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.
========================
Read the complete story here
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
“Nicholas Stern, a former chief economist at the World Bank and a climate change expert”.
Stern was not even a good economist, just a lackey of Nulabour. As for being a climate change expert – well, words fail me. He has no scientific background whatsoever.
If there are still people out there wondering if the science has been hyped, the answer is YES IT HAS!
What worries me most is Nicholas Stern’s comment that “the politicians are way ahead of the public”. That seems typical thinking from politicians and policy makers these days: “We don’t care what our constituents think, we know what’s best for you and we’re going to force you to accept it for your own good!”
Somehow, I don’t think that’s how democracy is supposed to work…
“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.”
As usual Nicholas Stern ghas it completely upside down. The politics is always about 3 years behind the public reality. What else would you expect from a man who has been so uttelry wrong on everything he has ever worked on ?
““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.”
Because dear, we turned our back on Catholicism and Indulgences centuries ago and have no wish to return it even in a modern disguise. As for Marxism, it was born on our shores and is Britain’s worst export ever. It’s our only export that failed to be a success everywhere it went.
“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.”
Doubts? After story after story evidence that a bunch of left-wing loons on a government teat wish to suck the world dry……of your money?
Great tidings.
The British and so many like minded people the world over can sense a ‘stitch up’, when politicians are so forcefully pressing a very dubious hypothesis, it leads to many people begging the question, why? And, what’s it that they’re trying to sell?
The promoters of the great Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming scam have most obligingly shot themselves in the foot by overplaying their hand in using graphic scare stories; the polar bears spring to mind, sea levels, glacier melt………yawn!
Right from the outset, the idea of man-made CO2e was causing runaway warming was an outrageous postulation but the ruse was not finessed.
It relied on presentations by extraordinarily dumb ex-politicians and ex NASA mouth pieces to pursue and promulgate the great lie, an error to which the scam has never really recovered its scientific integrity (if indeed it [AGW science/hype] ever warranted such high praise).
The CRU fiasco and Mann’s hokey stick fuelled the fires of scepticism, in all of this; empirical science and the reputation of science has taken a kicking, because the silent majority of the science community has kept its collective counsel, this is now changing…….there is no consensus with the exception of…… in that small band of accountants, railway engineers, snake oil salesmen, economists and oh yeah the odd climatologist…. aka the IPCC.
That was the cleverest con, the idea that the science (of AGW) was indubitable, incontrovertible and uncontested in the science community was good: but now most people realise this is not the case, most annoyingly (for the IPCC/Obama/CRU/Met Office/Dave Cameron/Michael Mann/an ex (D)Tennessee politician/a NASA scientist/The EU politburo etc ) the worm has turned and now it works not in their favour but against the alarmist cabal.
………Man knows many things but the more you know the more one comes to realise how much is still to be discovered.
We have only been around for 2 Min’s (geologically speaking)……the voyage of discovery has only just begun, nothing, nothing ( Einstein knew it) – is ever cut and dried and to claim it as such, is hubris-tic nonsense.
Now two cold winters have passed, it is remarkable how short people’s memories can be but older correspondents on this blog can recall the awful winters of the 60s and 70s (some even further back than that;> ).
Nature is wonderful but an elemental and terrible force, we don’t know much about it, politicians don’t know this…………….. The people do!
And lord! Don’t the climate change!
Doctor Lewis…….?
He needs to drop the attitude and gain some perspective, do some reading other than AGW lit’, get out more and enjoy life to the full.
Nicholoas Sterm is a climate change expert? Not in this dimension he’s not. Stern is nothing more than a bumbling rent seeker who was enobled by Gordon Brown for his services to shafting the British taxpayer!
Wren says: “Unfortunately, CAGW won’t be stopped by public opinion.”
It depends on whether CAGW is real or completely in peoples’ minds. If the latter, then it certainly can be so stopped.
If the former, then we must examine the evidence for and against the PREDICTIONS of catastrophe CAUSED by human CO2 emissions. Are you prepared to critically analyse the evidence behind those predictions Wren?
Some above have quoted the dismissive line oft used by warmers, “Weather is not climate.” That is, of course, very true. As has been described time and again, climate is the summation of weather over time. If you took calculus, you’ll understand that description to signify that in the limit (i.e., in the real world), “Climate is the integral of weather”, from whence it further follows that “Weather is the derivative of climate.”
The next time someone tries to shut you up by waving his “weather is not climate” talisman, you can agree with him and confuse him at the same time. Just say, “You’re right. Weather isn’t climate. Weather is the derivative of climate.” And grin.
I think it all comes down to time lags and attention ( delegation of decision ) behaviours.
