Excerpts from the New York Times article.
Climate Fears Turn to Doubts Among Britons
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
LONDON — Last month hundreds of environmental activists crammed into an auditorium here to ponder an anguished question: If the scientific consensus on climate change has not changed, why have so many people turned away from the idea that human activity is warming the planet?
Nowhere has this shift in public opinion been more striking than in Britain, where climate change was until this year such a popular priority that in 2008 Parliament enshrined targets for emissions cuts as national law. But since then, the country has evolved into a home base for a thriving group of climate skeptics who have dominated news reports in recent months, apparently convincing many that the threat of warming is vastly exaggerated.
A survey in February by the BBC found that only 26 percent of Britons believed that “climate change is happening and is now established as largely manmade,” down from 41 percent in November 2009. A poll conducted for the German magazine Der Spiegel found that 42 percent of Germans feared global warming, down from 62 percent four years earlier.
And London’s Science Museum recently announced that a permanent exhibit scheduled to open later this year would be called the Climate Science Gallery — not the Climate Change Gallery as had previously been planned.
“Before, I thought, ‘Oh my God, this climate change problem is just dreadful,’ ” said Jillian Leddra, 50, a musician who was shopping in London on a recent lunch hour. “But now I have my doubts, and I’m wondering if it’s been overhyped.”
Perhaps sensing that climate is now a political nonstarter, David Cameron, Britain’s new Conservative prime minister, was “strangely muted” on the issue in a recent pre-election debate, as The Daily Telegraph put it, though it had previously been one of his passions.
And a poll in January of the personal priorities of 141 Conservative Party candidates deemed capable of victory in the recent election found that “reducing Britain’s carbon footprint” was the least important of the 19 issues presented to them.
…
“Legitimacy has shifted to the side of the climate skeptics, and that is a big, big problem,” Ben Stewart, a spokesman for Greenpeace, said at the meeting of environmentalists here. “This is happening in the context of overwhelming scientific agreement that climate change is real and a threat. But the poll figures are going through the floor.”
The lack of fervor about climate change is also true of the United States, where action on climate and emissions reduction is still very much a work in progress, and concern about global warming was never as strong as in Europe. A March Gallup poll found that 48 percent of Americans believed that the seriousness of global warming was “generally exaggerated,” up from 41 percent a year ago.
…
In a telephone interview, Nicholas Stern, a former chief economist at the World Bank and a climate change expert, said that the shift in opinion “hadn’t helped” efforts to come up with strong policy in a number of countries. But he predicted that it would be overcome, not least because the science was so clear on the warming trend.
“I don’t think it will be problematic in the long run,” he said, adding that in Britain, at least, politicians “are ahead of the public anyway.” Indeed, once Mr. Cameron became prime minister, he vowed to run “the greenest government in our history” and proposed projects like a more efficient national electricity grid.
…
In March, Simon L. Lewis, an expert on rain forests at the University of Leeds in Britain, filed a 30-page complaint with the nation’s Press Complaints Commission against The Times of London, accusing it of publishing “inaccurate, misleading or distorted information” about climate change, his own research and remarks he had made to a reporter.
“I was most annoyed that there seemed to be a pattern of pushing the idea that there were a number of serious mistakes in the I.P.C.C. report, when most were fairly innocuous, or not mistakes at all,” said Dr. Lewis, referring to the report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Meanwhile, groups like the wildlife organization WWF have posted articles like “How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic,” providing stock answers to doubting friends and relatives, on their Web sites.
It is unclear whether such actions are enough to win back a segment of the public that has eagerly consumed a series of revelations that were published prominently in right-leaning newspapers like The Times of London and The Telegraph and then repeated around the world.
…
The public is left to struggle with the salvos between the two sides. “I’m still concerned about climate change, but it’s become very confusing,” said Sandra Lawson, 32, as she ran errands near Hyde Park.
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“Legitimacy has shifted to the side of the climate skeptics, and that is a big, big problem,” Ben Stewart, a spokesman for Greenpeace, said
Yep, it sure sucks that the world isn’t filled with a bunch of idiots that will follow you like lemmings, Ben.
Same response as I made to the last post. The Met Office has blown so many seasonal forecasts on the high side that few people (besides Gordon Brown and David Cameron) take their climate predictions or global warming seriously any more.
When people are freezing, WWF telling them they are hot just makes them look like morons.
There’s a simple explanation for the change in poll numbers. It’s called “education”. No one really took AGW as a serious threat until it became a “political game changer”. Once that happened – thanks to President Obama – the sceptics decided it was time to shine a light on the weak science and models that propped the “straw man” up. Even the sceptics didn’t take is serious enough at first.
After that, it was only a matter of time before “regular people” started to see both sides of the story. Once that happened … it was game over.
note the front-page reference at the bottom of the article.
