How many Brits believe in Climate Change?

31 Jan '11: [DNC writes] Professor Joe Romm, once a white house staffer of the Clinton era maintains a very interesting blog http://climateprogress.org/, including this article about the British attitude to Climate Change. Despite the downmarket nature of our national tabloid media, we are fortunate not to have the Fox News effect, where a channel can ruthlessly propogate a poisoned philosophy, instead of the truthful news. It turns out that a good majority of the British public sampled understand the difference between Weather and Climate, and recognise that if the UK got colder in December 2010, this doesn't mean that 'global warming' isn't happening, because there has to be a global balance. Most of us are aware that Greenland and the Canadian Arctic had the warmest winter ever, despite the UK's cold weather.
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Without Hot Air: Mackay

[DNC writes] David Mackay who wrote 'Sustainable Energy - Without Hot Air', has made it available free on the web - for some time it has been available as a large PDF or as a set of html pages readable on line. It is a very realistic look at all our sources of energy. While I can't agree with everything in the book (for example he is somewhat scathing of wind power) the overall message is clear - it is our Energy Guzzling habit that is the biggest problem. All the efforts to exploit new technologies like wind farms and heat pumps don't get away from the fact that as a society we use too much. Natural processes like vegetation cannot convert all the new CO2 that is caused by our energy consumption, especially if we are de-foresting as part of human activity. The inhabitants of the Los Angeles region drive the equivalent of 140 million miles every Day!

In particular he mentions that doing only a little, like not leaving mobile phone chargers plugged in will only achieve a little. Bigger gestures are required. Some need only to cost nothing. Turning down the thermostat by one degree could save 10% of annual heating costs. In everything he discusses, he is not polemically pro or anti anything specifically, fundamentally, he is pro-Arithmetic, and the logic that that carries with it. This is the opening quote from his statement to the House of Lords committee, Jan 2009:

The public discussion of energy options tends to be intensely emotional, polarized, mistrustful, and destructive.  Every option is strongly opposed: the public seem to be anti-wind, anti-coal, anti-waste-to-energy, anti-tidal-barrage, anti-fuel-duty, and anti-nuclear.

We can't be anti-everything! We need an energy plan that adds up. But there's a lack of numeracy in the public discussion of energy. Where people do use numbers, they select them to sound big, to make an impression, and to score points in arguments, rather than to aid thoughtful discussion.

Cutting our consumption is the priority, but what can governments do about generation? He concludes by discussing what is possible at the large scale, such as very large wind farms in the north and very large solar farms in sunny regions, with high capacity long distance cables.
Contents Page
Buying the Book
BBC article by D Mackay