Global Warming Not High on List of American's Environmental Concerns

Now some fresh pickings from the Political Grapevine:

Seems Like Old Times

On this Earth Day 2008, a new Gallup Poll finds that only about one-third of Americans say they worry a great deal about global warming — roughly the same percentage as in a similar poll 19 years ago.

In May of 1989, 35 percent of respondents expressed serious concern about global warming. The current figure is 37 percent.

The numbers are similar when asked whether immediate, drastic action is necessary: 35 percent said yes in April of 1995; 34 percent said yes last month.

And global warming is nowhere near the top of the environmental problems people worry a great deal about. No. 1 is drinking water pollution, followed by several other water concerns. The loss of natural habitat for wildlife, air pollution, rain forests and the ozone layer all top global warming, which comes in tied for ninth.

Chill in the Air

Of course a major focus of Earth Day is global warming. But it turns out about 40 people at an Earth Day celebration Sunday in Edmonton, Canada, had to cram themselves into a single tent after a blizzard forced them to abandon their outside locations.

The organizer of the event says, "Obviously we'll have fewer people than we would have liked, but to cancel an Earth Day event because of weather would kind of be the antithesis of what this is all about."

Said one of the vendors, "We're here to raise the awareness of the problem, even though on a day like today you don't necessarily think of global warming."

Inconvenient Untruth

There is new evidence of misleading information in Al Gore's Oscar-winning global warming film "An Inconvenient Truth."

ABC News reports one of the most famous shots in the movie — of Antarctic ice shelves — is a fake. The film's visual effects supervisor says the film took the shot from the fictional movie "The Day After Tomorrow," which created it from Styrofoam and scanned it into a computer.

"Yeah, that's our shot," she says. "That's a fully computer-generated shot. There's nothing real in there."

ABC wanted to ask Gore whether it was wrong for a documentary to use a fabricated shot to make a point, but says he did not return their calls.

Feelings Change

President Bush Tuesday appears at a fundraiser for the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Louisiana — John Kennedy. But Republicans were not always fans of Kennedy. In fact, the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee had some pretty unfriendly things to say about him.

Its report from 2004 says, "Kennedy's ineffective political career demonstrates he is not ready for primetime. Kennedy has bad ideas, shot-down suggestions, ill thought-out proposals and Al Gore-like political ambitions."

Now, Republicans have plenty of nice things to say about Kennedy. The current chairman of the same group that slammed him four years ago says, "John Kennedy has spent his career taking on the issues that matter most to Louisianans and fighting hard for their causes."

So what changed? Simple: Kennedy was a Democrat when he ran for the Senate in 2004. He switched parties last August.

— FOX News Channel's Martin Hill contributed to this report.