One of the inspirations for Water Words That Work is the Gallup Poll Daily Briefing, where Dr. Newport, editor in chief of the polling firm, narrates the company’s latest findings on a wide variety of topics (Yes, yes, they have a nicer set and fancier graphics than I do). Every year around Earth Day, Gallup does a poll on the environment.

This year, one of the findings they reported is how remarkably steady public opinion and behavior on environmental matters seems to be throughout this decade — despite a huge surge in news coverage around global warming this year.

Check out the trends in the chart above. If you allow for a 3% to 5% margin of error, there’s barely any perceptible motion here at all. How can this be?

One possible explanation is that the public has been losing faith and tuning out traditional print and broadcast news sources for a decade or more. And the result is that even huge surges in news coverage like the one Al Gore kicked off with “An Inconvenient Truth” just don’t have as much influence as they used to. What are Americans doing with those hours they used to spend reading, watching, and listening to the news? Surfing the net, of course.