Sunday 22 September 2013

Independent on Sunday: "Whatever happened to climate change?"


Link to web site

"Whither global warming? Apart from a succession of puerile puns – fracking awful quips, as the Energy Secretary, Ed Davey, might have put it in his conference speech – the issue hardly raised its head at the Lib Dem gathering in Glasgow. It is not looming large on the Labour agenda in Brighton over the next few days. And David Cameron, who once bragged his would be 'the greenest government ever', hasn't waved his eco-credentials for ages now.

There's irony, then, in the fact that more than 250 climate scientists meet in Stockholm tomorrow to finalise the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. When it comes out on Friday, it will be the most comprehensive report on climate science ever published. It will show that scientists have upped from 'very likely' to 'extremely likely' their judgement that it is human activity, rather than natural variations, which have caused most of the rise in global temperatures since 1951.

"Since we have the irony pot on the table, let's ladle out another helping: while experts have been becoming more convinced, the rest of us have been moving in the opposite direction. The number of people in the UK who think climate change is happening, and is caused by man-made greenhouse gases, is falling, polls show."

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