When it was “might get warm, go ’tisk tisk’ at parties” folks went along and delegated the decisions. Once it became “Put your children in bondage and wear sack cloth. Flagellation for your sins. Enrich Al Gore and Soros even more.” Well, folks decided to take back the delegation. Then you wait for a time lag while they read and ‘study up’ (something politicians seem unencumbered by…) and you end up at, well, now.
Then, for icing, we have modestly horrid cold breaking out all over the place and old folks talking about long duration cycles…
Hard to convince folks is getting hotter when they are standing in snow fall in May in California with June one week away…
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/05/23/freaky-snow-in-california-in-may/
So one cold winter is a fluke. Two were a minor pattern. Three is a trend. And a trend with a summer that isn’t coming on time (forget early) is a laughing stock.
Once folks are laughing at you, it’s unrecoverable. (Cue re-run of Obama speech with laughter at global warming line…)
FWIW, on “Law and Order” tonight the episode featured a Global Warming believer who was living by a set of “rules” to save the planet. They included not driving, not eating anything form more than 100 miles away… and not using toilet paper… A couple of times they ran the punch line of “bowl of water and left hand” …
So even TV is painting AGW true believers as some kind of over the top kooks.
At that point you know it’s soaking in…
Since when has an economist – and that is using the term loosely in the case of a socialist political advisor – been a “climate change expert”? Going back to my Economic Course I always had trouble with the Supply/Demand “graphs” which never had any datum points and was told “that’s irrelevant”. Seems to me that much of the “science” in this debate is generated in the same way – pick a range of points along an axis and make a graph that follows the curve you want.
Ah, I see, enlightenment dawns – that is what they’ve been doing. I’ll get back into my box now…
Professor Will Steffen is quoted above as describing 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.
The Professor heads up the Australian National University Climate Change Institute.
It seems obvious to me that his position would be very much at risk in the event that ‘climate change’ no longer attracted large amounts of research funding. It may be that such considerations are at the bottom of his simplistic characterisation of the debate.
Even so, banging on about those who deny climate change really is a bit over the top. I don’t know anyone who ‘denies climate change’ – that is just too silly! Those who are or who have become skeptical of the hype generated in connection with climate change nevertheless are perfectly well aware of the fact that climate does change …because….well….after all is said and done, that’s what climate does!
I would urge the Professor to abandon the hyperbole and off-hand ad hominem
attacks and devote such talents as he may command to providing solutions to any of the many extremely important questions which remain unanswered in the field of climate science.
Wren says:
May 24, 2010 at 10:45 pm
But fortunately, at least in a democracy, it can prevent trillions of dollars being spent on a futile attempt to solve it while lining Mugabe’s Swiss bank account.
The recently-departed NewLabour Government told us time and again that ‘the science of CAGW is settled’ and anyone who didn’t believe the CAGW mantra wa a ‘flat earther’. Is this an example of Nicholas Stern’s paradigm that the politicians are ahead of the public, or is it just the hubris most of us ordinary blokes and blokesses believe it is? Most of the MSM still persistently interview themselves and wonder why, when they talk to someone in the street, the information they hear is all new to them.
Hey I thought there were only a handful of sceptics, now theres whole groups in just one county!
Capn Bob and erficbob,
Did you hear that chilling item on BBC Radio 4 last night? “Experts” were saying that it’s time to forget democracy and just impose climate-change limitations. Governments have to take a lead. People are too short-sighted and thick. We don’t understand that the gases coming from the back of our cars today can cause the ice to melt in Alaska in 40 years’ time. We just don’t get it.
There are precedents: in WW2, if there had been a vote, we wouldn’t have gone to war with Germany; the Leaders have to take a lead.
The reporter “Isn’t this a bit like facism? Aren’t you talking like an eco-facist?”
“Expert” — “Ho ho ho, yes I’ve been called that, ha ha ha. But this is SERIOUS. It’s about SAVING THE WORLD.”
Question of time, until it will become a topic for mainstream politicians. Modern politicians are populists, listening what population wants. If the public resentment will turn the other way, they will crawl from their caves.
Until then, you US voters do proper job in November.
NYT finally begins to notice Crime of the Century.
Only with a screwed up MSM could you get away with declaring the world is approaching global warming catastrophic tipping points and the only solution to the problem is to get Wall Street and the other incompetent Financial Markets to trade $billions of worthless carbon dioxide to prevent it.
The NYT is now and has been for quiet some time the NRT(Non Relevant Times)
I think the article has slightly missed the point as one of the reasons for the decline in alarmism is that the British Public are sick to the back teeth of all the blatant propagand in the form of stupid adverts, biased Tv programmes and general hectoring and lecturing. We are a contrary people and resent being lectured.
On top af all this of course is that for the first time a reasoned sceptical view has started to be heard in the MSM, coupled with the realities of the most severe winter in 30 years after we were told that Snow was virtually a thing of the past.