“A version of this article appeared in print on May 25, 2010, on page A1 of the New York edition.”
meanwhile:
25 May: Age, Australia: Adam Morton: Climate debate ‘almost infantile’
A SCIENCE adviser to the federal government has described the debate in the media over the basics of climate change science as ”almost infantile”, equating it to an argument about the existence of gravity.
Speaking at a Melbourne summit on the green economy, Professor Will Steffen criticised the media for treating climate change science as a political issue in which two sides should be given a voice…
”It’s a no-brainer. If you go over the last couple of decades you see tens of thousands of papers in the peer-reviewed literature, and you have less than 10 that challenge the fundamentals – and they have been disproved,” Professor Steffen said after an address at the Australian Davos Connection’s Future Summit.
”Right now, this almost infantile debate about whether ‘is it real or isn’t it real?’, it’s like saying, ‘Is the Earth round or is it flat?’ …
http://www.theage.com.au/environment/climate-debate-almost-infantile-20100524-w81e.html
CAGW was a perfectly good man-made concept of a shadow of a crisis, and now it’s going to waste. I’ll bet Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod have bought TMJ cushions, to prevent them gnashing their teeth in the night.
I’m curious what happened with Simon Lewis’ court case?
Hes suing becasue the Times reported “Distorted information about climate change” and “pushing the idea that there were serious mistakes in he IPCC report”
The mind boggles!
For the Times, they are a Changin’.
See comment #6 on the malaria thread at DotEarth, a nice back and forth between Pat Michaels and Andy Revkin. Comment #4 is good, too, by an author of the pertinent Nature article.
==========
Note however that the article still takes the view that climate change is a serious threat and that people are being lead astray by the “skeptics”.
It gives instant credence to the bleating of a “rain forest expert” and the WWF.
I guess it is progress that the press is at least admitting that alarmists are losing the battle of public opinion.
Unfortunately, they are confusing the issues and lumping them as one and this is the most infuriating part of these kinds of stories and everytime I see one, have to assume that whoever said it, doesn’t have the foggiest idea what the debate is about.
First it was “Global Warming”
Then it was “Humans cause it”
Then it was “Catastrophic”
Then sceptics got up in arms about murky evidence for “Catastrophic”
Then sceptics started showing the murky evidence that “Humans cause it”
Then “Global Warming” morphed into “Climate Change”
and finally sceptics of “Human Caused Global Warming” became “Deniers of Climate Change”
This lovely little leap in logic is so absurd that I have a tendency to feel like throttling the speaker when I hear them say we don’t believe in Climate Change, especially when belief in “Climate Change” has never been a point of this debate.
pat:
That Steffen thinks the issue is as easily explained as whether the Earth is round or flat speaks volumes about his value as a scientist. I’ll bet his opinion that significant rebuttals have been “disproved” are just that; an opinion.
Keep up the fight and keep asking the experts the uncomfortable questions that the media refuses to. This is far from over but its none the less encouraging.
Cap & Trade, brainchild of Ken Lay, who bilked California for billions and started the economic slide frow whence my state has never recovered.
Don’t think folks didn’t notice this little tidbit?
They did.
Amidst the blown forecasts, predictions and a sea level that is stuck in Lodi.
The Alarmists did this to themselves.
These Alarmists are not the people who inspire nations.
Nobody wants to follow them anymore. Why? They panic and act rashly.
It might have been good to interview someone from the skeptical camp. Or aren’t journalists taught how to do that kind of thing these days.
I guess it’s because we hayseeds confuse weather with climate. May 22, 2010 we had a winter storm watch with snow down to 2,8oo feet in the mountains of Idaho and eastern Oregon, setting a record low for Boise for that date and a record total precipitation for that date. We are too ignorant to know when our tomatoes are killed by frost and the mountains are white on green in the morning.
Reminds me of Mencken’s famous comment about politics, in which he warned us about Al Gore, Henry Waxman, and Barack Obama before any of them were even born:
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
Before there was AGW, there was “overpopulation”, natural resource depletion, and Alar lurking in your kid’s apple juice. Jeez–talk about depressing. If they’re going to scare the hell out of me while taxing me for the privilege, I at least would like to have a little input into which hobgoblins they trot out after this one expires. How about the “not enough fast cars, rich food, and fine wine to meet demand” crisis?
This is the latest (May 20) I have set out my tomato plants (in S.E. Washington State) and they have been pummeled with hail and cold nights (40 F). I wish there were global warming, but despite weather-isn’t-climate, it is common everyday experiences like this that integrate over enough time and people to produce the collective wisdom of crowds – “there just ain’t no global warming!” – peer reviewed by Poor Richard’s Almanac, 2010.
