Tuesday
Jan182011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Enviro what?
Jan 18, 2011 Greens Benny Peiser points me to some more evidence that interest in the great green god Gaia is waning. In fact so uninterested are the public that it is getting quite hard to find anyone who thinks it's a priority at all.
The story comes from a report about a Fabian society conference, which heard from pollster Peter Kellner:
YouGov pollster Peter Kellner reinforced the point, noting that in 2005, 20 per cent of the public pointed to environmental issues as important to them - this year that number had fallen to 7%. Likewise, three years ago 50% of the public accepted that climate change is man-made, but as a result of the University of East Anglia controversy, amongst other things, this had fallen to below 40%.
Reader Comments (40)
Precisely why we need to get rid of democracy. The plebs are stupid, as this poll demonstrates.
A pedant writes...that would be uninterested rather than disinterested old boy, sorry to be annoying.
[BH adds: Thanks. Fixed]
My mother-in-law pointed me at this article in one of the UK papers today - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1348127/Climate-change-blame-fall-Roman-Empire-titter-ye-not.html. She used to believe that men (and women) did have some influence on the climate. Now she just laughs and urges me to read the various articles she has seen when we speak on the phone. Progress indeed!
Similar view here. A few different polls summarized indicate that climate issues are the lowest priority..
Has anyone told Lovelock yet ?
It must be very confusing being an enviro-nut. They love MINBYs when they protest airport expansion, but hate us when we oppose wind farms. They hate harmless incandescent light bulbs and love dangerous chemical containing long-life bulbs. They have turned people off by telling us how we should behave and by crying wolf too often.
The 40% who are still warming scaredy-cats is made up of (a) the hard left for whom "capitalism" (read industry) is so evil it MUST be destroying the planet; (b) Greens for whom humanity is a virus eating away at poor mother Gaia and (c) all those who believe everything they're told and are too lazy to find things out for themselves.
The newspapers will rapidly abandon the AGW hysteria and move on to some new fresh hairy-scary the ski is falling meme.
They need fresh fear mongering to keep the eyeball count up and the corresponding advert revenues flowing in.
O'Geary
The number of people who believe in CAGW is about the same as the number who believe in ghosts, astrology, and homeopathy. Some people are just gullible.
The alarmists' best bet is to spin the ENSO-related weather disasters of 2010 and 2011 as 'hard evidence' of approaching catastrophe. Of course this has already happened and is ongoing, but I wonder if we will see a 'review' of the 'evidence' that weather is climate at some point?
Funny how people are so easily distracted from 'right on' causes by problems like:
Can they pay the mortgage
Will they have a job next week
Is there any chance the bank will extend the overdraft so they can afford a bag of potatoes.
I have always thought AGW was invented to distract us from the real nasties that were threatening.
Justice
LOL! The next few years are going to be hilarious as we watch and hear people firstly becoming more desperate in their defence of CAGW, and then ever more disingenuously explaining how THEY were never actually taken in by it.
Finally, in 20 years time, there will be sad lonely slightly deranged types hanging around street corners with stubbled chins and placards proclaiming "Climate Change is upon us. Prepare to repent". Don't forget to have some loose at hand.
The last BBC poll had 26% belief in AGW. I bet it's less now.
Yes the FS is (slightly) left wing, but that's because the media has portrayed AGW as a fight for the people against big business. The reality is that it is a fight for big business against the people.
This big business.
International Emissions Trading Association (IETA)
BP, Conoco Philips, Shell, E.ON, EDF , Gazprom, Barclays, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs.
Dammit: Don't forget to have some loose change at hand.
Tried to buy a light bulb recently?
They have banned 100w bulbs, can't find 60w because people are getting wise to the EU Green-Nazi control over our useles elected representatives and stocking up. My local shops have only 40w left for sale. Welcome to the new dark ages, must "save energy"
This is the biggest mistake the ecofacists have made. They have shoved down everyone single persons throat, even if they couldnt care less, a taste of a world run by Gaia-fantasists.
Wait till they tell you to go to bed early to "save energy", then they knock on your door at midnight because you still have a light on. The Greenpeace Energy Police.
You forgot:
(d) all of the people who earn a living manufacturing evidence for it (that must be a fair number!)
I note that next week's Horizon (BBC 2, 9pm, 24/01/11) is entitled 'Science Under Attack' and is described thus: Nobel Prize winner Sir Paul Nurse examines why science appears to be under attack, and why public trust in key scientific theories has been erroded.
