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.
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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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Read the complete story here
re: Dave Springer
A modern electical grid isn’t the universal answer. Sending electricity from here to there hasn’t changed much in a long time. We may well need a bigger electrical grid. “Smart” grids, proposed by many pols, really means giving the utility/government the ability to turn things off when they choose to. It doesn’t add a kilowatt-hour to anything.
Solar collectors in the deserted southwest are great. No people. And no water. So how do you keep them clean? And prevent the blowing sand from etching the glass? Not impossible, but a long way from practical. And very expensive.
The Solar Power Satellite was interesting in the late 70’s. It was shot down by reality shortly thereafter, but has refused to die. Sunlight isn’t “much more intense” up there. On Earth, pointed directly at the sun, you get about 1kw/m^2. In orbit, about 1.36 kw/m^2. And you have to convert it to microwaves (inefficient), beam it down (maybe 50% loss), and convert back to electricity (inefficient). My microwave engineer associates say you would be lucky to get 5% end to end. That overcomes the more intense sun by a wide margin. There is the cost of getting a lot of stuff up to Clarke orbit. Anything lower requires rather complex aiming and handoff protocols. Making solar panels on the moon to save boos cost doesn’t pass the laugh test. We are going to build things that need the best clean room possible on the dirtiest place we’ve ever been? And transport a major manufacturing facility to a place we’ve sent only 12 folks to with a tiny dune buggy or two?
There is the not-so-slight problem of keeping this gizmo aimed at the sun. It will be huge, many football fields in size. And it must rotate completely once per orbit to keep the flat part pointed at the big yellow thing. Not easy. Read “Neutron Star” by Larry Niven for a simple description about what happens to things in orbit.
Then there is a small problem of RF pollution. A multi-gigawatt transmitter in an orbit shared with all the communication satellites? So it’s not the same frequency, but that much power will totally desensitize any earth-based receiver. Been there, done that, in far smaller terrestrial applications. As for the “rectantenna” that receives all this power? Assuming the 10×20 km size in the original proposals, the energy density for a 1 Gw receiver (about 0.1% of our national needs) would exceed 10 mw/cm^2 at the center of the antenna. That’s about 1000x the federal standard for microwave exposure. Birds flying over may not appreciate this.
We need practical solutions, not pie-in-the (literal) sky answers. Until we build a reprocessing facility, I’m not a fan of nuclear. So we have coal and gas. With a bunch of both, enough until we get something like fusion. Which might take a while.
The MET OFFice did it’s part. It had great forecasting errors 10 years in a row. 9, the errors were on the hot side.
The Met Office helps us doubt the mantra.
….or perhaps all betwetters leave diapers and get back recharged, on steroids, and begin hunting skeptics ☺
CheshireRed – that happens all the time.
Newsrag site puts up alarmist AGW piece, then pulls or buries the story as soon as it looks like the skeptic side is winning the comments.
stevengoddard
I’m not saying the Northwest passage is open at the moment, only during the Arctic Summer months.
Tom in Florida
What grounds do you have to say warming is good? in Australia increased warmth is diastrous for our Agricultural industry with increased droughts and heatwaves. Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global warming comes into play when permafrost melt releasing Methane, which is starting to occur from the East Siberian sea. The massive amounts of Methane stored in this region would cause catastrophic Global warming when released fully.
rbateman
The Northwest passage was succesfully navigated by a commercial cargo ship in 2008, no rescue required, in fact not even a ice cube was seen.
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/north/story/2008/11/28/nwest-vessel.html
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John V. Wright laments “…the damage done to the reputation of scientists” by the whole anthropogenic global warming foofaraw and especially the hammering so delightfully inflicted upon the AGW high priesthood by the Climategate revelations.
Speaking as someone practiced in the scientific method (though you’ve gotta stretch painfully to call the practice of medicine all that exactingly “scientific”), I can personally attest to no such respect among the scientifically literate for those who conduct scientific research. Especially in clinical medicine, we’ve seen just too damned many episodes in which people – if not given to flights of bogosity by virtue of sordid financial interests in this or that patented pharmaceutical product or medical gadget – have simply made mistakes.
