Friday
Jan282011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Scepticism on the up
Jan 28, 2011 Climate: Sceptics It's not just UKIP that's on the up, but global warming scepticism too. According to the Daily Mail, the number of people unconvinced by Messrs Pachauri, Mann and Jones has doubled.
The number of climate change sceptics has almost doubled in four years, official research showed yesterday.
A quarter of Britons are unconvinced that the world is warming following successive freezing winters and a series of scandals over the credibility of climate science.
Reader Comments (31)
It must be more than a quarter, other than online I meet no-one who still believes.
I'd like to know sample size and how it was weighted / controlled for versus the previous study.
My sense is that about 50% don't know either way with about an equal number of sceptics and decline-hiders. The former, however, have arrived their view on the evidence while the latter have arrived at it because they believe stuff.
There are a lot of people who have to believe in man-made global warming because their jobs depend on the scam.
The original report, from the Department for Transport, is here.
It shows (Fig 1.1) a gradual decline in belief and concern form 2006-9 and then a steeper drop from 2009-10.
Bish, would you allow me to repeat a post I put on WUWT as a slogan to counter Trenberth's preposterous arguments - 'cos it just tickles me?
"If you can't stand (up) the warming, stay out of the bitchin'"
As the man said....I'll just get my coat....
I'd be counted in the 3/4 because I think the world has/is warming. I'm a skeptic because I think that mans contribution to this is minimal, that nearly all of it is natural and that there is no upcoming Armageddon due to rises in CO2.
It seems from the report that fewer and fewer people are willing (or asked) to respond to the 'survey'. The sample size seems a bit marginal to me.
The questions (based on the wording used in the report) seem utterly inappropriate for any useful assessment. The possible exception being for air travel where there are fewer subsidiary factors (based on a brief look) so the question comes down to "Will you deliberately choose to accept a reduction in your right to fly" which seems to get a sizeable NO on response.
I note that the introduction to the report mentions that the stats excluded any questions that the interviewee refused to answer. As yet I have not seen any question that would be worth answering - they are simply not clear enough to be able to provide a Yes/No/Maybe response. Unless, of course, the questions asked were not the same as the categories under which they are grouped in the report .....
The report in the Daily Mail states that this survey was carried out last August, and so obviously doesn't include people's reactions to this winter.
Personally, I think this winter is going to have far more of an impact on the public than Climategate, or Copenhagen. We're still waiting for the first post big-freeze polls to come out, so perhaps it'll have less impact than expected. Perhaps the public just won't care that much, one way or the other.
What has struck me, though, has how this winter has been so badly mishandled by the CAGW-ers. I thought the science was supposed to be of the post-normal type, with clear, unconfused, simple, messages aimed at the plebs and politicians.
But what have we had? Climate change leads to LESS snow and warmer Winters. Everyone knows that. Or to MORE snow and colder winters. This year has been the COLDEST in the UK for a hundred years. But wait a minute, you're forgetting it's been the HOTTEST world wide.
Wha? Who cares?
They've couldn't have made it more confusing if they're tried. What they should have done is just tut-tutted like the rest of us, murmured a few nothings about weather being different from climate, and left it at that. But that's not how they do it, is it? Their guiding principle for the last year seems to have been: if you can see your foot, why not take a shot at it?
This is inevitably all going to have an effect on public opinion. Just how much we'll have to wait and see.
But support for CAGW is clearly in decline - something which is recognized by all sides.
Even by Bob Ward, so it must be true.
> It must be more than a quarter, other than online I meet no-one who still believes.
My experience is young people, still generally believe, I'm talking about, under 30s say. Then add to them those working in spheres dominated by a left/liberal consensus - government jobs, schools, universities, etc.
As far as young people are concerned, being green anti-climate change is the sort of thing that a lot will eventually grow out of, the left-wing student rebellion of youth many of us had in our day - the big difference being that a lot more young people go to university and have more opportunities to get involved in this stuff .
I find the green anti-climate change "rebellion" of young people sort of funny and ironic. Because they're actually rebelling in favour of the political consensus and government policy!
Now get off my lawn.
Copner: "My experience is young people, still generally believe"
Hm. Have you seen this report, "Green Is Totally Uncool: Young Britons Least Concerned About Global Warming " from last Sunday?
http://www.thegwpf.org/uk-news/2283-green-is-totally-uncool-young-britons-least-concerned-about-global-warming.html
Is Iain Stewart undergoing a conversion? I watched his ‘men of rock’ programme last night, which was mainly about the discovery of ice ages, and was intrigued to see him spend half the programme explaining Milankovich cycles. He only grudgingly referred them as that, since one of his premises was that the connection with orbital variation was first suggested by James Croll about 50 years earlier, although I suspect that the real reason for his preference was that Croll was a Scot!
