While the denial industry’s campaign of misinformation has taken its toll, recent polls of UK public opinion on climate change paint a rather less gloomy picture than some media reports have suggested ...
UPDATE: The Guardian have commisioned another poll, this time from ICM, on the economy and the environment, which offers a significant qualification of the previous poll results. Mark Lynas also comments on it here. In answer to the question, “Bearing in mind growing global economic problems on the one hand growing environmental problems including global warming on the other, where do you think the governments main priorities should now lie?”, 52% favour environmental issues, 44% economic problems. There is also a striking tendency among respondents of lower socio-economic status to choose the environment - a significant contrast with the results discovered by Ipsos MORI. It’s debatable what the significance of these conflicting results is, but again, there may be some cause for relative optimism. Ipsos MORI’s poll, since it produces a spontaneous answer, is almost certainly more reliable as a measure of levels of concern about different issues as they exist among the public, and that concern is weighted far more strongly towards the economy. More encouragingly, the ICM poll suggests that there is a persistent level of “latent” concern about the environment, even where there are economic trade-offs. Nevertheless, while “spontaneous” concern stagnates around the 7% or 8% mark, it is clear that the urgency of the climate crisis is still not hitting home. Among other things, therefore, we need to keep pushing this issue into public consciouness, day in, day out, until its urgency becomes unavoidable.
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