Half of Telegraph readers belief climate change a ‘natural phenomenon’. 98% of scientists disagree

On the back of chairman of the Commons Energy and Climate Change committee Tim Yeo's comments that climate change may not be man-made after all, the Telegraph have done a poll asking its readers if they think the same.

On the back of chairman of the Commons Energy and Climate Change committee Tim Yeo’s comments that climate change may not be man-made after all, the Telegraph have done a poll asking readers if they think the same.

After voting in the poll – I voted ‘yes completely’, as you might have guessed – you get the results. And guess what – a whopping 48 per cent of Telegraph readers believe that climate change is a ‘completely natural phenomenon’.

Telegraph poll climate change

Rather than berate readers of the Telegraph for their views myself, I’ll leave the floor to Martin Wolf of the Financial Times (£):

An analysis of abstracts of 11,944 peer-reviewed scientific papers, published between 1991 and 2011 and written by 29,083 authors, concludes that 98.4 per cent of authors who took a position endorsed man-made (anthropogenic) global warming, 1.2 per cent rejected it and 0.4 per cent were uncertain.

Never underestimate the power of self-denial.

22 Responses to “Half of Telegraph readers belief climate change a ‘natural phenomenon’. 98% of scientists disagree”

  1. Freedom Fighter

    Global warming is bunk – as the constant cold weather so clearly reveals!

  2. Jonny Kingham

    No need for science then when you have weather events

  3. Leslie Graham

    Amazing. And just WHAT exactly is this ‘natural phenomenon’ to which they refer?

    Why are they so shy about their incredible discovery. If they were to publish their research that reveals the presense of this ‘natural phenomenon’ that tens of thousands of qualified climate scientists have failed to spot in over a century of research they would be on for the Nobel Prize at the very least.

    What could it be?

    Massive herds of invisible unicorns all farting in unison perhaps?

    I can’t wait to see the published research.

  4. Leslie Graham

    Yes – it’s cold in your back garden – that’s the clincher isn’t it?
    All this nonsense about the loss of 80% of Arctic ice volume affecting the jet stream and bringing Arctic weather south with it? What silliness. These thousands of climate scientists – what do they know about it?
    It’s cold in parts of the UK so that’s it. The science is settled and 115 years of research has been revealed as a hippy hoax.
    And of course the fact that GLOBAL warming has accelerated over the last 15 years according to thirty thousand thermomters and several thousand deep ocean bouys has nothin gto do with it.
    It’s cold in ‘Freedom fighters’ garden and that’s all anyone needs to know about it.

  5. Paul Trembath

    Where do you get that? According to the linked analysis, the papers were evaluated by (1) blind rating by web volunteers; (2) asking the authors themselves.

    http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024/article

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