British public conviction about the threat of climate change has declined sharply after months of questions over the science and growing disillusionment with government action, a leading poll has found.
The proportion of British adults who believe climate change is “definitely” a reality has dropped from 44 percent to 31 percent in the last year, according to the latest survey by Ipsos Mori.
Overall, about nine in 10 people questioned still appear to accept that some degree of global warming is happening.
But the steep drop in those who have no doubts could mean it will be harder to persuade the public to support action to curb the problem, particularly with higher prices for energy and other goods.
The poll also found a significant drop in those who said climate change was caused by human activities. A year ago this number was one in three, but this year just one in five people believe global warming to be caused by people, said Edward Langley, Ipsos Mori’s head of environment research.
“It’s going to be a hard sell to make people make changes to their behavior unless there’s something else in it for them, [such as] energy efficiency measures saving money on fuel bills,” Langley said. “It’s a hard sell to tell people not to fly off for weekends away if you’re not wholly convinced by the links. Even people who are [convinced] still do it.”
The latest poll, taken at the end of last month, followed two months of allegations that said climate scientists might have manipulated and withheld data, and the inclusion of a flawed statement on Himalayan glaciers in the influential 2007 report on the science and impact of climate change by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
However, whether or not these events are behind the increased public uncertainty is in doubt.
Russ Lidstone, chief executive of the advertising agency Euro RSCG, which commissioned the Ipsos Mori survey, said the research among consumers found “great cynicism now as a result of questions in popular culture and regarding the credibility of IPCC data.”
But a recent poll for the BBC suggested these events had had less influence on UK public opinion than had the cold British winter.
The poll questioned more than 1,000 people in Britain on their views on climate change: 31 percent of those polled said climate change was definitely happening, 29 percent said “it’s looking like it could be a reality”, and another 31 percent said the problem was exaggerated, a category that had risen by 50 percent compared with a year ago. Only 6 percent said climate change was not happening at all and 3 percent said they did not know.
The UK energy and climate change secretary, Ed Miliband, who recently called on the public to ignore the “siren voices” of climate skeptics, said the poll illustrated the scale of the task of building public support for action.
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