OK, let's not pre-judge it but... I wonder which key scientific theories the BBC are worried about?
These people really are fascists. From the same meeting report
So Michael Jacobs, 'visiting fellow on climate change at the LSE' has views which are unacceptable even to the Fabian Society. The same Fabian Society that in times past were big cheerleaders for eugenics.
Should be interesting Dave. But I'm probably going to switch off due to extreme nausea as soon as the first mention of AGW being `scientific' is made.
I believe they interviewed Delingpole for this programme.
Good spot Dave Salt...
"Nobel Prize winner Sir Paul Nurse examines why science appears to be under attack, and why public trust in key scientific theories has been eroded - from the theory that man-made climate change is warming our planet... He interviews scientists and campaigners from both sides of the climate change debate..."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00y4yql
Another programme from a channel that I used to enjoy sooo much - corrupted, co-opted and subverted. Am I wrong to think that watching it I will be accused, insulted, blamed and ridiculed with such a distorted argument that I'll be gibbering with indignation by its end?
Not sure that I can bring myself to watch any more - how bad is that?
The program is likely to be interesting given the Guardian's profile of Nurse - http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2010/oct/24/profile-paul-nurse-dna-genes
At the risk of seeming to be a foaming zealot oneself (always a danger!) it is still important to suggest to people that the catastrophic predictions are highly unlikely, even if we are contributing to global warming with our fossil fuels. This battle is very far from over and it will take a long time to "deprogram" the general population.
What I find so sad is that this debacle has set back the cause of sensible environmentalism by decades. When it all unravels a lot of baby is going to be thrown out with the bathwater.
P.S. You can still buy 100W incandescent bulbs in the UK by ordering them on the Internet. Lots of people still have stock. They are,however, extraordinarily wasteful unless you need the heat they throw out as well. I use them for reading and in my sitting-room only.I do not think much of the mini-flourescents but I have been given loads of free ones by my energy supplier and I will use all them up.By then,I would hope to experiment with the new LED light bulbs.
Being a cheapskate on a limited income fuels my environmentalism!
Justin Ert
Nice handle. The idealistic left had been incredibly naive and gullible regarding AGW, and its hijacking for purposes of governance, taxation and corporate trading, but the scales seem to be finally falling, all passion spent. Its there in those sinistral BBC eyes. The arrogance is gone. Climategate and Copenhagen were the Berlin Wall moment. Now we just have to pick up the tab and pay.
@ LondonCalling
"Tried to buy a light bulb recently?
They have banned 100w bulbs, can't find 60w because people are getting wise to the EU Green-Nazi control over our useles elected representatives and stocking up. My local shops have only 40w left for sale. Welcome to the new dark ages, must "save energy""
Yes, Try Lidl, the local pound shop, the local hardware store, or a car boot sale for 60W and 100W incandescent bulbs. 150W are decidedly hard to find now. Tesco were making a big thing of flogging off 40W incandescent bulbs a few days back.
I stocked up some time back because I want the stairs lit when I turn on the switch, not a couple of minutes later, and the carbon footprint of falling downstairs and breaking something is considerable, (and I don't much like the government telling me which sort of lightbulbs to use).
Mind you, CFLs are 10p each in the supermarkets, I suspect that will change a lot when the subsidy is removed.
I don't agree that science in general is under attack at all.
Bad science is certainly under attack, but so should it be.
@Jan 18, 2011 at 11:25 PM | Unregistered Commentercosmic
'I stocked up some time back because I want the stairs lit when I turn on the switch, not a couple of minutes later'
My mates just leave them switched on, makes a mockery of it all really.
"They have banned 100w bulbs, can't find 60w because people are getting wise to the EU Green-Nazi control over our useles elected representatives and stocking up."
I bought myself one of those 65W daylight-spectrum giant eco-bulbs - puts out the equivalent of a 320W incandescent. I like it so much I'm thinking of buying several more. The daylight spectrum aspect is a bit weird, but it's definitely not dim!
@O'Geary,
"The 40% who are still warming scaredy-cats"
Believing something is real and believing something EXPENSIVE should be done about it are different things.
Gaia my own Queen;
Unimpressed with CO2,
Scared to death of Sol.
==========
This is very sad news, legitimate concern for the environment has been undermined by the doom mongers.
Don't worry, Gaia is alive and well and lives in an Australian environmental mindset.