And I, for one, am damned glad that we keep this in mind. That’s how it should be. The Bishop of Rome can play at ex cathedra infallibility. Nobody with an ounce of intellectual integrity in the sciences can.
There is in scientific method a helluva lot of that “creative destruction” about which methodologically sound economists speak in their discourses upon the value of a market economy free of jackbooted government thugs’ interferences.
I bear in mind one of Mencken’s late-in-life thoughts from his Minority Report (1956):
Anything more required? Well, hell. Looking even further back in Mencken’s corpus we’ve always got this from 1919:
Appreciated that way – and every scientist, whether engaged actively in research or simply fiddling around as an educated student of scientific inquiry, really needs to keep this “ignoble” characterization in mind.
The best kind of scientist models himself on Kipling’s “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” and has no other real purpose in this life than to “Run and find out.”
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One of the most annoying things about how sceptics are treated in the MSM is the way the media sets up strawmen arguments to represent the view of sceptics. I have finally found a great article that well expresses the views of the sceptics and summarizes many different threads of the sceptics argument. It is written by a law professor. Here is the link for Roger Pielke, Sr.’s website: http://go2.wordpress.com/?id=725X1342&site=pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpapers.ssrn.com%2Fsol3%2FDelivery.cfm%2FSSRN_ID1612851_code711466.pdf%3Fabstractid%3D1612851%26mirid%3D1&sref=http%3A%2F%2Fpielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com%2F .
“People will think… What I tell them to think.” Says Charles Foster Kane, the thinly disguised characterization of William Randolf Hearst in Orson Welles’ masterpiece “Citizen Kane.” For thousands of years now the structure of human civilization has been carefully honed and manipulated to allow a small faction of gate keepers to control the masses. Religion, mythology, disease, death, terrorism are all the tools of fear factories – until recently successful in making people think what they are told to think.
With the grass roots expose of “climate change” for the pseudo-science it is – a new era of enlightenment has begun. And not since “Citizen Kane” has the story of political hubris and arrogance been so boldly, cinematically told. We WILL transition to electrified transportation and clean sources of sustainable energy without fear of drowning. We will end our imports of foreign oil. We have done so without hype or hubris or being told what to think. It appears, for the moment at least, that the “Climate of Fear” has reached its proper inevitable end.
And it’s been kinda fun getting here.
It certainly does not help that their ridiculous predictions, tipping points, dead lines, hurricanes, sea level rise, glaciers, snow, you name it…..
……..have for the most part, been false
woops, I just realized, have they been right about anything so far?
Locomotion, UK.
This is grass roots now.
The best man for the job:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/7762502/Tony-Blair-hired-by-US-billionaire-Vinod-Khosla-for-climate-change-advice.html
Hmmm….Tony Blair
Climate Expert? – No
Environmental Expert? – No
Technology Expert? – No
Economic Expert? – No
Scientist? – No
Honest broker – No
Economical with the actualite? – Yes
Political Influence – Yes
Great Love for large amounts of Money – Yes
PS, isn’t Gore involved as well?
“..Nicholas Stern, a former chief economist at the World Bank and a climate change expert…”
Exactly how does an economist become a climate change expert – is redistribution expertise qualify you as a”peer”?
sorry, meant to say ‘does’ – guess my English expertise won’t qualify me as a peer either.
These are not Ladies. They fight their way.
I think Europe is far too concerned about their economic mess right now to worry about climate-change boogey men. The real concern in Europe is not the climate of the earth, but the economic climate. Any politician…..ANY POLITICIAN stupid enough to introduce a whole bunch of economic measures to curb CO2 emissions in the current economic climate deserves to be run out of office as soon as possible.
Roger: great information. Where did you get the data for Carbon Trust etc handouts please?
