Your point…

One of the historical weaknesses of the left, it seems to me, is that it has been unwilling to face the fact that the mass of left voters don’t actually spend much time bothering about the things which obsess intellectuals. [...]It is the fact that they are not responding to Global Warming as the warmists would like that has pushed certain journalists on the Guardian and Independent into Pol Pot mode.

…perfectly sums up my own personal attitude and most people I know about this whole climate change obsession.

The above point (e) by StuartR is also right on the money.

I’m personally fed up with having climate change shoved down my throat at every opportunity, and the point about whether there is actually a problem gets lost in the rhetoric.

You may all have seen this before, but this is a great page:

http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm

Happily entitled “A complete list of things caused by global warming”

In my view, quite a high number. And since Western nuclear reactors don’t even have the inherent flaws that made the Chernobyl disaster possible, it made me suspicious.

Why haven’t governments declared martial law and started building nuclear reactors as fast as possible, with any anti-nuclear protesters being simply shot? If the climate catastrophe threat was real that’d be the obvious thing to do.

It looks like the goal of the climate campaigners is to reduce our energy production, not our CO2 production, but why?

Herein lies the deep weirdness of the story.
The Independent, like the Guardian/Observer, is losing readers and money.
Both papers are going hell-for-leather after the committed green readership with stories like these.
Yet reader responses to articles on global warming suggest that, among readers of these papers, sceptics outnumber believers by something like 5 to 1. (this suggests that scepticism is greater among readers of the Guardian and Independent than among the public at large!).
What’s going on? Are Britain’s two centre left newspapers bent on suicide?

Alex Cull at #7 asks a pertinent question about opinion polls, and Ben at #8 gives the outline of a response. If you transform his 3-way split of “Sceptical v Don’t give a monkeys v Alarmist” into a 4 -way (2X2) split of sceptics v. alarmists, and informed / opinionated v. uninformed / don’t-give-a-monkeys, you have a schema which I think might help to explain a lot, including the (to me) disturbing fact that activist scepticism about global warming is to be found mainly on the far right.

The opinionated / “don’t-give-a-monkeys” division has been used to great effect by the French sociologist Emmanuel Todd, who was practically the only analyst who predicted the electoral success of Jacques Chirac. The fact he spotted was that opinion polls on hypothetical subjects (“who might you vote for in an election in the distant future?”; “Is Ed Milliband doing a good job?”) attract responses from those who have an opinion ready-made on every subject – the chattering classes, in other words. The majority of people, who don’t feel the need to devote their lives to the creation of a coherent philosophy to support their Weltangschauung, give sensible responses to concrete questions, like: “Who are you going to vote for?” Otherwise, they’re don’t knows.
One of the historical weaknesses of the left, it seems to me, is that it has been unwilling to face the fact that the mass of left voters don’t actually spend much time bothering about the things which obsess intellectuals. When push comes to shove (over apartheid, or Palestine or any other subject involving what Orwell termed “basic human decency”) most people vote for decency. But, unlike you and me, they don’t think about it much in their leisure moments. It is the fact that they are not responding to Global Warming as the warmists would like that has pushed certain journalists on the Guardian and Independent into Pol Pot mode.

The sceptical public:

(e) Know damn well that the most vocal alarmist proponents just don’t live up to their own rhetoric. Why should we be coerced to act in a way that they clearly don’t?

I may be a sceptic and most of the people I know who actually research this whole issue themselves become a sceptic…however I would say the vast majority of the masses fall into two other categories:
1. I haven’t a clue about climate change, nothing seems to have changed so quite frankly I don’t give a monkeys
2. I haven’t a clue about climate change, however the media and ‘the scientists’ think we’re all going to fry and every weather event is due to climate change so lets get on the band wagon.

I would say in my humble opinion that the vast majority of people fall into group 1., then next largest group of folk into group 2. Us the sceptics are a far smaller (but determined and usually well read) group. The group 2 lot have fallen foul to the constant barrage of mainly media buy into to climate alarmism…with words like sustainability, carbon this that and the other (not CO2 note), eco this, enviro this being important to them because that what eminates from the BBC, Guardian, Independent etc.

The one group I have of course missed out are the activists, the true believers. THey of course are trying to convert via guilt, the laws and by shear persistance etc group 1 into group 2. Unfortunately for them they are fighting apathy and the fact of course that we aren’t yet frying. The race now is whether the activists can get all their eco measures into law in god time versus nothing actually happening. So climate porn we have for a few more years.

So yes, I could well have been overstating the case when I wrote “We know it’s (d)…” I’m confident that the reason I’m sceptical is not because I know it’s true and am terrified of admitting it to myself. But there could be people in that category. Who would know? They might not admit to it, or hint at it, in a survey. And a psychologist of the psychodynamic persuasion could argue that any of us could be consciously sceptical, but unconsciously terrified.

Good point, and food for thought.

Another excellent article from the Editors. While Whitmarsh may want to try to steer away from the faintly elitist phrase “deficit model” she still seems wholeheartedly to hold a belief in it.

If, for example, she were talking about a deficit model about the public’s understanding about the connection between lung cancer and smoking it could be possibly be used fairly enough. Because if members of the public so desired (we can’t coerce them – yet) then there would always be an unambiguous path to follow to help reduce the public’s knowledge ‘deficit’ on this subject.

However it could start looking fishy when used about the public’s deficit of understanding of “carbon literacy”: a fairly recent made up catch phrase as far as I know. I know they don’t mean organic chemistry or carbon mineralogy or even carbon dating. I suspect “carbon literacy” means something like an utter certainty of humankinds contribution to CO2 being the main driving cause of devastating climate – something that even the IPCC leaves some wriggle room of uncertainty about.

They still don’t get it, do they. Are we, the sceptical public:

a) confused, poor things, and need to be educated a little more about the terrible importance of climate change, or

b) just being selfish spoilsports and need to be shamed into mending our ways and doing the right thing, or

c) so terrified of climate change that our tiny minds cannot handle it and we must deny its very existence (or go to pieces, presumably), or

d) able to make up our own minds about the subject without being subjected to ever more extreme forms of end-of the-world titillation and ever more intrusive lecturing about our travelling, spending, lifestyle and eating habits?

We know it’s (d), but do they?

Here’s to Climate Resistance (never futile), a questioning attitude and a refusal to be quietly assimilated!