Climate scepticism ‘on the rise’, BBC poll shows
The number of British people who are sceptical about climate change is rising, a poll for BBC News suggests.
The Populus poll of 1,001 adults found 25% did not think global warming was happening, a rise of 8% since a similar poll was conducted in November.
The percentage of respondents who said climate change was a reality had fallen from 83% in November to 75% this month.
And only 26% of those asked believed climate change was happening and “now established as largely man-made”.
The findings are based on interviews carried out on 3-4 February.
In November 2009, a similar poll by Populus – commissioned by the Times newspaper – showed that 41% agreed that climate change was happening and it was largely the result of human activities.
“It is very unusual indeed to see such a dramatic shift in opinion in such a short period,” Populus managing director Michael Simmonds told BBC News.
“The British public are sceptical about man’s contribution to climate change – and becoming more so,” he added.
“More people are now doubters than firm believers.”
Read the complete story at the BBC
See the report in PDF format:
Articles on dodgy computer code
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/feb/05/science-climate-emails-code-release
In The Guardian and many more in the same vain are the real reason people are at last waking up to the con of AGW. The BBC just cannot believe the house of cards they have spent 15 years helping to build is falling down around them.
I’m wondering how all this will unfold politically in the UK.
All the major parties (Labour, Conservatives, Libeberal Democrats – and the SNP here in Scotland) have pinned their colours firmly to the AGW mast.
This would appear to be a golden opportunity for UKIP (AGW skeptics and fiercely anti-European Union) to make hay. Lord Monckton recently joined UKIP.
In the meantime, I wonder how many UK-based skeptics, who are following the US Cap & Trade and Australian ETS stories, are aware that the UK is implementing it’s very own emissions trading programme in April this year? http://bit.ly/a82KPb
@Smokey (02:29:58) :
“Lucy (01:42:25):
“…what is the % of the earth’s surface that is populated by man.”
I’ve been to the Isle of Man. It was OK, but I would have much preferred going to the Isle of Women.
I assume you meant the area of the planet covered by humans of all three sexes ”
In Old English the word man, like homo in Latin, simply means person, member of the human race, the species. Gender attributes can then be attached to it, like weapon-man (a free male who must bear arms) or wife-man (the root of the word “woman”). PC was not a common phenomenon in the past when the language was evolving. So using “man” like this is perfectly ok. 🙂
As a Brit and a sceptic scientist, I am proud to report that I am responsible for recently making at least 20 people understand they were been conned over AGW.
When debating with a typical AGW supporter, the first response is usually one along the lines of: “Don’t confuse me with the facts, my made is made up.”
I have found the best way of getting through the above defence is to ask: “Well OK, but just answer this one question – how much carbon dioxide do you think there is in the atmosphere?”
I have not yet had one even remotely correct answer (0.038%), usually you need to push to get any answer at all, but it is always between 1 and 10%. When you give the right answer – especially in terms of one part in 2,600 – the shutters come down and, as often as not, the response is along the lines of: “That’s far too small to have any appreciable impact.”
At which point the previous AGW supporter now has his or her mind open to hearing the facts, i.e. the truth.
I have not tried this with any card carrying greenpeacers, but I suspect they might be a tougher nut to crack – kind of like the SS fanatics of 70 years ago.
I think a large chunk of the UK population has always been sceptical. Climategate and all the subsequent debacles have effectively given us permission to express our doubts in no uncertain terms.
The UK is absolutely riddled with political correctness. Even I have buttoned my lip to a certain extent in the company of “believers”. One doesn’t wish to cause ill-feeling or embarrassing controversy. Now, at last, the gloves are off!
We are used to seeing comments from the Telegraph, Times, Guardian, Mail and Express, but I do not recall the Sun being mentioned. For the benefit of the non-Brits, the Sun is aimed at, shall we say, the less cerebral reader, but it is a major opinion former in UK politics (they have claimed in the past to have won elections by supporting specific political parties of left and right).
There is no data on how many Sun readers took part in the poll that is covered by this thread, but I think it would be instructive to see what there stance is on climate change, so have a look at this and bear in mind that it is today’s date in their header.
The page title is “The Sun helps you to stop Climate Change with our Green Week special”
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/special_events/green_week/
Note how they highlight “topical” issues:
“We explain UK heatwave guide” with a link to a June 2009 article
“British weather going to be HOT!!” similarly linked to June 2009
I despair.
Settled science doesn’t sell papers.