Anyway, the early part of the programme concerned itself with Louis Agassiz, who studied the effects of glaciers in the Alps and later proposed that the same effects were apparent in Scotland, implying that it had once been covered in ice. Despite convincing evidence for this, his efforts to get his ideas published were largely scuppered by Sir Roderick Murchison, then head of the Royal Geological Society, and clearly just as hidebound as AGW supporters like Beddington, Reese and Nurse. Stewart pulled no punches over this, and was scathing about Murchison’s behaviour, apparently oblivious to the more modern parallels.
Still, it was nice to watch a programme about climate on the Beeb that both admitted to the large effects of natural variation, and failed to mention AGW at all.
BTW, I looked up both Agassiz and Murchison on Wiki, and there is no mention of Sir Roderick’s opposition to glacial theory. Has the Stoat been at work?
When even this guy backs off:
Ban Ki-moon ends hands-on involvement in climate change talks
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jan/27/ban-ki-moon-un-climate-change-talks
I think revision to the primary message has been extremely damaging to the cause. The message was always "the globe is getting warmer and we are responsible." The journal Nature in 2005, for example, published several striking papers drawing on the 2003 heat-wave in Europe (Schar and Jendritsky "Hot News from summer 2003" or Patz et al "impact of regional climate change on human health"). It's important not to gorget that climate change then (just a few years back) was invariably defined as local things getting warmer, albeit subject to uncertainty in prediction. If there's a similar crop of papers arguing for local things getting cooler following the extremely cold winter of 2010 the journal may possibly rescue its credibility, but at the cost of killing off an inherently implausible hypothesis for good. Alan Kennedy
@ Paul Boyce
Good points, some of which I had noticed too.
The reaction to the third successive grim winter from the decline-hiders was conspicuously incoherent. Thus the contradiction between "AGW makes winters warmer" and "AGW makes winters colder". Thus the farce of "this is consistent with AGW" (which if it menas anything means "we predicted this after it happened). Thus the claims that although cold, the winter was "dry" (because a foot of snow, that thing of the past pace The Independent, and was thus predicted.
What this bespeaks, to me, is that they reacted emotionally rather than logically, reaching for any and every excuse they could find even if at mutual odds. Nobody went back to data and asked, Did we predict this could happen and say so out loud at the time? No, they just knee-jerk defended their little hypothesis. It must be right, it's peer-reviewed.
What it most resembles is a vicar insisting that God is good among 250,000 corpses killed by a tsunami. But then it would because in both cases it's all about faith.
Peter Lilley MP said on the Politics Show yesterday that the UK contribued only 2% of global CO2. Yet China was contribting 25% and still building many coal fired power stations at an alrming rate. So why are we spending billions to reduce such a minute fraction?
He is absolutely right of course. A level of 2% is probably within the noise anyway, and any change we made will also be hidden in noise.
@ Peter Stroud, re China and coal, there is a recent article in the Economist that drives the point home:
http://www.economist.com/node/18010727?story_id=18010727&fsrc=rss
"The IEA estimates that China, which generates more than 70% of its electricity with coal, will build 600 gigawatts (GW) of coal-fired power capacity in the next quarter-century—as much as is currently generated with coal in America, Japan and the European Union put together."
I don't have the figures at hand, but I'm under the impression that North America has a much greater proportion of skeptics. Any ideas what would explain this ?
I go to the Independent environmental section every few days for a laugh, in 7th postion on the most read in that section for some time is 'Snowfalls are a thing of the past'.
75% are at least fairly convinced the climate is changing. I would have to agree with the majority because the climate is always changing. And a little of it might even be due to CO2 emissions. Now if I were asked was it mostly caused by man or a problem I would give different answers. So long as poorly drafted surveys get published we have a big problem. They don't call us catastrophic anthropomorpic global warming deniers. It is a bit too long with great big words. They call us climate change deniers of even just climate deniers. It is hard to deny we have climate or that the climate changes.
The climate is changing.
It does not matter how many "believe", or not. What counts is the fact that the climate is changing and it's the burning of fossil fuels that is causing it.
No amount of Daily Mail readers, or UKIP members can change this.
@Paul Boyce
The GWPF is chaired by Nigel Lawson and funded by the fossil fuel industry. Please avoid quoting them, its bad taste.
