Most Brits are confused over it all. We’re greened out over here or at least I am. Some say it is some say it isn’t. The NIPCC is the source to look at as they seem to be the only organisation taking a “professional scientific” viewpoint, a calm, cool, considered look at the science without the political intrigue from bureaucratic interfering &/or environmental well intentioned but totally misguided meddling. The IPCC is a politcal construct, the NIPCC is not.

And as for taxes, when all the politicians & government scientists & bureaucrats stop flying thousands of miles around the world to exotic places to talk about reducing “carbon footprints” & CO2 emissions, then the world can take AGW seriously. Yes the British Govt is raising money for moneys sake, with little effort to reduce emissions when we all get £1.00 per household to solve the problem! I have a problem with anyone who shouts too loud about a particular subject, in this case CO2 emissions.

Now that the AGW panic is finally starting to come to an end I am looking forward to the day when we ask the moaning minnies for the AGW Brigade to leave our collective houses and to watch that the frontdoor doesn’t hit them on the backside on the way out.

Attached piece from the Daily Telegraph on the next crisis, the burgeoning middle class. It used to be, and in my mind still is, a good thing that people got on in life and lifted themselves out of poverty. Now it’s going to be a problem or so some say.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/03/06/scichief106.xml

I read a couple of weeks ago that the Conservatives had quietly dropped their plans for “green” taxes, as they were turning out to be not at all popular with the voters. And as for Labour, their “green” budget last week involved increasing taxes a bit on “gas-guzzlers” and charging for supermarket carrier bags. Just what impact this is likely to have on Global Warming wasn’t made clear.

And what about our very own dear Chancellor here in Germany, Angela Merkel, at the EU meeting last week. Yes, she’s very much in favour of really drastic reductions in C02 – but definitely very much against if they’ll have any sort of impact whatsoever on the German car industry.

I think there’s a lot more of us sceptics around than is generally admitted.

“England, and Canada will be destoyed through simplistic shallow lefty self-loathing, for no other reason than they find thoughts such as these “deep”.”?

And we were not duped. We never had the chance to vote on it, and most of our laws are made by the French now anyway. Don’t blame the British, blame the British Government. Besides, do these kinds of essentially racist slurs have any place on a scientific blog? Moderate more carefully, please, I take extreme offence at this gross generalisation.

REPLY: While I appreciate what you are saying, you’ve gone and done the exact same thing on your own blog http://woofkitty.blogspot.com with this:

“It is with great pleasure, therefore, that I discover that all Christians are by definition Cretins! And I quote:”

I’m sure there are some Christians out there who are offended as well. But let’s just cut each other some slack rather than start a flame war.

~.7C of warming over 30+ years, ~90% certain that just over half is due to human activity and feedbacks, IIRC about 60% of that is attributed CO2eq and feedbacks. That puts anthropocenic GHG warming at about .07C a decade.

Perhaps I might be able to put some context on this result for non-British readers. Firstly, the Conservative voters are pretty much guaranteed to say that anything the Labour government does is for the wrong reasons, even though they have proposed ‘green’ taxes themselves. Note that because of their current overall popularity, they have skewed the total percentages.

The Lib Dems (a minority party, stuck that way because of our antidiluvian voting system) are even keener on high green taxes, and probably take the same view as the Conservatives about the government’s real aims, but are swayed by their own greater commitment to the principle.

The interesting figure is the 45% of Labour voters who believe their own party is doing things for the wrong reasons. But you can’t tell from this whether they support the idea in principle…

… but you can from the rest of the figures, not quoted above. 45% overall support increased taxes on flights; 68% support increased tax on gas-guzzlers.

So my take-home message from this is that the UK public broadly *support* the principle of green taxes, but they distrust this government’s motives, and are (if you read the rest of the poll) generally complaining about the high levels of tax and fuel prices which are actually quite independent of the green tax issue.

My apologies to anyone whose view of the British public will have to be readjusted downwards again, but politics this side of the Atlantic really is quite different.

The might of human stupidity is a wondrous thing to behold but with as result like this, my opinion of the British public has just taken a significant upturn.

I must say it makes a change from being called a moron and a “f***wit” for expressing AGW-sceptical views on the UK Guardian’s “Comment Is Free” blog.

Course, I now live in Germany, so your comments probably don’t apply to me, born and bred though I was in England.

Incidentally, even given the Guardian’s extreme views on Global Warming, I’d say roughly half the posters on CIF still express sceptical views.