Well, we here in Britain have a long tradition of responding to politicians and experts who tell us what to do for our own good but don’t do it themselves (and, boy, have we just had a lengthy run of that sort of bs from our last government, with state spying, nanny state health and safety, endless invasions of our privacy and personal lives) – and the way we tend to respond is by jeering and raising two fingers in the Agincourt salute. It’s a great and refreshing British tradition and a general indication of how much faith we have in those who think they know better. I hope that’s what’s happening now. We are completely peed off with being told what to do and have got to that Network moment where we’re opening the windows ready to yell.
That said, the forces of inertia are still hugely powerful, the Beeb in particular, and we can’t afford to be sanguine about it. The eco-fascists on that Analysis programme are still waiting for their chance to crush scepticism and democracy and we will have to fight the mad buggers all the way.
Anyway and mildly off topic – here’s one natural disaster that, at last, is NOT being blamed on AGW:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/poland/7764347/Beavers-responsible-for-Polands-flooding.html
jcrabb
it’s called the North West Passage for a reason, hence it’s name.
But sometimes it’s closed and it called a lot of other names.
That passage has been closed due to ice, in history.
But anyway it’s called North West Passage, sorry to hear you did not have ice for cocktails, you might want to bring an ice bucket next time.
I may have missed this in previous comments, but this is encouraging:
http://globalwarming.house.gov/files/HRG/052010SciencePolicy/happer.pdf
jcrabb says: May 25, 2010 at 8:14 am “Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global warming comes into play when permafrost melt releasing Methane, which is starting to occur from the East Siberian sea. The massive amounts of Methane stored in this region would cause catastrophic Global warming when released fully.”
Given this is a blog which likes some scientific evidence, what are your peer-reviewed references for these assertions? Preferably ones based on observation rather than computer modelling. One could also substitute “if” for the “when”. Philip of Macedon told the Spartans that if he came to their city he would raze it to the ground, kill the men and enslave the women. The Spartan response to his envoy was one word: “If”.
I am so tired of these people using terror to achieve their ends, usually on the basis of inadequate or manipulated evidence (and I’m being charitable here) . The Siberian methane didn’t react in this way in the Roman or Medieval warm periods and there is no reason, apart from your questionable religious need to cry End of the World, why this should be so now. Start thinking – we know it’s fraud; we KNOW it.
David L. says:
May 25, 2010 at 5:31 am
Tom in Florida says: (May 25, 2010 at 4:59 am)
“Good, because warmer is better.”
I agree. Go back 13,00 years when the glaciers were receding from North America and see if the people living at that time were upset that the globe was warming. Do you think they stopped burning their fires because it was perceived to be warming the planet and they would rather have it cold? Can you imagine the panic when they realized the glaciers were receding and creating the Great Lakes and the Finger Lakes? How they must of cried. But it was too late for them, it was irreversible. Too bad their politicians weren’t strong enough and had enough cute little catch phrases to save the glaciers. The glaciers are completely gone now, as are the mammoths and various other species. And look what’s happened to the human population since then! What a catastrophe!
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Modern civilization is based on modern climate. Warmer would not be better in areas that depend on the current climate for agriculture. Warmer would not be better in areas that depend heavily on air-conditioning for health, economic activity, and comfort. Warmer would not be better for coastal areas that would be under water because the warming caused a rise in sea level.
Friends please indulge me in an OT
Regarding civil debate between sceptics and pro AGW, Jo Nova has allowed Dr Andrew Glikson ( dyed in the wool alarmist) a lengthy and detailed post.
This now makes part 5 of their ongoing debate from Quadrant on-line
Comments and contributions are welcome.
Link here
Yesterday, a record was set for the latest date measurable snow has fallen at the Salt Lake City International Airport.
How to get two birds with one stone for future generations:
1. Tax coal – taxing coal would encourage more efficient use of this natural resource, thus reducing the impact of global warming on future generations
2. Apply the coal tax to the national debt – reducing the national debt would leave less debt for future generations to pay.
t . f . p . and Gareth Phillips:
I am also a gardener in the UK, and of course there’s no noticeable difference in climate. How could there be? According to the most rabid alarmists the temp has changed a fraction of a degree in a century. It isn’t humanly possible to notice something change so little over such a long time – particularly when there are such large daily and annual temp changes.