Between 1990 and 2009, total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from UK agriculture are estimated to have fallen by 21%.

So far, so good: it looks like British farmers have been doing their bit with cutting carbon. And assuredly many have – whether that’s meant cutting excessive fertiliser use, using biofuels to run farm machinery or planting more trees.

But then take a look at this chart. It shows UK agricultural self-sufficiency – the extent to which we grow our own food compared to relying on imports – and is plotted using official data available on the Defra website prepared for another publication.

Notice anything similar between the two graphs?

Could it possibly be that a continuous decline in UK agricultural production over the past two decades helps explain the resultant drop in agricultural emissions?

I’ll leave readers to speculate.

But whilst there is no statistical analysis of this in the report released yesterday, it does at least acknowledge the strong possibility that it is happening – and warns against it being confused for real emissions savings.

As the report states in its introduction: “A decline in agricultural activity in the UK may well lead to a decline in domestic GHG emissions (and vice versa), but …  As in other sectors, it would not make sense to drive down emissions from UK agriculture by relying more on the import of products that are at least as GHG intensive: this would effectively export the emission effect of food consumption, causing ‘carbon leakage’.”

But until we start to measure the emissions we’re outsourcing, and work to either plug the leaks or alter consumption patterns, official statistics will continue to tell only half the story.

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We were founded in 1971 by campaigner Charles Medawar and veteran social entrepreneur Michael Young, who also set up, amongst many other organisations, the Open University. PIRC’s creation was inspired by the work of legendary US civic activist Ralph Nader, and it was his brand of activism – using careful research and cogent advocacy to empower citizens and hold governments and companies to account – that Medawar and Young sought to bring to British shores.

PIRC in its 1970s incarnation, replete with cool hair.

In its early years, PIRC’s remit was broad, taking in issues of industrial pollution, workplace safety, consumer protection, and government secrecy – all bound together by a commitment to operating in the public interest. PIRC’s ‘social audits’ of unaccountable companies laid the foundations for corporate social responsibility reporting; whilst our concern for breaking down the walls of secrecy that kept citizens from scrutinising their government led to the formation of the Campaign for Freedom of Information. Maurice Frankel, a founding member and current Director of CFOI and former PIRC staff member, remains one of our trustees to this day. We’ve been making use of the FOI Act that he helped bring into law in our recent investigation of outsourced carbon emissions.

In more recent years, PIRC came to concentrate on critiquing the pharmaceutical industry – our work earning the praise of many, including John Le Carré, author of The Constant Gardener. But the rise of climate change as an issue of overwhelming concern precipitated a shift in our focus to environmental matters, and press for a transition towards a sustainable society.

Our fortieth birthday coincides with the fortieth anniversary of the modern environmental movement. PIRC was set up in the same year as Friends of the Earth in the UK and Greenpeace in the US. Over the past four decades, environmentalism has gone from being a fringe concern to part of mainstream politics, achieving some notable successes along the way – such as tackling acid rain (the subject of one of PIRC’s first reports), and taking renewable energy into the mainstream (the subject of two of PIRC’s more recent projects, Zero Carbon Britain and the Offshore Valuation).

But the environmental agenda has also seen its fortunes wax and wane. 2010 was a difficult year for environmentalists, following the failure of Copenhagen to reach a global climate deal, attacks by climate sceptics and a falling-away of media interest. Some commentators even seek to proclaim the death of environmentalism. Yet it would be far more constructive to debate its future – a future that may see environmentalism becoming very different, with new priorities and different ways of working, but still a vital social movement. Life, as they say, begins at forty. As the movement looks back on its first forty years, it’s crucial also to be considering the next forty, and the great transformations needed to make the world of 2050 a sustainable, healthy and happy one to live in.

As we celebrate our 40^th, we’d also like to take this opportunity to wish our Chair of Trustees, Chris Zealley, a very happy birthday. He turns 80 today and has worked for PIRC since its foundation. Very best wishes from all of us, Chris!

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Whilst on paper, Britain’s carbon emissions have declined, in reality they have grown – once emissions from imported goods are factored in. From a consumption perspective, the UK’s emissions have risen by 19% since 1990. New data from the Carbon Trust shows that by 2025 the UK’s total carbon footprint could actually be bigger than it is today, despite legally-binding targets to cut it by a third. Whilst domestic emissions will look smaller, almost half of the country’s footprint will be unseen, as the emissions will originate overseas.

