Brit global warming skeptics now outnumber believers

Nothing like a taste of climate policy to put you off


Fewer Britons than ever support the proposition that global warming is caused by human-driven CO2 emissions, according to the latest survey.

Some 48 per cent of Britons now agree with the suggestion that warming could be "mostly natural" and that the idea of it being human-caused has yet to be proven. By comparison only 43 per cent agree with the idea that warming is "mostly" caused by industrial and vehicular CO2 emissions.

In Canada the ratio is 58:34 in favour of the mamade warming hypothesis, while in the USA it's a tie.

Only 43 per cent of Britons think we should get poorer in order to protect the environment. The numbers have actually moved very little since November 2009, but believers are now in the minority.

The studies were conducted by Angus Reid and surveyed four thousand people in the USA, Canada and the UK.

The UK is only one of three countries in the world to pass legislation mandating CO2 reduction, and the issue dominated the media agenda between 2006 and the Copenhagen Summit in 2009. So the UK is unique amongst the three countries surveyed, in giving its population saturation exposure to the climate change issue, and early exposure to CO2 mitigation policies.

It would seem that the more people hear the arguments and study the policies, the less they like them.

You can download the PDF, with results and methodology, here. ®


Other stories you might like

  • What is this hot, hot thing Magma? An open-source project for building mobile networks, you say

    Amar and Bruce explain how cloud native principles can be applied to wireless connectivity

    Systems Approach This month's column was co-written by Amar Padmanabhan, a lead developer of Magma, the open-source project for creating carrier-grade networks; and Bruce Davie, a member of the project's technical advisory committee.

    Discussions about mobile and wireless networking seem to attract buzzwords, especially with the transition to 5G. And hence we see a flurry of “cloudification” of mobile networking equipment—think containers, microservices, and control and user plane separation.

    But making an architecture cloud native is more than just an application of buzzwords: it entails a number of principles related to scale, tolerance of failure, and operational models. And indeed it doesn’t really matter what you call the architecture; what matters is how well it works in production.

    Continue reading
  • Windows takes a breather in London's Spitalfields

    No, not that sort of Rust

    12BoC The Register's Bork column is coming to an end, and to mark the occasion we present the 12 Bork's of Christmas. Today: an unwanted appearance by the Windows command line.

    No PowerShell for this administrator, oh no. Whoever is behind this screen (spotted by Register reader Sam Owens) has fired up cmd.exe, probably via a script or batch file, and piped the output somewhere passers-by can admire it.

    Continue reading
  • You geeks have inherited the Earth, but what are you going to do with it?

    Historians a thousand years hence will talk about us. Let's not muff it

    Opinion It's the end of the year, when the tradition is to look back at what just happened. Let's not do that. Let's take a step back and look at the wider picture, because while we've been worrying about data breaches and OS updates, we've rather missed the point.

    The world is living through an historically great technological revolution as huge as any that has gone before. Farming and settlement turned us from slaves to masters of life support systems. The printing press liberated thought and enabled the Enlightenment and science. The Industrial Revolution linked energy to society.

    Now, the information revolution is doing the same for data, putting it to work, putting it in the hands of everyone, upsetting the status quo so fast we can barely see the shapes it makes.

    Continue reading

Biting the hand that feeds IT © 1998–2021