Headlines like ‘apocalypse soon, we’re all going to die from AIDS/swine flu/avian flu/SARS/global warning/MMR’ are generally followed by ‘where’s this apocalypse then?’ followed by ‘who’s to blame for spreading all this apocalypse nonsense?’
C’mon WUWT, you guys showed the wrong graph! A better representation of your case is the graph showing that a mere 26% think that climate change has been conclusively established as anthropogenic.
One of the comments from the Daily Express article referenced above.
Do as I say not as I do.
Just before xmas I was driving back from Finland and stopped for the night in Copenhagen. Outside of my hotel was a fleet of 6 mercedes s500’s with the engines left running, I checked in, showered and changed then went out for dinner. When I came back about 3 hours later the same cars were still there engines still running. Whose were they? Delegates from the climate change conference……and they want us to be greener
“Bryan (02:28:49) :
[…]
The energy moving around at the surface of the Earth is almost three times the input energy from the Sun.
Put another way a double sided solar panel raised say 2 metres above the ground could make use of this plentiful free energy.”
Solar panels work only with visible light. For LWIR radiation you need microscale antennaes, which is feasible using nanotubes. Unfortunately the frequencies are in the terahertz range and as yet we don’t have electronics that can collect the energy from the resulting electric oscillations – you’d want to collect the output of many billion antennaes here, and the key problem is the absurdly high frequency. Not much research is going on but with a few technological breakthroughs it would be possible.
vibenna (23:50:41) :
This was why I was on about the UAH data showing strong warming. Whatever the cause, it is clearly occurring over the last 30 years. So that 25% is denying some fairly clear empirical facts.
Vibenna, We won’t know if the satellite data is showing strong anything until we have a thousand years of satellite observation.
vukcevic (02:05:04) :
Thanks for showing that information. I can’t help thinking that the difference between the summer and winter trends might be man made.
Comparing my lifestyle now with that of my youth in the 1950s, we run all our buildings at much warmer levels now and this extra heat must have a two-fold effect on temperatures. Firstly the generation of power used for heating is inefficient, and must produce large quantities of waste heat, secondly the extra heating in homes eventually leaks out even from well insulated properties.
This is evidenced by the UHI effect, but the cumulative effects must also have a background effect on overall temperatures, and intuitively I would have expected this effect to increase over time.
Does this make sense to anyone else?
@ur momisugly Thomas (02:27:47) :
Well, you might also say that 25% have an IQ > 110.
Or, 25% have an IQ under 90.
Why must it be political?
Well, the BBC will mangle it, but however you look at it 74% of those polled do not believe in Anthropogenic Global Warming/Climate Change, up from 59% last November. The vast majority are sceptical, and AGW is a minority opinion. Now that would have been a better headline for the BBC, wouldn’t it?
My daughter (finishing a degree in psychology) is verbally abused for admitting that she is sceptical on climate change. One of the subjects she could have done a project on in her final year is the psychology of climate change scepticism. It is being taught at British universities that climate change scepticism is some form of psychological abnormality, and delusional paranoia. For a popular take on it (completely mad, IMHO) by the US-born psychoanalist Coline Covington now practising in the UK, former editor of the Journal of Analytical Psychology and former Chair of the British Psychoanalytic Council (formerly British Confederation of Psychotherapists), see here
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/57532,news-comment,news-politics,what-the-deniers-of-climate-change-are-really-denying
In this she says “…another denier of the evidence for climate change, has ironically called for better scientific evidence: evidence that she hopes will counter the findings that we have now and demonstrate that the restrictions being urged on our use of energy are merely a means of political control rather than based on any reality of damage limitation…This is a mentality resembling the narcissism of small children who want to hold onto their illusion of omnipotence and control over mother. Any threat to their position is experienced as a narcissistic wound that is tolerable only to the extent that their attachment to mother is relatively secure…One way to control anxiety is to deny reality. Reality itself becomes the enemy that challenges this narcissistic hegemony and must be attacked accordingly. The need to maintain control then turns into paranoia. While scientists are being accused of conspiring to distort the truth in order to wrest control over others, this is precisely what the deniers of climate change are doing.”
So, we sceptical scientists who are calling for better evidence, openness and truthful dealing in science are being branded as delusional narcissists. What a state our scientific world is in!
Covington’s warped views are obviously finding fertile ground with influential sectors of British society, not just within science. Her own practice describes her clients:
“Coline’s clients come from different sectors of the business world, particularly the financial services…Coline worked for many years as a consultant to local authority agencies throughout the UK and with the Metropolitan Police…Her work…has given her a special insight into the problems facing many CEOs and senior executives today.”
