A Climate Skepticism Denialist

Skepticism about skepticism: this is very meta. I followed a link from my favorite science compilation page, Not Exactly Rocket Science, to this article from a British blogger agonizing over recent polling data suggesting that the global warming narrative is losing steam in Great Britain. The number of her countrymen who believe claims about environmental threats are exaggerated is 37%, a sharp increase from the 24% with similar beliefs a decade ago. But she's quick to point out that data can be misleading, especially in the hands of media with an interest in presenting a narrative:

The survey also considered whether people agreed more with these two statements: “We worry too much about the future of the environment and not enough about prices and jobs today” and “People worry too much about human progress harming the environment”* (p95). From this, the BSA report argues that the public are more sceptical that a threat exists. I’m not sure that follows. Maybe, but it’s a jump to cite scepticism. It could just be that people think we worry too much. Perhaps they just think there are other things to worry about. As the report itself suggests, the “financial pinch” of the recession may well be having an impact on the ways people make choices about the environment. Or, perhaps people agree that climate change is happening, just that there is nothing we can do. Again, this doesn’t mean climate sceptics aren’t winning the communications battle here, I just mean I don’t necessarily see that from the data. It all rather depends on how we unpack and then define denialism/ climate scepticism, and I don’t think the report does that very clearly (not that it necessarily should, but we need to keep that lack of definition in mind when reading the data).

The blogger also notes that, in evaluating sweeping claims, it's important to examine the source of the underlying data:

One final thing that bugged me about this report was that it didn’t really examine how and where people got their information about the environment from, and yet still felt able to make loose connections between the timing of Climategate and the apparent rise in scepticism. From the final pages: “we conclude that media coverage may make a difference – not least ‘new’ media and the internet ‘blogosphere’ where unfounded opinion can sometimes be favoured over scientific fact” (p106). The impact of the media on people’s understanding, reasoning and framing of any issue, perhaps in particular ones including esoteric expertise like climate science, is incredibly complex, and the BSA report writers should have known better. They should certainly know better than to make loose comments about unfounded opinion on blogosphere (which is a large, diverse and porous area of activity). I also don’t see how they can look at a change over ten years and say it has to be something that happened in 2009, no matter how much media ink was spilled. To their credit they do also say it could also be matter of fatigue and refer to financial cost, etc.

Don't you hate it when people are secretive about their data sources? She concludes with this poignant plea:

Personally, I’d like to see them acknowledge that they don’t know and call for investment in more research here.

The only thing missing was a demand for sounder science before society was expected to invest trillions of dollars and wreck the world economy to address a potentially non-existent threat. I do admire the blogger's choice of art, though: