EcoAmerica Poll: Climate skeptics are the majority, not the minority

I haven’t taken a close look at this survey, but I seriously doubt its findings.
Europeans in general see it as a fact that CO2 is harmful.
In Germany it’s tough finding anyone who disagrees with AGW dogma.
And just take a look at the speakers to appear at the next NIPCC convention.
It was only possible to find two outside of the Anglo-speaking countries. Not a single one from Denmark, Russia, Holland, Spain, Italy, China, India, South America, Germany, Japan etc.!
The sceptic movement indeed appears, and underservedly so, to be a Manchester Capitalism effort.
Is anyone thinking about PR at the Heartland Institute?

Trust Al Gore when he talks about global warming: 22 percent of Republicans; 71 percent of Democrats.
Trust anyone who talks about global warming: 39 percent of Republicans; 75 percent of Democrats.

I’m shocked to know the shopkeeper nextdoor is more trustworthy on GW than Al Gore.

How about instead of asking what people believe ask them what they are willing to pay from their own pocket to back up their belief. Fine to say that corporations and government’s should do something but end of they day the public pays.

Pierre, you say: “In Germany it’s tough finding anyone who disagrees with AGW dogma.”.
Well I live in Bavaria, south of Munich. And quite honestly I can’t find anybody who particularly cares about climate change, one way or the other.
I asked my teenage son the other day what his classmates think about it. He told me 1 of the girls is a member of the Green Party, but otherwise it’s of no interest to them at all.
But his teachers – now that’s a different matter. They would all appear to be true believers, including the science teachers.

Come to think of it, I don’t know anybody personally in the UK either who cares about climate change – except for one friend who is a member of Friends of the Earth.
I asked him what they discussed at their local meetings, and he said: “Football”.
“Yeah, right” I said – “But all joking aside what do you really discuss?”. “No, I’m not joking, we talk mainly about football”.
His group are pretty active as well. Last year on his way to flying off for a short walking holiday in Switzerland, he had to undergo the indignity of walking past his co-members picketing his airport, much to both our amusement.

Slightly Amused/Eve Stevens/Mike Dubrasich/Paul Maynard:
Some of us try to think things thro! I always believed that those who shout loudest in an debate/argument are always in the wrong, they know it, that’s why they shout!
The whole thing is quite frightening. We are told not to dissent from the official viewpoint. The whole rationalé is to control the populace with fear, raise taxes, every totalitarian system does so right or left. The UK government & its Green relatives have bought into this big time, so it will be very difficult to change viewpoints, to avoid huge embarrassment, huge salaries going down, huge budgets being reduced & cut, & reputations being lost, very difficult to face losing these things once a little empire has been built off taxpayers funding!
The planet is cooling, has done for 8 years, is “predicted” by a computer to do so for another 8-10 years, yet this is “perfectly in keeping ” with the understanding of Climate Change. Makes no sense to me. If a crack in a building opens up one year, then closes the next, it says to me it is very likely (95% IPCC) a cyclical movement. If the climate warms over a period of time, then cools over another period of time, then warms again, then cools again, it surely should say something to a “climate scientist”, although to be honest, climate science is in its infancy after all, despite what some would have us believe. The AGWers in the UK take the Gorean stance that the debate is over therefore we must all go along with the story that it’s all done & dusted. Yet the climate still seems to have a mind of its own, & doesn’t want to play ball with the climate models.
As to the Politically Correct clap-trap that this group come out with they have certainly been studying the PC brigade over here in the UK. The jargonese is quite delightful & meaningless of course, but it sounds terribly technical & important. A bit like Anthropogenic (yes it’s in my little dictionary) as opposed to Man-made, why use simple when complex sounds more important! Sounds like the sort of stuff an administrator would use, when a technical bod would tend to opt for a simpler definition.
BTW, had difficulty logging on yesterday about 6:00pm GMT, was there a problem with the site or just one of those things? I was mildly alarmed after reading some of the blogs about restricting freedom of access to non PC AGW sites, I thought for a moment they’d put it in place already! God forbid.

Andy:”Are we that stupid though? I now drive a car that would have been taxed a flat rate at £180 but due to government enviromental concerns I get to pay £20. The government paid for my attic to be insulated so I got that for free… The government is also helping paying for pensioners and disabled peoples boilers to be changed to more efficient new ones. ”
The only government money is OPM, other people’s money. The things you get for “free” and the payment help the government engages in are paid for by someone else. Someone who first has to earn that money so the government can take it away and give it to people like you. But then, everyone who is on the receiving end of “government money” ignores this and will always vote for those who promise it. This is how liberty and freedom die, a slow socialist death under the pretense that government is there to help not control. The USA is going to go through this in the very near future. Thank the Foundering Fathers that we have a 2nd Amendment.

Paul Maynard (23:55:10) : “Unfortunately, although the majority of the British may not believe in AGW, 99% (or that’s what it seems like) of the people who rule our lives do.”
That’s pretty much it, in a nutshell. It’s not that ordinary folks here are stupid, (most people I know are concerned with matters like family, work, money, food, etc, and don’t rank global warming highly as something to get particularly excited about, even if they vaguely believe it.) It’s the government, media and NGOs who aggressively push AGW at every turn. If only one of our political leaders (Boris Johnson??) could just stand up and say “My position is that manmade global warming is a load of absolute bollocks” it would be very heartening.

‘Belief belongs in the realm of churches; data either support conclusions or they do not.’
Belief as in ‘faith’ is, as St Paul saith, ‘the testimony of things unseen’ and certainly has no place in natural science. However, that is not the whole story about the way the noun ‘belief’ and the verb ‘believe’ are used in English. In ordinary usage, ‘belief’ that a proposition is true or false implies a high level of confidence without asserting 100% certainty. For example, until a few years ago, the overwhelming majority of mathematicians believed that Fermat’s Last Theorem was true. The theorem has, finally, been demonstrated to be true, i.e. knowledge has been substituted for belief.

BUT the way it is now, the Conference’s overall appearance would make Diversity want to puke. It can hardly be called a global conference

Ahh…. the “D” word. I thought you were going to point out there are practically no women! 🙂

“Richard (02:26:14) :
How about instead of asking what people believe ask them what they are willing to pay from their own pocket to back up their belief.”
Excellent question for the 18% who believe the worst.

I am an optimistic person by nature and I look at the “green” movement to be as much about money as about the environment. If I can be environmental green and keep more of my financial green, it gets my support. So more insulation in my house, a higher mileage car, light bulbs that work more efficiently, I’m all for it. I’m even a bit more tolerant than most of higher energy costs because I know there are things I can do to reduce energy consumption and at least break even and possibly come out ahead. However an environmental movement that can blindly push for reduced carbon footprints that in the long run will have so little impact is mindless. An envirionmental movement that blindly pushes biofuels as costs for food goes up to the point people are pushed deeper into poverty and some to starvation is heartless. I think if we continue down this path much futher, we’ll have a Winston Churchill moment but on this topic he’d be saying, “never have so many, paid so much and accomplished so little” in their effort to control the climate.