Bit OT – but this link to a report by the OFGEN warning of dire times ahead for energy in the UK should help people to concentrate their minds on the real facts. Christopher Booker et al have been warning everyone in the UK for years about this. http://www.ofgem.gov.uk/Media/PressRel/Documents1/Ofgem%20-%20Discovery%20phase%20II%20Draft%20v15.pdf What’s the outlook for the US looking like?
That’s so the gov’t. won’t be a suspect when Choo Choo turns up missing from the Orient Express.
Copenhagen Conference — COP15
Where I live, COP stands for Claims Of the Paranormal.
Yes. It fits.
Is the BBC deliberately avoiding the really important political question:
Do you think CO2 taxes can change climate?
She stressed that carbon dioxide levels were rising and that the gas’s impact on temperature had been known about since the 19th century
I suppose this comment of Slingo’s refers to Arrhenius. So I also presume that either she does not know that he backtracked fairly rapidly in which case I’m not sure what right she has to call herself a scientist or she does know in which case she has no right, as a government employee, to be misleading her paymaster (ie me!) about scientific facts about which I am entitled to rely on her expertise.
Either way I doubt that she deserves to hold down a senior position in a (supposedly) scientific establishment.
From the Guardian’s sidebar:
3 Feb 2010
Climate scientists withheld Yamal data despite warnings from senior colleagues | Fred Pearce
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/03/yamal-data-climate-change-hacked-email
3 Feb 2010
As the Iraq inquiry and ‘glaciergate’ show, the truth is slippery | Michael White
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2010/feb/03/iraq-inquiry-climategate-row
1 Feb 2010
Leaked climate change emails scientist ‘hid’ data flaws
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/01/leaked-emails-climate-jones-chinese
3 Dec 2009
Climate science: Inconvenient truths
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/dec/03/climate-sceptics-hackers-leaked-emails
Lucy (01:42:25)
There was a very comprehensive breakdown on this very subject on a WUWT thread a few weeks ago. I wanted to keep it for reference, but when I went back to look for it I couldn’t find it anywhere.
I’ve meant to request whoever submitted the comment to repeat it, but didn’t get round to it. If you are out there, PLEASE submit again. It was hugely informative and I meant to memorise the figures to quote at the over population freaks.
I think I remember the final upshot was that only around 2% of actual land was occupied by humans, but I would love to see it again.
Peter Miller (03:58:12) : Here’s another analogy you could try (which I found at Joanne Nova’s site)
“Imagine 1 kilometre of atmosphere and we want to get rid of the carbon pollution in it created by human activity.
Let’s go for a walk along it.
The first 770 metres are Nitrogen.
The next 210 metres are Oxygen.
That’s 980 metres of the 1 kilometre. 20 metres to go.
The next 10 metres are water vapour. 10 metres left.
9 metres are argon. Just 1 more metre.
A few gases make up the first bit of that last metre.
The last 38 centimetres of the kilometre – that’s carbon dioxide. A bit over one foot.
97% of that is produced by Mother Nature. It’s natural.
Out of our journey of one kilometre, there are just 12 millimetres left. Just over a centimetre – about half an inch.
That’s the amount of carbon dioxide that global human activity puts into the atmosphere.”
And referring back to the second graph, given the pretty unpleasant weather that most of us have experienced recently, how did they find 15% of people who don’t think that ANY climate change is happening??
People are slowly waking up to the fact that 90% of the forces driving the AGW issue is political in nature instead of science. It has been said that politics is the world’s second oldest profession. Politicians have been increasingly obtaining the consent of the governed by manipulation and deception, as well as occasionally donning the jackboots. Since it is normal for politicians to spin the facts and lie, the currently increasing skepticism by the public is healthy. Only the deeply religious adherents to the church of AGW remain unswayed by the plethora of evidence pointing to the AGW hoax.
@ict558 (04:44:22) :
“Well, you might also say that 25% have an IQ > 110.
Or, 25% have an IQ under 90.
Why must it be political?”
Another way of stating it is 50% of the population is of below average intelligence. 🙂
@ur momisugly Peter Miller (03:58:12) :
A good way of demonstrating the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere when at work is by taking a full five-ream box of A4 paper (as used in the photocopier) and asking people to pick how many sheets make up the CO2 content. Tell them they can open a ream to get close to the quantity. I find most people grab at least one ream of 500 sheets. They are a little shocked when hand them one sheet.