The graph above, put together by the Carbon Trust, shows how the gulf between counted emissions and reality is projected to grow, as ‘outsourced emissions’ rise inexorably.

The Carbon Trust’s findings can be downloaded here. Today, PIRC also releases previously unpublished government documents it has obtained under the Freedom of Information Act following a 3-month investigation into outsourced emissions.

The full set of documents are available to download as a zip file here. Over the coming weeks, we will be analysing their content in detail. For now, to summarise some key findings:

• The government has long been aware of the issue of outsourced emissions and has repeatedly briefed Ministers about it – yet has failed to take meaningful action. One briefing states: “We have long known about embedded emissions as an issue and, given known trends in the UK’s trade balance and economic growth over the relevant period, the results are not surprising.” Another states: “increased emissions from UK consumption could cancel out the progress that we have made in reducing domestic carbon emissions.” Documents show civil servants have been investigating the matter since at least 2004.

• The government accepts the UK bears some responsibility for outsourced emissions, though it is reluctant to admit this publicly. Whilst one briefing claims that “Government policy has much less leverage over emissions that occur abroad”, it also states: “Nevertheless, we recognise that we do have a certain amount of control over emissions from abroad, as this is where many of our products come from. Consumer demand can be a powerful influence on manufacturers. The energy that goes into making many consumer goods might be used in another country, but by purchasing these products, we are contributing to that energy consumption.”

• The government also knows that energy efficiency improvements are not enough to offset growth in consumption. Newly-uncovered documents state: “While technological efficiency has improved the CO2 impacts of our products since 1992, the rise in UK consumption has outstripped the improvements achieved”; and “the Government needs to be cautious about over-claiming on its achievements in decoupling economic growth from environmental degradation”.

• The great majority of the UK’s outsourced emissions are created in China and other developing countries without any form of binding emissions targets. In 2004, UK consumption resulted in a net balance of 125Mt CO2 being emitted in China and other non-Annex 1 countries. Had the emissions occurred in the UK, we would have had to pay a price for the carbon emitted in their manufacture. Instead, no-one anywhere bore the full ecological costs of this consumption – except the planet itself.

• A Defra-commissioned report on outsourced emissions in 2008 was dogged by controversy and delays in its release. As BBC journalist Roger Harrabin reported at the time, “The government sat on the Defra SEI report since February, tested its calculations, then published it in an obscure press release on 2 July.” A Defra briefing from May 2008 obtained under FOI states: “It is well known, at least in the research community, that Defra has recently completed this project. There is no good reason to delay publication and doing so may attract unwarranted negative attention.” Why was the government so reluctant to publish this evidence?

• The government has repeatedly refused to ask the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) to investigate the matter properly. Yet the Committee has shown repeated interest in examining the problem, and government has suggested that ordering such an investigation is merely a mattering of timing, not principle. A DECC briefing from October 2009 states: “Any decision to commission work from the CCC on embedded emissions should… await the outcome of Copenhagen”; whilst a briefing from January 2010 suggests that, “While it would be possible to ask the Committee to look at embedded emissions, they have more than enough work to do in the next year to keep them very busy.” However, in December 2010, the CCC themselves told Ministers that “The Government should commission the CCC to look into the implications of considering UK emissions on a consumption rather than a production basis.” When asked in a Parliamentary Question in February 2011 whether he would request the CCC to look into the matter, DECC Minister Greg Barker stated, “I have not made a request”. Why is the government ignoring the advice of its own advisors?

We’ll be offering further analysis later this week.

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My conclusions from the charts are:

1. Level of concern

Climate change and the environment in general isn’t a major issue on most people’s radars.  It doesn’t come high in the list when people are thinking about the issues that affects their day-to-day lives. However, it does become more significant when it’s prominent for external reasons: severe weather attributed to climate change; positive media attention (e.g. around the Stern report).  Equally, it can be less of a concern for the opposite reasons. Indeed, the dates for the fieldwork for a number of the charts – early 2010 – have, I believe, reduced some of the scores for action on tackling climate change. So comparisons with 2005 and 2008 look worse than I suspect they would have been if the fieldwork had been a couple of months later.

I think this suggests that people generally don’t reject the idea of climate change as an important issue. When they’re reminded about it, it reappears as something important. But most of the time, most people aren’t affected by it at an emotional level, any more than most people in rich countries are affected emotionally by food security in the global South apart from when starvation makes the TV screens.

