bills.”

That small, but hard, core likely makes up most of the 15.7% who think “the IPCC, or Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is an effective group of government representatives, scientists and other experts.” These holdouts are overwhelmed, though, by the 83.6% who agree the IPCC “is a corrupt organization, prone to groupthink, with a political agenda.”

This isn’t what we expected from the readers of a magazine that Cato’s Patrick Michaels says “has been shilling for the climate apocalypse for years.” Yet we’re not shocked. A new consensus is emerging as the unraveling of the global warming tale picks up speed. See more here. H/T Marc Morano, Climate Depot.

Also SEPP’s weekly newsletter TWTW reports Wall Street Journal article on a leaked White House memo contained the Quote of the Week. Apparently the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Treasury question the wisdom of huge subsidies for wind farms, thus are delaying approvals for massive amounts of subsidies under the stimulus bill. According to the article, a wind farm at Shepherds Flat, Oregon will receive a total of $1.2 Billion in Federal, state, and ratepayer subsidies. According to another article, the total permanent jobs created will be 35. This works out to over $34 Million per job. From: Wind Jammers at the White House, A Larry Summers memo exposes the high cost of energy corporate welfare, Editorial, WSJ, Nov 11, 2010