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Survey Finds Popular Concern in the UK About Climate Change Has Dropped Significantly

Guardian. A survey by YouGov, commissioned by energy company EDF, finds that popular concern in the UK about climate change has declined significantly, now standing at 62% down from 80% in 2006 and 71% in 2009.

The numbers of those interested in where Britain's electricity comes from have also slipped back, according to a survey commissioned by the energy company EDF, demonstrating what appears to be growing consumer complacency in an era of electric-powered gadgetry.

Other recent polls have recorded a similar drop in public alarm about the imminence of climate-triggered disaster. The number of climate change agnostics—those unsure whether human activity is warming the planet—has risen from 25% in 2007 to 33% now. There may be many reasons for the change. Failure to reach agreement on fresh emissions targets at the Copenhagen climate summit, the furore over the leaking of global warming data from the University of East Anglia and the recent cold weather may all have contributed to confusion around the issue.

The poll also found that resistance to building new nuclear power stations appears to be slackening.

Comments

wintermane2000

Ah climate gate;/

Anyone else here laughing that they STILL havnt figured out what it was in those emails that did them in?:)

Id say it but frankly im having far too much fun watching them flail about.

richard schumacher

Sometimes it is fortunate that the public have a short memory. After a few murderously hot summers they will be clamoring for global warming legislation.

ai_vin

@winter
The, so called, climategate scandal has been debunked so many times and in so many ways I am not going to waste my time going over it yet again. Instead I'll let others do it for me;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nnVQ2fROOg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXesBhYwdRo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PWDFzWt-Ag
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P70SlEqX7oY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJFZ88EH6i4

wintermane2000

As I said you still dont have a clue what it was in those emails that caused the real impact of it.

ai_vin

You're right, I don't. But the people who did the independant inquiries do and they all cleared the CRU.

sulleny

Funny thing about public perception. Once an institution is seen as corrupt or ethically bankrupt - they rarely recover. Met Office and University East Anglia will forever be seen as the purveyors of the climate Piltdown Man.

What's in evidence daily is that the demise of the global warming campaign has not derailed the move to adopt alternative energy. Electrification of transport accelerates, and the production of renewable fuels expands - as in this municipal waste to biodiesel story ignored by the GCC Editors today:

http://gas2.org/2010/05/24/biodiesel-from-poop-2-0-sewage-claus-is-comin-to-town/

Sanity Chk

ai_vin: thank you for setting the record straight.

Winter: AGW deniers troll for fragments of comments, pull them out of context, and sensationalize them by wrapping them in lies and attaching sound-bite negative associations like climate-gate, hoax, etc. Then there's the media that fans the hysteria with the help of big fossil interests (Oh for the days when reporters actually investigated the basis of what they reported).

Surely you can see this for yourself. Puts me in mind of what Kipling wrote:

"If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools"

Anyone with even a modicum of critical thought can see right through the AGW denier vacuum. No substance to it at all really.

(pssst: Don't give in to the dark side)

wintermane2000

Sanity chk I guess I can go ahead and explain.

Before this email fiasco I at least had the image of a band of david atenbourghs doing SCIENCE! I may have thought they MIGHT be off and worried what might happen if we spend spend spend down that path only to find we made a wrong turn.

But I respected them.

And then the emails...

The only word that comes to mind is fanboy.

So I dismmissed them just as quickly as I dismiss oil company fanboys.

Now on your end what happens when an org backs an oil company study? They get tainted by it they are deemed OVER IN THAT CAMP. Fanboy in other words.

The damage is done. The image is shattered.

Its just a great big fanboy war and now im back where I started.. wondering what the future holds.

Scott

I’m with Sulleny on this one. The demise of the global warming campaign has not derailed the move to alternative energy, because energy security, quite frankly, is the real issue that needs to be tackled and it is a mutually important issue across all political, economic and social spectrums.

Unfortunately global warming, whilst it may or may not have some validity, is a subject that has been hijacked by eco-fascists and the extreme left, and used to object to just about anything. Claims are exaggerated, often hysterically. A proposal for an air freight depot being called an ‘environmental disaster’ by ‘Plane Stupid’ pressure group is an example.

When we’re running our cars and planes on CO2 neutral biofuels within the next few decades, these types of groups (obviously with nothing else better to do) would find another reason to protest, simply because this type of activity does not fit with their ethos.

wintermane2000

Yup thats why I call em all fanboys. The whine will never end.

HarveyD

Does this mean that oil financed groups are winning?

ai_vin

Look, it's simple if you want to know if climate change is real or not find out what the climate scientists are saying. Just make sure the person you get the info from IS a climate scientist and not just some poser; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZzwRwFDXw0

sulleny

"Just make sure the person you get the info from IS a climate scientist and not just some poser;"

Err, Rajendra Pachauri, IPCC Chair, railroad engineer and economist.

wintermane2000

Its alot more complicated then that ai vin.

