Snow impact on climate change beliefs
The historically cold winter, the hacking of climate scientists’ emails and the failure of governments to agree urgent action at Copenhagen have not melted the public’s belief in climate change, according to a new poll.
The survey published today finds that 83 percent of people in Britain believe climate change is a current or imminent threat and among those 68 percent believe global warming is caused by human activities, such as burning fossil fuels.
The Guardian published the results from a new poll commissioned from ICM and reports that the findings are very similar to results to the same questions posed by the newspaper 18 months ago.
Damian Carrington, the Guardian’s head of environment, suggests that the controversy around the release of emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia has not dramatically harmed the public trust in global warming research.
He writes: “Supporters of action on climate change, from government to business to campaigners, will be relieved that this series of negative news failed to increase scepticism significantly.”
Climate sceptics are better represented among the over-65s with 24 percent of this age group saying that climate change is not a threat compared to 14 percent across all ages. And 27 percent believe climate change is already “a threat to the world” compared with an average of 40 percent nationally.
However, Carrington also notes today that polls taken in the UK in 2010 did in fact suggest that belief in climate change science among the public had been seriously eroded by the severe winters of 2009 and 2010 and the “Climategate” affair.
An Ipsos-Mori poll published in February 2010 suggested only 31 percent of people asked believed climate change was definitely happening. A Populas poll commissioned by the BBC during the same month showed that the number of people who did not think global warming was real had risen from 15 to 25 percent.
Back in March 2010 Carrington concluded from these poll results that “it seems it took a perfect storm of snow, scientific doubt and political failure to dent public acceptance of the reality of global warming by about 10 percent.”