FYI I have reported the GWPF to the Charities Commision as they are not acting in a charitiable way according to their articles of association. The GWPF plainly do not provide education about climate change, but choose instead spread about propaganda.
Still, there's lots of money to be made in being the mouthpiece for polluting industries.
@bluecloud: And I just bet you believe every darn thing that WWF tell you, don't you? It seems to me, based on your post, that you would only ever believe anything if it came from the CAGW side of the argument. That being the case, how the hell do you ever get to hear a balanced case?
Also, I suggest you do a little more research into where those nasty 'fossil-fuel polluters' tend to place their funding. I think you will find that an awful lot of pro-CAGW groups get their money that way.
And just BTW....try and get some balance into your argument: Yes, pollution is not a good thing, but not all GHG is caused by pollution and not all pollution causes GHGs. try end enjoy the benefits of the modern world and the joy of having access to the products of 'fossil-fuel polluters'. Unless, that is, you have an agenda that would see the modern world taken back to the stone age.
Cool BlueCloud. Way to go. Real positive contribution to society and all that.
Bluecloud
Yes, the climate is changing. Now we need a properly constrained value for climate sensitivity to CO2. Which we don't have.
In the meantime, tedious alarmist handwaving from such as yourself continues to be as pointless as it is irritating.
Do you have anything to say or are you just parroting the 'certainties' of others on a subject where certainty is not actually available?
Bluecloud
If you want to do something useful, report some of these guys to the Charities Commission:
http://fakecharities.org/
If you think the GWPF spreads propaganda, you clearly haven't seen Al Gore's film or the 10:10 effort...
@Paul Boyce:
> Hm. Have you seen this report, "Green Is Totally Uncool:....
No I haven't. But I'm saying that young people generally believe, not that they all necessarily think it's something that needs urgent action by them personally.
As with most things in life, most people are usually most concerned about things that most affect them, and it's only a few political activist types who really get involved in the big issues that affect society as a whole. Young people and climate change fits that model, I think.
@Bluecloud:
My apologies for upsetting you by linking to the survey above, via a GWPF article.
Here's the direct link to the article:
http://www.mediatrust.org/newswirefeed/2011/01/14/debt-unemployment-and-violence-top-list-of-young-people-s-concerns/
To quote from this article directly:
You say about the GWPF:
Quite possibly - but what exactly has that got to do with the GWPF? You read The Guardian, don't you? Didn't they report recently that GWPF's income up until the end of July 2010 was £503,302? That about $800K, right?
Admittedly this IS a lot if you're a poor Bish, trying to make ends meet, flogging off the odd book when and where you can. (FWIW, personally I'd have nothing much against adverts on the site, if that were to help).
But it's not a lot really if you're Greenpeace, with an income of $224 million, now is it?
Or if you're the WWF, with an income reputed to be $3.1 billion, wouldn't you say?
Bluecloud is a contributor and resident patrolling troll at Guardian Environment. If he really has information that GWPF is funded by the fossil fuel industry, then he has a scoop on his hands, because Lord Lawson has specifically said, before a Parliamentary Committee, that it is not.
If he hasn’t, he could be getting a letter from Lawson’s lawyers.
PaulBoyce
The youth survey you mention is pretty unconvincing, since it was conducted in youth clubs, schools and universities - places where 75% of under 24s never set foot - and asked respondents to rate climate change against poor body image, among other things.
I take no satisfaction from the fact that only 7% of young people think climate change is the most important issue facing them. 7% is quite enough to furnish Britain with journalists, politicians, and university lecturers for the next 50 years.
It's useful that he appears here occasionally, because whenever anyone "outs" him on CIF as a full time Greenpeace activist - the post disappears within minutes.
I remember when he unwisely attached his photo album to his CIF profile - lots of pix of him interfering with shipping and "occupying" (vandalising?) other people's property, interspersed with quaffing vino with his mates in posh German restaurants.
I think he's an up and coming junior exec in the Greenpeace corporate sabotage & extortion business.
If you want to read the climate change part of the survey that actually was used in the Department of Transport Report, go to section D (starting at page 203 of 213 of the pdf), at:
http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/scienceresearch/social/climatechangetransportchoices/pdf/interimreport.pdf
It has the usual gating questions, and poor design. The issue is not whether the climate is changing, but whether there is a current perturbation that is (a) principally driven by anthropogenically produced CO2; and (b) is now causing, or is likely to cause in the forseeable future, a material adverse effect on life on earth. The questions do not permit that line of argument to be developed, because of the assumptions that go into the creation of the survey.
Surveys should have an option of permitting a respondent to say whether he or she believes the question itself is badly designed or ill-informed...