1 Is the proper climate even all that nice for humanity? Look up eden cycle for thoughts on that nasty thought...

2 Should we realy spend soo very much effort on gas cars or alot more effect on batteries and fual cells? Is cafe realy going to help in the long run? Would it simply have done more for the earth if we had spent all that money on moving batteries and fuel cells forward 30 years?

3 Who out there actualy wants global warming to happen and can we even tell if they do much less do anything about it if they are out there?

4 Are we being lied to to keep us calm? Not just that its not happening but that its happening and we can do something about it... are both sides lieing to us?

5 Who are the peoploe who would know on number 4 and where are they moving to?

6 Are we going to spend trillions to build something only to have climate change destroy it? How do I tell who is smart enough not to do that? Is anyone smart enough to not do that?

Why the heck am I in a basket and why is it getting hot?

Can I realy expect much out of the species that invented bowties?

ai_vin

You're right sulleny Rajendra Pachauri is a railroad engineer and economist but has he ever claimed to be something he's not like Tim Ball or Lord Monckton? And being the IPCC Chairperson means he just presides at the meetings of the organization and just passes on the information he gets from the real climate scientists.

Sanity Chk

Winter: Bowties, turnip twaddlers, and Edsels not withstanding, our species can, and should do better.

Our collective smartness is the product of our individual smartness. At the moment, it doesn't look too good because as a whole, we are educated in neither critical thinking skills, nor in science and the scientific method.

As such, it takes little depth of argument to sway popular opinion. So the cry-baby, ranting loud-mouths on Fox Nooz and blab radio have a field day herding the minds of their loyal followers with their propaganda.

Exacerbating the problem is that the solution to Climate Change requires people to change their habits and possessions to reduce their carbon footprint. This is inconvenient and tends to make people vulnerable to the influence of anyone who denies it is happening.

Propaganda is always driven by the agenda of those funding it, including pseudo science with results that are determined at the onset. Real science never is.

So how do you know what to believe? Will it be science, or shameless manipulation by self-serving propagandists? How do you tell them apart?

Except for the purpose of invention or product development, good science is never funded by corporations. Science funded by universities and government institutions is generally, but not always, unbiased.

The more studies published on a given subject, by scientists around the world, in multiple disciplines (e.g. climate, geology, oceanography), that reach similar conclusions, the more you can rely on the results. By this measure, anthropogenic climate change is undeniable and the need for immediate and dramatic action to prevent catastrophic consequences is imperative.

Eden? What a ridiculous fantasy! The reality of unchecked climate change is all glaciers and polar ice melting, ocean levels rising 100-300 meters, global scale droughts, flooding, massive storms, starvation, disease, ocean life dying, war, . . . you get the picture - and it's no exaggeration.

Everyone needs to do their part to make a positive collective response. To do nothing individually is to bury your head in the sand and hope nothing bad happens. The more people that get involved to better chance we have of averting a catastrophe.

Personally, I'd rather be part of the solution than part of the problem. If not, how could I ever look my children/grandchildren in the eye and say I did what I could to leave them a viable, thriving world?

wintermane2000

The eden cycle is not about the garden of eden its about a climate cycle that seems to happen every so often and one which we might currently be leaving. If we ARE then we are boned.

Sanity Chk

Ah, I thought it referred to the oft-stated denier misdirection that warmer winters are a good thing.

You must be talking about Howard Bloom's latest book. Mostly sensationalism about cosmic calamities being the cause of knocking earth's climate out of equilibrium, with the apparent agenda of trivializing the significance of human-caused climate change. A classic example of denier misdirection from the immediate problem.

Yes, we do need to be vigilant about the possibility of cometary or asteroid collisions. Because they happen, however, does not free us from the much more immediate impact that human invention has created.

Sanity Chk

Actually, I was a little hard on Howard. His book is really not about misdirection, but about a much bigger picture of humanity, capitalism, and the larger fragility of the earth in its cosmic setting.

The term "Eden Cycle" is misleading because climate disruptions caused by cosmic impacts are really profound perturbations to Earth's natural cycles. They happen on average every 26 million years or so. For the first time, humankind is in a technological position to observe and predict such threats, and contemplate ways of averting such disasters.

Henry Gibson

Lets go back billions of years to before there was much oxygen in the air and much of the air was CO2 and some methane before the dastardly creatures began life on earth and the plants filled the air with poisonous oxygen. Humans are just trying to correct the damage done to the air by the runaway explosion of plants.

Fission energy is green house gas negative because it can replace present consumption of fossil fuels and even be used to make liquid fuels from CO2 in any desired quantity. It is a great source of wealth and income for those who produce it. Consider France who long ago should have started building reactors to take much more money from England who was overdosing on north sea methane to kill its nuclear industry.

What is always true is that the other inhabitants of the planet, animal or vegetable, are better off in general without humans. Humans breath out CO2 and if they were eliminated there would be much less CO2 put into the air. The flooding that humans will cause with the nearly undeniable green house gases is not a problem compared to the flooding caused by the end of the ice age a few ten thousands of years ago. ..HG..

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