2. Level of engagement

MORI’s conclusion on the data about whether climate change is exaggerated is that two in five agree with this. That’s true, but what I think is most interesting is that 71% are in the middle three options: tend to agree / neither agree nor disagree / tend to disagree. Another 3% don’t know.  So only 26% have a strong opinion.  Similarly, on the question about whether people are uncertain what the effects of climate change will be, 79% are in those three options.

We see this often in questions about climate change that give middle-ground options. More people seem to be put off by the heat of the ‘debate’ between climate campaigners and those who reject humans as the cause of climate change. Both sides are seen to be overstating their case; the compromise is assumed to be the correct position.

3. Basis for action

I’ve used the data on slide 18 on a couple of occasions (here, for instance). I think it’s one of the most important findings I’ve seen about the communication of climate change.  While most people think that climate change is caused by humans, that it’s serious, that it requires action, and that that action should be led by governments…  they don’t trust politicians to lead that action.

Either politicians have to get much better at how they talk about climate change, and be much more transparent about how climate taxes are structured.  Or they need help from other people, who can push for action on climate change with much more credibility.

This is post was originally published on ClimateSock​.com.

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A movie that is now being launched in the UK called Collapse shows Michael Ruppert chain-smoking his way through visions of social and economic disaster. It is symptomatic of the utterly self defeating way that peak oil  and climate change are typically communicated.

Ruppert is a media generated phenomenon who brings together a cluster of conspiracy theories under one house brand. His endlessly promoted back story- as the LAPD cop who faced dismissal for revealing the CIA supply of drugs- is the stuff of a hundred good-cop movies . His highest profile accusation, that Dick Cheney personally ordered the 9-11 attacks, is downright nuts.  It is directly descended from the  conspiracy theories that the CIA ordered the shooting of J F and Bobby Kennedy. No big surprise – Ruppert promotes these myths too.

But never mind Ruppert, what is interesting for the Climate Denial blog is the appearance of this film at this time and the way that it presents its case. I have not yet had a chance to see the entire film though have seen long extracts. Here is the trailer – judge for yourself.

I have several observations on this film that relate directly to climate change and the way that these issues are communicated.

The first is that this is not a minor film. The director, Chris Smith has made several excellent progressive documentaries including The Yes Men. Collapse received positive reviews from across the mainstream US media and has a powerful afterlife in the blogosphere and campaign networks.

The second is that it does not speak directly about climate change- its concern is peak oil. Both issues are conflated in the mind of many activists and networks (the Transition Movement most notably). The public as a whole sees them as part of the same world view.

In terms of the documentary form we are clearly in the footsteps of Al Gore who established the box office potential of a feature length lecture by a charismatic (older man) presenter. What is interesting is the way that footage of Ruppert is interwoven with a rolling news format of economic and social collapse. Recent documentaries and disaster movies now frequently use  a collage of rapidly edited random footage taken out of context. This slick style aestheticises  images of destruction and objectifies the suffering of the people who appear, all too briefly, as bodies being blown up or swept away.

Four years ago an excellent report by the Institute of Public Policy Research identified alarmism in words and images as one of the dominant narratives about climate change. Gill Ereaut wrote:

The sensationalism of alarmism and its connection with the ultimate unreality of the movies also serve to create a sense of distance from the issue. What is more, in this ‘unreal’ and awesome form, alarmism might even become secretly thrilling – effectively a form of ‘climate porn’ rather than a constructive message. Alarmism potentially positions climate change as yet another apocalyptic construction that is perhaps a figment of our cultural imaginations. All of this serves to undermine the ability of this discourse.

By this analysis ‘Collapse’ is an 82 minute long apocalypse pornfest that further reinforces the association between the visual aesthetics of disaster and concerns about resource shortages, peak oil, and, by association, climate change.

In terms of public motivation this is very bad news. Repeated research has shown that apocalyptic language and images create a sense of powerlessness and actively undermine peoples’ capacity to act.  They can also directly feed a range of associated denial strategies including a short term hedonism and nihilistic cynicism that can be very appealing to young people.

Increasingly- as we are seeing with the political polarisation in the US and Australia- people are not weighing up climate change or other resource issues on the strength of the solid evidence but are choosing between competing worldviews that deliver a package of lifestyle, political and ethical decisions.

