Tuesday, November 17, 2009

 

Climate Change Denial a Cause for Real Concern

Given the widespread publicity given to it is really is extraordinary that so many people reefuse to accept the central findings of climate change scientists. According to The Times 14th November, only 41% of the cpountry believes climate warming is the consequence of human activity:

poll, undertaken last weekend, found that only two in five people in Britain accept as an established scientific fact that global warming is largely man-made. ..

Among the public as a whole 41 per cent agrees that it is established that climate change is largely man-made. Tory voters are more dubious, at 38 per cent, than Labour and Liberal Democrat supporters (at 45 and 47 per cent). A third of the public (32 per cent) agree that climate change is happening but believes it has not yet been proven to be largely man-made, while 8 per cent think that the view that climate change is man-made is environmentalist propaganda. Fifteen per cent believe that climate change is not happening. Only 28 per cent believe that climate change is happening and is “far and away the most serious problem we face as a country and internationally”, while 51 per cent think that it is “a serious problem, but other problems are more serious”.


Occasionally one's faith in the good sense of one's fellow countrymen takes a hard knock and this is one foe me. How on earth can people deny the resuilts of careful scientific studies by world experts in theior field? No major newspaper questions these facts yet a hard core of deniers insist it's all not so, a figment of environmentalists' selfinterested imaginations. I have to quote The Times again, this time the editorial which says the case is 'overwhelming' and that the

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was written by 152 scientists from more than 30 countries and reviewed by more than 600 experts. It concluded that most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is due to the observed increase in man-made greenhouse gas concentration. Concentrations of CO2 have increased by more than 35 per cent since industrialisation began, and they are now at their highest for at least 800,000 years. Natural factors alone cannot, on any but the most extraordinary assumptions, get anywhere close to the temperature rises that have been witnessed. Hardly any serious scientists dispute this any longer.

One can only conclude from this that many people just do not want to believe these inconvenient facts and are so addicted to consumption of cars, cheap travel and so forth they are just closing their minds to what might happen to our grandchildren and great grand children.

Comments:
No major newspaper may question the facts in its news columns, but they certainly do in their comment ones. Take your average Clarkson column in The Sun, for example. Columns such as these promote the view that either global warming is not man-made or that it's not a big problem.
 
Peter
I was rather thinking of editorial endorsement here. I agree the likes of idiots like Clarkson refuse to recognise that they know less than Nobel prizewinning scientists but I put them in the same category as Holocaust deniers or people who think eating doesn't make you fat.
 
Proof that Lenin was wrong when he said "a lie told often enough becomes truth". The case remains unproven. I suspect people are a bit brighter than you realise. Perhaps they follow the money, and will know that huge amounts of funding go to "scientists" who support the environmentalist/leftist argument. But many other reputable and independently minded scientists dispute the theory. Ridicule in the mainstream media doesn't appear to have fooled most people. Good.
 
Michael
We diagfree on most things but I have always assumed that you are a basically rational person. Yet you seem to believe you- not to mention the bulk of society which you normally excoriate for its ignorance- are better informed than the best climate scientists in thew world. Allowing for the fact that so much of this water-muddying climate change denial research is funded by Exxon, can you name me three of those 'reputable and independently minded scientists' who dispute the consensus view?

You scarcely need me to tell you that when something looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, a duck it most assuredly is.
 
The fact is I bought all my light bulbs low energy, we hardly use any electric or gas because we are in poverty.

this week six jet fighters and a number of helicopters flew over us obviously going training, then all day we had jets dropping bombs on the training area by me, that night my grandson was in hospital because the air was thick with fuel vapor from the jets.

And i said to the wife F*ck it, put the old bulbs back in.
 
The funding to prove a human link to climate change FAR exceeds the funds that the oil companies have allegedly allocated for their own research. Indeed many eminent scientists have claimed to be bullied for disputing your version of the truth.

As for me. Oh contraire Skipper, I know little of science - as I suspect do you. If it was my arguments against the rest of the world's, then I would lose. But the truth, inconvenient as it might be, is that MANY eminent scientists dispute what you claim

Three? I'll name you five.

Richard Lindzen - Professor of Meteorology at MIT

Fred Singer - Professor Emeritus of Environmental Science at the University of Virginia

Patrick Michaels - Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and a retired Research Professor of Environmental Sciences from the University of Virginia

John Christy - Special Award winner at the American Meteorological Society

Robert Balling - former director of the Office of Climatology

Still what would they know eh?

I guess it just depends on which group of people you believe. But to portray this as a lot of ignorant and selfish people against the universal voice of science and reason is completely untrue. Perhaps if governments stopped patronising people in this way, then more of them might give a stuff about this issue.
 
Michael
I don't think it's 'a lot' of such people- it's only a few who insist on raising uncdertainty about the science.

As with so many things you and I have discussed, we have to agree to to disagree. You and I are miles apart on this.

I haven't heard of most of the scientists you cite-though you did well to find five of them- but will make an effort to check them out.
 
I only need to look out the door to see it today the temp in November hit 16 in my area.

It's raining cats and dogs and we do not have the weather we did twenty years ago, things are changing and if you cannot see it then sadly people need to see Spec savers.
 
It is extremely interesting for me to read that article. Thank you for it. I like such themes and anything connected to them. I definitely want to read more soon.
 
"I only need to look out the door to see it today the temp in November hit 16 in my area.

It's raining cats and dogs and we do not have the weather we did twenty years ago, things are changing and if you cannot see it then sadly people need to see Spec savers".

And apparently it's the skeptics who are being unscientific(!). Who needs the Professor of Meteorology at MIT when we have such powerful logic(!).
 
Post a Comment



<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?