Climate Fears Turn to Doubts Among Britons

[groovedaddy]

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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/science/earth/25climate.html?th=&adxnnl=1&emc=th&adxnnlx=1274803237-j1Xd9X06MixDlRtMBpNlkw

[Kolesar]

1. Two independent reviews later found no evidence that the East Anglia researchers had actively distor

-ted climate data, but heavy press coverage had already left an impression that the scientists had schemed to repress data.
...
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.

In January, for example, The Times chastised the United Nations climate panel for an errant and unsupported projection that glaciers in the Himalayas could disappear by 2035. The United Nations ultimately apologized for including the estimate, which was mentioned in passing within a 3,000-page report in 2007.

Then came articles contending that the 2007 report was inaccurate on a host of other issues, including African drought, the portion of the Netherlands below sea level, and the economic impact of severe storms. Officials from the climate panel said the articles’ claims either were false or reflected minor errors like faulty citations that in no way diluted the evidence that climate change is real and caused by human activity.

[guardian]

2. I think the doomers have been hurting their own cause.

The more AGW acolytes claim the sky is falling and doom is inevitable, the less people will listen. Quite simply we've been looking out our window for 30 years and can see the majority of the claims are unfounded.

The AGW histrionics aren't working any more.

So go ahead and spread your tale of doom and woe. Create ridiculous fictional movies like the Day After Tomorrow and intimate that it is our future. Tell people they have to give up their cars and walk or go back to using horse and buggy, or live 16 people to a 400 SF apartment to meet some inane carbon footprint calculator. Tell people that you think the world is better off if you could get rid of most of the earth's population (of which it's always someone else that has to die and not you). Scream about "ongoing mass extinctions" when nobody can discern the loss of even one species that they've seen first hand. Go ahead and claim how any and every event is tied somehow to global warming: heat, cold, drought, flood, wind, earthquakes, spicy Thai food, and Britney Spears underwear. Tell us how there will be mass deaths this summer because the global temperature is half a degree warmer than last year. Continue to intolerantly demonize any who questions or disagrees no matter how mildly. Show us your smug and condescending attitude for anyone that doesn't buy into your hot-tub/dime-bag wisdom. Exaggerate claims of rising sea levels with fancy graphics showing the effect of 20 foot sea level increases when the IPPC reports say 2-3 feet worst case. Tell us how the 'little people' have to change, consume less, and adapt to a lower standard of living when the AGW leaders are living large. Tell us how it's "all or nothing" with no in between ground.

I think the changes in polls are simply a reflection of just how desperate, shrill, and insane AGW proponents sound.