On the one side people are presented with a cornucopialist future of endless expansion, built on technical ingenuity and personal freedom. This has now become absorbed into a wider right wing narrative of globalisation, corporatism, minimal government and free markets.

On the other side the apocalyptists promote a future of decline, conflict, corruption, personal guilt, and collapse.  This worldview has become deeply associated in the public mind with climate change and peak oil and this movie reinforces it in every way.

So if Ruppert is right he is following the worst possible strategy for raising concern about Peak Oil. By emphasising and reinforcing the existing worldview divides he is following a script that could have been written for him by those  opposing action.

That is if he is right. But I think he is wrong. I think that capitalism is, for all the reasons that its defenders use, far more resilient than most apocalyptists believe and has repeatedly shown its capacity to postpone the impacts of resource shortages. What is more, there is overwhelming evidence that even when people do face problems they are far more likely to work together and seek collective solutions than to panic and riot. The images in this film of looting and rioting are rooted in a very American fear of the underclass.

This does not mean that I do not think that we are running into severe problems. There is no doubt that our resource use is insanely short sighted and we are already seeing the first shortages. However I do not agree with the timeline of this film or the wider peak oil community.

And the timeline is everything. The boy who cried wolf was not wrong about the wolves- in fact his flock was eaten by the wolf in the end. But he was wrong about the timeline and  he exhausted the capacity of the nearby villagers to listen or trust his judgment.

So every time a film like this comes out and the world does not collapse – as indeed it will not- great harm is done to our interests. In the false dichotomy of competing worldviews, people’s support for the dominant worldview will have been reinforced and future attempts to raise concern will have been damaged.The real issues (climate change, resources depletion,food scarcity) become conflated in peoples minds with  the false panics like Y2K which made similar predictions about the collapse of law and order.

Of all resources, the most precious is the willingness of people to listen and change. This too is finite and only changes between generations. We only get one shot at this and we’re really blowing it.

A footnote

Caspar Henderson, who writes the Grains of Sand blog, just pointed me to the recent book State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain, 1970-1974 by Dominic Sandbrook. It quotes a personal ad in the Ecologist from March 1974 from a young man seeking a girlfriend to “share the remaining years of industrial civilisation” and experience the “end catastrophe”. Teddy Goldsmith, founder of the Ecologist, had just published the bestselling A Blueprint for Survival two years later, prophesying that food and essential minerals would run out within a few decades and “the breakdown of society and the irreversible disruption of the life-support systems on this planet” would occur “within the lifetimes of our children”. Source..] Teddy Goldsmith died two years ago and, as far as I am aware, his many children are all fit and well. His book “5000 days to save the planet” is sitting on a shelf behind me . It was published in October 1990, over 7,000 days ago.

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Imagine you were part of a highly successful environmental campaign group, that had spent the best part of the last year enthusiastically building a broad coalition of organisations – from schools, to local councils, to football teams – committed to cutting their carbon footprint. How might you choose to mark such a successful 10 months?

An attention-grabbing stunt of some kind? Great idea. A controversial and challenging video? That could work, yes. A poorly executed ‘joke’ about peer pressure involving the violent deaths of children and office workers who don’t subscribe to your campaign? Err, possibly not…

But yet, bizarrely, this is precisely what the otherwise well-respected 10:10 group opted to do. If you’ve not yet seen the video No Pressure, then you can now only view bootlegged versions as the original was wisely taken down just hours after it was launched. It made the front page of the Guardian Environment section, took a predictable bashing from the far-right conspiracy theorist James Delingpole over at the Telegraph, and sent the, ahem, ‘data libertarian’ blogs into a spin.

That the video was panned by the usual suspects is unsurprising. Delingpole spluttered that “the environmental movement has revealed the snarling, wicked, homicidal misanthropy beneath its cloak of gentle, bunny-hugging righteousness.” But while Delingpole’s wilfully literal misreading of the video is unremarkable, there is a genuine reason for concern: as a piece of climate change communication, it is disastrous.

At the most general level, the video fails to address basic principles of communication. What is the message? Who are the audience? The video literally doesn’t make any sense – if it is aimed at supporters, what are we supposed to take from it? And if it is aimed at those who oppose the 10:10 campaign – or more pertinently, are not yet aware of or interested in it – then what is the video hoping to achieve?

