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Times Poll: Climate Alarmists Losing the Argument
Less than half the population believes that human activity is to blame for global warming, according to an exclusive poll for The Times.
The revelation that ministers have failed in their campaign to persuade the public that the greenhouse effect is a serious threat requiring urgent action will make uncomfortable reading for the Government as it prepares for next month’s climate change summit in Copenhagen.
Only 41 per cent accept as an established scientific fact that global warming is taking place and is largely man-made. Almost a third (32 per cent) believe that the link is not yet proved; 8 per cent say that it is environmentalist propaganda to blame man and 15 per cent say that the world is not warming……..
Global warming is not our fault, say most voters in Times poll
Only a quarter of people believe that climate change is the most serious problem that the world faces, according to a poll for The Times.
The finding suggests that the public is unconvinced by the Government’s message that climate change is “the moral issue of our times” and that we must embrace urgently a low-carbon lifestyle.
The Times: Widespread scepticism on climate change undermines Copenhagen summit
Even more interesting than the result, though, is the Thunderer’s appalled reaction. In a leader that might have been easily have been written by the Great Moonbat himself, the Times quite simply refuses to accept that the growing band of sceptics may have a point. Instead, it accuses these ‘deniers’ of being idiots:
It is possible that the collective expertise of brilliant scientists could be wrong. The best minds in the world once held a geocentric theory of the solar system. Before the discovery of sub-atomic particles they believed that everything was made of earth, air, fire and water. Right up to the 19th century, serious scientists wrote recipe books for making animals. But no previous process of scientific trial, error and progress has ever overturned such a well-attested thesis. Lord Rees has reminded us that we now live in a global village and it is, he pointed out, probably inevitable that there will be some global village idiots.
The Times’s approach is not unlike that of a Marxist theorist berating the bourgeoisie for their “false consciousness”; or indeed, a Eurocrat deciding that when sovereign nations keep voting “No” in Euro referendums it doesn’t mean that the EU is an oppressive and unpopular construct but that the voters need working on a bit harder so that they come to the correct “Yes” conclusion next time. It is, in fact, another perfect case of what Jonah Goldberg calls Liberal Fascism.
It is also an example of just how increasingly out-of-touch the MSM is with the views of the wider reading world. Recently, the Times launched a poster campaign boasting that it offered more extensive eco coverage than any other newspaper. Some of the claims made on these posters – such as the one about the North East passage being used as a commercial shipping route for the first time (when actually it has been used since 1934) – have been shot down by the excellent Andrew Orlowski on The Register.
But even if these claims were true, are wall-to-wall horror stories about impending man-made eco-doom really what readers of the quality newspapers want to read these days? My suspicion is not. I’m presuming that the audience which reads and comments on blogs isn’t totally different from the one that reads newspapers in print form. And if that’s the case, then the MSM’s obsession with AGW is looking increasingly out of date.
If you don’t believe me, check out the comments below one of George Monbiot’s columns, or indeed, either of the two Times articles listed above. Commenters who take the Al-Gore-approved line are vastly outnumbered by commenters who believe the whole AGW thing is a load of crock.
And it will take a bit more than bullying accusations that they’re “idiots”, I suspect, to swing them round.
James Delingpole in The Telegraph: 59 per cent of UK population are ‘village idiots’ thunders The Times