It is unknown how a hot summer and a fightback by the BBC and others will change peoples views again.
Tonyb
As a gardener in the UK I have observed no signs of warming. While this is a local and anecdotal observation, the plants that need a good summer do less and less well each year. 10 years ago I could grow Sweetcorn and tomatoes outside, now we are more reliant on Potatoes, Cabbage and other colder climate crops. Every year we are told that it will get warmer, every year I waste seeds on crops that need a reasonable summer. Very few people in our village believe in warming any more, as the lady in the post office said: “we were promised so much, but it delivered so little” She is a pretty observant lady!
And the warmists wonder why they are losing the argument:
1. Taking the questionable Theory of AGW and calling it fact. In all other branches of science, today’s level of knowledge and understanding of climate change would definitely classify AGW as only being an “interesting theory”.
2. Obvious widespread manipulation of historical climate data to help ‘prove’ the Theory.
3. Never ending scare stories, mostly obviously bogus, ludicrous or wild exaggeration of the facts.
4. Most vocal supporters of AGW being: a) Rent-a-mob lefties and losers, b) Greenpeace, and c) tax hungry politicians – now that’s a group any thinking person will instinctively know has to be wrong.
5. Growing public awareness of climate scientists’ motives: namely, the preservation of their research grants, salaries and comfortable life styles – almost always funded by the government.
6. Ignoring anything which questions the Theory, such as: a) full implementation of the UHI effect in historical climate data, b) flat to declining global temperatures for more than a decade, c) Antarctic Ice Cap stability, d) recent climatic history such as the Medieval Warm Period and climatic fluctuations of the Pleistocene and Holocene periods etc, etc.
7. Proposing to solve the ‘problem’ supposedly caused by the Theory by economically catastrophic tax rises, which only western industrialised countries would actually impose and would: a) not solve the ‘problem’, and b) not result in any material benefit for anyone with the possible exception of the Swiss banks.
8. Climategate and with it the exposure of the cosy little club that ‘climate scientists’ have created for themselves, along with examples of how data is manipulated to support their Theory.
9. The Hockey Stick and the disrepute that has caused AGW.
10. An almost universal refusal by warmists to debate with sceptics in public – there is no one more zealous than a convert to a new cause or religion – so why do they wish to hide? I guess the answer is obvious.
In conclusion, I suspect the most telling fact is that while sceptics may only have a few million dollars in voluntary, private sector, annual support, the warmists have many hundreds of millions of annual state support, the latter are losing the argument.
The much mentioned Nicholas Stern is such an renowned expert in the field of climate science, he recommended we should all become vegetarian, as eating meat requires more livestock and their belching is warming the planet. He would be well-advised to keep his mouth shut on this subject (and probably on Economics too).
Anthony, thanking you for flagging up Elizabeth Rosenthal’s article in the NYT. Writing from the UK, I can confirm that we are a nation of sceptics, particularly about Government-led thinking. From the beginning there was an evident national unease about the ‘end of days’ way in which the AGW story was bring told.
I have always believed that there are two sides to virtually every story and once I began to investigate the science I quickly discovered how underhanded and duplicitous a large section of the scientific community can be. There are, however, two areas of great concern not flagged up in the article, both of which will cause problems for the Establishment in years to come.
The first concerns the BBC. The damage to the Beeb’s reputation among vast swathes of once dedicated middle England ‘BBC believers’ has been incalculable. Even now, the BBC will not discuss the science. Even now, it still trots out the IPCC line – limiting its attempt at ‘balance’ to reminders about the East Anglian Univ. FoI scandal and the disappearing glaciers farce. Even now, the flagship ‘Today’ programme pats the head of some blinkered oik from the halls of grant-filled academe as he/she/it fields happy science-free questions from ‘journalists’ while thinking people across the country howl with laughter at the BBC’s inability to properly get to grips with the issue.
The second concerns the damage done to the reputation of scientists. Among with, I suspect, the majority of British people I have always viewed scientists with respect, holding them in high esteem as apolitical apostles of progress. As a former journalist and avowed sceptic myself I was aware that scientists had been used to pursue political ends in the past. But it seemed to me that the majority approached their research with an open and enquiring mind and the wellbeing of life on earth as a common cause. I, and millions like me, now see that many scientists are just as venal, power-hungry and in denial as the politicians who pay their wages.
It is not enough for the silent majority to know what is going on. Climate change sceptic scientists need to be given primetime platforms on the BBC to explain the breathtaking scope of the global con-trick being attempted by scientists and Governments in this unholy alliance. In this way, both science and the BBC can go some way to repairing the reputational damage.
Tony Blair has just been appointed a climate adviser by Vinod Khosla. That should help convert a few more waverers.