Beyond these general faults, many of the pitfalls of communicating climate change are gleefully skipped into. It is now well established that using shock tactics to pressure people into caring about climate change is of limited use: while fear of a negative outcome (e.g. lung cancer) can be an effective way of promoting behavioural changes (e.g. giving up smoking), the link between the threat and the behaviour must be personal and direct. Typically, climate change is perceived as neither a direct nor a personal threat – and so shocking people into doing their recycling is probably not the way to go.

We also know that while ‘peer pressure’ can be a remarkably effective way of promoting and spreading environmentally friendly behaviour, this is a process of social comparison that cannot be controlled by ‘outsiders’ to an individual’s social group. People make their comparisons to people who are ‘like them’ – people that they respect, admire, or empathise with in some way. Observing other people engaging in pro-environmental behaviour is a fantastic way of generating a positive social norm. Blowing them up for failing to get with the programme is not…

Of course, its easy to be critical of any attempt to engage the public with climate change – it is a formidable challenge finding the right way of encouraging people to embrace low-carbon lifestyles. But gradually, social scientists and climate change communicators are starting to piece together good evidence on how to effectively communicate climate change. The recent report by the Climate Change Communication Advisory Group (CCCAG), a network of climate communication academics and practitioners, set out seven principles for communicating climate change to mass audiences:

1. Move Beyond Social Marketing
2. Be honest and forthright about the probable impacts of climate change, and the scale of the challenge we confront in avoiding these. But avoid deliberate attempts to provoke fear or guilt.
3. Be honest and forthright about the impacts of mitigating and adapting to climate change for current lifestyles, and the ‘loss’ – as well as the benefits – that these will entail. Narratives that focus exclusively on the ‘up-side’ of climate solutions are likely to be unconvincing.
   1. Avoid emphasis upon painless, easy steps.
   2. Avoid over-emphasis on the economic opportunities that mitigating, and adapting to, climate change may provide.
   3. Avoid emphasis upon the opportunities of ‘green consumerism’ as a response to climate change.
4. Empathise with the emotional responses that will be engendered by a forthright presentation of the probable impacts of climate change.
5. Promote pro-environmental social norms and harness the power of social networks
6. Think about the language you use, but don’t rely on language alone
7. Encourage public demonstrations of frustration at the limited pace of government action

The 10:10 film may yet prove to be a success in terms of the level of attention that is paid to campaign – once people scratch the surface, they will find that exploding children are not actually a part of the plan, and that the aims of the 10:10 campaign are both reasonable and fair. But the danger is that more people will be persuaded that the pastiche of environmentalism that James Delingpole promotes is real.

At such a crucial juncture for campaigning on climate change, with public scepticism higher than a year ago, international negotiations tying themselves into a knot, and the British government taking enormous chunks out of the budget for tackling climate change, don’t those in the public eye have a responsibility to do a better job with their climate change communications?

Update: We recommend this great response from Rob Hopkins.

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• Why positive feedback doesn’t necessarily lead to runaway warming – Positive feedback happens when the response to some change amplifies that change. For example: The Earth heats up, and some of the sea ice near the poles melts. Now bare water is exposed to the sun’s rays, and absorbs more light than did the previous ice cover; so the planet heats up a little more. In both of these cases, the “effect” reinforces the “cause”, which will increase the “effect”, which will reinforce the “cause”… So won’t this spin out of control? The answer is, No, it will not, because each subsequent stage of reinforcement & increase will be weaker and weaker. The feedback cycles will go on and on, but there will be a diminishing of returns, so that after just a few cycles, it won’t matter anymore.
• Himalayan Glaciers: Wrong Date, Right Message – Is the AR4 terribly flawed? It is important to note that this is one error in a roughly 3000 page technical document, an error percentage similar to the Encyclopedia Britannica. The 2035 claim was not included in the Technical Summary, the Summary for Policymakers, or the Synthesis Report. Does this error show the IPCC has an ‘alarmist’ bias – a tendency to exaggerate the negative impacts of climate change? In fact, there are far more documented instances of the AR4 being too conservative, rather than too alarmist, on emissions scenarios, sea level rise, and Arctic sea-ice melt. Many of the Himalayan Glaciers are retreating at an accelerating rate (Ren 2006) and roughly 500 million people depend on the melt water from these glaciers (Kehrwald 2008).
• A history of international climate change policy – An overview of the history of international climate policy over the last 30 years, divided into five periods. The article shows (1) the increasing complexity of the definition of the climate change issue from an environmental to a development issue; (2) the inability of the developed countries to reduce their own emissions and raise funds commensurate with the nature of the problem and their initial commitments; (3) the increasing engagement of different social actors in the discussion and, in particular, the gradual use of market mechanisms in the regime; (4) the increasing search for alternative solutions within the formal negotiations—such as the identification of nationally appropriate mitigation actions for the developing world, reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, and the use of geo-engineering solutions; and (5) the search for solutions outside the regime—the mobilization of sub-national policies on climate change, litigation, and markets on biofuels.
• Coffee threatened by beetles in a warming world (!) – The Arabica coffee grown in Ethiopia and Latin America is an especially climate-sensitive crop. It requires just the right amount of rain and an average annual temperature between 64 degrees Fahrenheit and 70 degrees Fahrenheit to prosper. As temperatures rise — Ethiopia’s average low temperature has increased by about .66 degrees F every decade since 1951, according to the country’s National Meteorological Agency — and rains become more variable, Ethiopian coffee farmers have suffered increasingly poor yields. Last year was especially bad, with exports dropping by 33 percent. Some have moved their coffee trees to higher elevations, while others have been forced to switch to livestock and more heat-tolerant crops, such as enset, a starchy root vegetable similar to the plantain. Now, there is evidence that a warming climate may be linked to one of the major threats facing the coffee industry in Ethiopia and elsewhere…

