One of the major problems with the global warming debate is that the media like to report on catastrophes and impending peril. I think the public have figured out that there is a lot of exaggeration in the media. The media really love things like shrinking glaciers, shrinking ice fields, and drowning polar bears. They don't point out things like the fact that glaciers have been shrinking for about two hundred years,, there's more ice at the north pole than average (which average only goes back to 1979) and that the polar bear population is expanding rapidly. (Regarding glaciers, they probably don't even know that Hannibal's crossing the Alps with his war elephants wasn't as impressive as we were told in elementary school because there were no glaciers in the Alps back during the Roman Warm Period.) Here is a discussion of
this mis-reporting.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/11/23/do2310b.xml