25 May: Age, Australia: Adam Morton: Climate debate ‘almost infantile’
Problem with the Alarmists is they continue to insult the average persons intellect. I certainly don’t like being called infantile – even almost.
The average person may have given politicians the benefit of the doubt about CAGW because of ignorance about the subject and also feelings of guilt about their contribution to CAGW. However now that realism about climate change is infiltrating the average persons thinking the politicians will rapidly lose support for continuing to exploit CAGW for reasons of control and tax. And it will come back and bite them hard on their collective behinds because people tend not to trust or believe them even during the best of times.
“The public is left to struggle with the salvos between the two sides. “I’m still concerned about climate change, but it’s become very confusing,” said Sandra Lawson, 32, as she ran errands near Hyde Park.”
Nice, is it too much to ask that the public stay at least remotely informed? Salvos between two sides????? Educate yourselves beyond the pathetic public education you’ve received!!!! In this day and age, there is no cause for the ignorant, other than the willful sort. I have as much disdain for them as I do for the people that wish to control them. Does the elemental chart not include atomic weight any longer? As far as I can tell, critical thinking is no longer a course in advanced learning. No damned way that big yellow globe in the sky is the major force for warmth on this earth. Struggle? Yeh, people are forced to struggle under this farce. Someone wants to talk about forcings? Let’s talk about the economic melt down that coincides with CAGW alarmism. Yes, there were other factors, but the capital spent on this garbage……..a few billion here, a few billion there…….next thing you know, we’re talking a couple of trillion. I wonder if that correlates with any bailouts we know of? As it turns out, the largess of this world has an end point. But we all knew that. Didn’t we?
You know, at the start, there were only a few nut bags like me saying “this is BS.” Today, there are many, but for different reasons. I’d give a pound of safety for less than an ounce of freedom. The peace that would come with assuring the freedom for just an insignificant part of our society would be worth everything.
Life with total constraints is merely existence and not living. Freedom works under the constraints of morality. Without morality, there can be no societal endorsed individual freedom. There is nothing less and there is nothing more that should be acceptable man’s condition.
Tomorrow comes early. Good night.
Over-hyped? No!
Surely you jest? What and where are these stories that have ‘dominated’ news reports?
I always laugh when I read this line. It is so common it is obviously one of the proscribed ‘topics to repeat as often as possible’. If it was not so serious it would be a complete joke, it is all so clearly orchestrated from a few or even a single source. Either that, or the reporters cannot ever come with a thought of their own, I guess.
So, you get a minuscule fraction of reports in the media telling people we may not all die immediately, and that is obviously unacceptable to you. Can you say ‘Totalitarianism’?
Gee, Gillian and Sandra, two women in London, have their doubts and are very confused about this “climate change problem”.
In the end, it will be what the Earth’s climate does, not some media PR campaign, that convinces millions of Gillians and Sandras.
One side will be right.
One side will be very, very wrong.
last winter was the coldest in britain since 1963, that was a big influence : they’re changing their minds there. stevengoddard – you’re right in your assertion : freezing temperatures can do that.
Unfortunately, CAGW won’t be stopped by public opinion.
What was not to like in the campaign, that went something like this Agenda:
1. We are intelligent and you are dumb.
2. We don’t care what the thermometer says, see Agenda item1. We are always right.
3. You aren’t listening to us, re 1. So we are going to put you in jail, we are going to sue you and we are going to hang you because of 1. We know where you live. So pay us protection if you know what’s good for you. You are various (substitute various insulting and derogatory terms as applicable) so do as you are told.
4, You have to pay more tax see Agenda item 1. That is all you need to know and we say it is for your own good..
5. Little children and POLEY bears know we are right they recognise item 1.
6. We won’t debate you, because you don’t qualify under item 1.
Agenda item 7 revision.
Okay items 2 to 6 haven’t worked, so now we are going talk at and over you again and again until you understand agenda item 1, you dumb ignorant bastards who we will pretend to respect.
Personally, & I’ve written this before here, I think the collapse of CAGW can be laid to rest because of the rememidy that was proposed by the Warmers.
When the world was told that the temperature was increasing & the polar bears were disappearing, the Average Joe said, “Hummm, maybe, could be, probably… this is all too bad.”
As the years past, the story changed to, “It’s getting warmer & we will all be washed away by the melting ice at the poles.” “The sky is falling, the sky is falling!”
Average Joe said, “What shall we do???” The Warmers said, “Stop using your cars, your air conditioners & wear more sweaters… lower your heat!”
“Oh, & one more thing… we’re gonna invent a new tax to pay for the solution… which will be here in 100 YEARS!” “Right, if you make yourself miserable now, pay higher taxes… the SKY WILL NOT FALL IN 100 YEARS!!!”
Did they think that we were really that dumb, really???