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’.
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”
Paul Trembath
Of course not. The Earth’s climate has varied significantly many times, often (but not always) slowly over thousands or millions of years, and there is a huge weight of evidence for this. Anthropogenic global warming is (a) happening now, fairly rapidly and (b) substantially caused by combustion of fossil fuels by human beings. There is also a huge weight of evidence for this. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change.
brossen99
We are living this !
http://nollyprott.wordpress.com/2012/06/20/green-holocaust-2/
Gubulgaria
They get this stuff from fossil fuel industry shills, and then repeat it, without attribution, because they’re paranoid conspiracy theorists who’ll believe absolutely anything if it’s on a far-right blog.
And they call themselves ‘sceptics’.
Lee Roberts
I have to agree with many others commenting here: the suggestion that climate change is entirely man-made simply cannot be true. It is more appropriate for us, as environmentalists, to instead adopt the narrative that climate change is a natural phenomenon but that human activity is modifying and/or accelerating it. I haven’t personally done the assessment of all the climate papers referred to in the FT piece, but I can’t believe 98% of climate scientists are saying the changes we’re witnessing are totally our fault the way it’s being suggested – my guess is that, the 98% hold the view human activity is definitely impacting climate systems, but not in itself creating them
Co,e
Idiot.