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• And yet it works. Adam Corner on ‘ClimateGate’, transparency & peer-review. – “Open access is based on the premise that there are those outside the inner circle of peer reviewers who are competent enough to provide a second opinion on the science. This is indisputably true. But while talk of throwing open the lab doors might be rhetorically satisfying, it would provide only an illusion of democracy. Certainly there are non-academics competent enough with statistics to find errors in a piece of published science. Correcting errors in science would be a valuable service for an auditor to offer. But if several auditors reached conflicting conclusions, then somehow a judgement would have to be made about their respective competence. And who should make that judgement? Presumably a group of suitably qualified, honest individuals with a proven track record in a relevant discipline – in other words, peer review.”
• Climate email inquiry: bringing democracy to science | Richard Horton – “Scientists need to do more to emphasise their uncertainties, not recoil from them. Uncertainty may be uncomfortable, but its admission builds trust. It demonstrates integrity. One of science’s great strengths is its quantification of doubt. Fourth, scientists need to take peer review off its pedestal. As an editor, I know that rigorous peer review is indispensable. But I also know that it is widely misunderstood. Peer review is not the absolute or final arbiter of scientific quality. It does not test the validity of a piece of research. It does not guarantee truth. Peer review can improve the quality of a research paper – it tells you something about the acceptability of new findings among fellow scientists – but the prevailing myths need to be debunked. We need a more realistic understanding about what peer review can do and what it can’t. If we treat peer review as a sacred academic cow, we will continue to let the public down again and again.”
• Economics Behaving Badly – A great NYT article on behavioural economics & its failings, important for climate policy.
• Institute of Physics disbands Energy Sub-Group following ‘skeptical’ ClimateGate submission – Hopefully the end of the embarrassment for the IoP.

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• Will 2010 be the hottest year on record? – it all depends on which data source you choose: GISTEMP (likely) or HadCRU (about as likely as not).
• Climate change is leaving us with extra space junk – Even the space junk is trying to tell us we’re changing the climate. One more independent line of evidence to add to the pile, how many do we need?!
• Black Carbon’s Grey Areas – A brilliant, must-read article on black carbon. Who would have thought it has such broad geopolitical implications? Worth the effort. It’s conclusions: 1. Stop throwing cook-stoves at the problem. 2. Target diesel. 3. Be very careful about comparing black carbon with carbon dioxide.
• Ocean acidification – still happening.
• Arctic climate may be more sensitive to warming than thought – “Our findings indicate that CO2 levels of approximately 400 parts per million are sufficient to produce mean annual temperatures in the High Arctic of approximately 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees F) [19 degrees Celsius warmer than today!],” Ballantyne said. “As temperatures approach 0 degrees Celsius, it becomes exceedingly difficult to maintain permanent sea and glacial ice in the Arctic. Thus current levels of CO2 in the atmosphere of approximately 390 parts per million may be approaching a tipping point for irreversible ice-free conditions in the Arctic.”
• Network Rail study to assess impact of climate change – eco-stealth taxes are being used to… strengthen our vulnerable rail network, oh.
• Troubling ice melt in East Antarctica – it’s losing mass, which is not good. – “It’s too early to know what the ice loss in East Antarctica really means, says Isabella Velicogna, a remote-sensing specialist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “What is important is to see what’s generating the mass loss,” she says. Reductions in snowfall, for example, might reflect short-term weather cycles that could reverse at any time. But thinning caused by accelerating glaciers—as seen in West Antarctica—would warrant concern.”
• Peru inventor ‘whitewashes’ peaks to slow glacier melt – In a remote corner of the Peruvian Andes, men in paint-daubed boilersuits diligently coat a mountain summit with whitewash in an experimental bid to recuperate the country’s melting glaciers. Peru’s Environment Minister Antonio Brack has said the World Bank’s 200,000 dollars in funding would be better spent on other “projects which would have more impact in mitigating climate change.” “It’s nonsense”, he commented bluntly last year.
• Leakegate: A retraction – “It is an open question as to what impact these retractions and apologies have, but just as with technical comments on nonsense articles appearing a year after the damage was done, setting the record straight is a important for those people who will be looking at this at a later date, and gives some hope that the media can be held (a little) accountable for what they publish.”