"We'll never be able to control the earth, there's no doubt about it. We can't control its systems. But we can nudge them and we can foresee danger. Once that occurs, then the Gaia of the Ancient Greeks really will exist. This planet, this Gaia, will have acquired a brain and a nervous system. That will make it act as a living animal, as a living organism, at some sort of level. That to me is the most exciting threshold for humanity. It's as if the little embryo is about to hatch out of the shell, as a formed being. After four billion years, I think that's where we're at. We'll see it, I think, this century."
Tim Flannery on the first ABC science show for 2011
Full transcript here http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2011/3101365.htm
The 'lame'stream media + cretinous politicians will be the last to 'get it', AGW is a fad, a passed/over/defunct fad, like ban the bomb, the sky ain't fallin' in yet.
Big business, now that is the battle, anyone unfortunate enough to put up with CNN and beeb world will know what I mean - the constant big business soft sell: "we are more greener than ever, whoever and whatever!"
Lest some not know the danger of the Fabian Society, here is a hard-to-find speech by an Australian when he was Prime Minister. I suspect he tried to hose it down after the event.
http://www.geoffstuff.com/Hawke%20Fabian.pdf
Seems a bit odd to single out the Fabians as a nefarious gathering of wolves in sheeps clothing when the only difference between their method, and a dozen other shady political clubs/lobbies from all sides, is that the Fabians have the sheep in wolves clothing prominent on their coat of arms. The rest are just a bit better at hiding their agenda.
Imagine a political candidate holding up the Fabian coat of arms at a hustings waxing lyrical about it's history. Shame New Labour wasn't honest enough to have the Fabian COA on their election bumph.
Marc Morano at Climate Depot posted some time ago that in America the people who still believe that man is responsible for global warming had fallen to 36 percent and 37 percent believed in the existence of haunted houses.
Makes you wonder about those one percent people. What was the final straw? I mean what was it with global warming that the one percent would still believe in haunted houses but not in CAGW?
Not sure that the "sheep in wolves clothing" is quite what is on the Fabian's coat of arms, Frosty but it's a perfect description of CAGW - scary looking on the outside; harmless when you look a bit more closely! Josh, where are you?
:-)
@ LondonCalling They have banned 100w bulbs, can't find 60w ...
Seems even worse in Oz. My son working there asked me to send him some tungsten lamps for his photography hobby.
The lamps did not arrive. Instead, he got a letter from the Oz customs saying that his attempt to receive illegal objects had been noted and any further infraction would be dealt with severely.
The Lucky Country...
Great find, Benny/Bish, and not just the YouGov input. David C's comment above is the main trigger for me:
Winston Churchill and many others were counted as supporters of eugenics in its day but the commitment of Fabian luminaries like the Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who also founded the LSE, was particularly strong. But eugenics is out of fashion and it's especially good to hear Michael Jacobs' plaudits for the Chinese one child policy called out for this by today's Fabians.
This links to E Smith's strong burden to see the left mobilised against CAGW. I don't share your self-identification as a person of the left ES but, strangely perhaps, I do share this burden. And I certainly share your mistrust of Big Money's involvement (which perhaps unlike you I would see as crypto-fascist and thus absolutely against free enterprise).
Where has environmentalism met the anti-population movement met Big Money most disastrously? In the demonisation and virtual elimination of DDT, causing tens of millions of deaths, mostly the children of the very poor, through a resurgence of malaria. "The Excellent Powder" by Donald Roberts and Richard Tren, published less than a year ago, is an awesome book on the subject which I've read in the last month.
The title comes from the same Winston Churchill, long after his eugenics phase, paying tribute to DDT's astounding power to save the lives of Allied troops in 1944. But possibly the most important thing the book revealed to me was how the hand of new eugenicists, the anti-population crew, led by Paul Ehrlich, was massively involved in the move to bring an end to the use of DDT from the 60s. I knew Rachel Carson normally gets the lion's share of the blame for this but it turns out that's an unbalanced picture.
I mention this because it's an issue the Left ought to pick up with a vengeance. In fact anyone with a vestige of humanity. Reading how the science was perverted from the 1960s reads like a dress rehearsal for AGW. But the damage caused to the poorest for decades is the real message of the book. We have to take in this story. At least I speak for myself. At the very least I hope this comment is not considered OT on this thread.
BOB WARD, are you listening. This is why know body is listening to you!