And finally, on a slight tangent:

• Ben Goldacre: Yeah well you can prove anything with science – “When presented with unwelcome scientific evidence, it seems, in a desperate bid to retain some consistency in their world view, people would rather conclude that science in general is broken. This is an interesting finding. But I’m not sure it makes me very happy.”

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• A large majority of people think the climate is changing (78%)
• A large majority of people are concerned about this (71%)
• A large majority support the use of tax revenue to fund low-carbon policies such as investment in renewables (68%)
• A large majority of people say they are willing to reduce the amount of energy they use in order to tackle climate change (65%)

If this doesn’t sound like the findings you saw reported, or your impression of public attitudes towards climate change, then go and look up the results which are publicly available. The picture in the US is slightly different, but not drastically so, with large majorities agreeing that climate change is happening and expressing support for developing low-carbon energy infrastructure.

Large majorities agree that climate change is happening and express support for developing low-carbon energy infrastructure

But what about belief in whether humans are causing climate change? Isn’t that the crucial measure of scepticism?

Intriguingly, given that the public are frequently portrayed as teetering on the brink of abandoning climate change altogether, one of the US polls recorded an increase in the number of people who believe that human activity is changing the climate (the other had no previous survey to compare with, but found that 75% acknowledged human influence on the climate).

True, the number of people who agree that climate change is largely the result of human activity is significantly lower (in the UK and the US) than it was three years ago. But given the four consistent findings outlined above, the big question has to be ‘so what’?

Consider the BBC poll conducted in February, routinely cited as the most damaging of the public opinion polls in the UK. The statistic that was widely reported and repeated was that only 26% of the public agreed that:

“Climate change is happening and is now established as largely man-made”

Seems pretty damning doesn’t it? But a further 38% agreed that:

“Climate change is happening, but not yet proven to be largely man-made”

Even in the BBC poll, at the height of everything-gate, a healthy majority accepted that the climate was changing. In the very same poll, only 11% reported being any less concerned about the risks of climate change. The BBC results are completely consistent with the fact that a majority of people are concerned about climate change – anthropogenic or not – and want something done about it.

That significant numbers of people feel confused about whether human influence is responsible for climate change is unsurprising – a great deal of effort has been expended in trying to confuse them. The parallels between the strategies of the tobacco industry in the 1960s and the tactics of ideologically driven climate sceptics today are now well documented. The tobacco companies knew that if they could create enough uncertainty around the link between smoking and lung cancer, then people would continue to consume their product. But as opinion poll after opinion poll comes in, it is starting to look like the link between belief in human-caused climate change and support for low carbon policies is nowhere near as direct.

There is no escaping the fact that there is a major disparity between the level of certainty expressed by climate scientists and by the general public about the basic facts of climate change. It seems counter-intuitive that people dispute anthropogenic climate change, but are willing to modify their behaviour to prevent it. It seems bizarre that 73% of the BBC poll respondents who had heard about ‘climategate’ and IPCC glaciers error claimed that their views about climate change had not been altered. But this is what the polls are telling us.

The merchants of doubt will soon run out of steam – for all the uncertainty they can generate about human impact on the climate, public support for mitigating climate change remains high.

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