Gordon Brown must overcome public scepticism before Copenhagen

Ben Webster, Environment Editor: Commentary

With the most important meeting on man-made climate change starting in about three weeks, the last thing the Government needs is a survey showing that more the half the population is reluctant to believe that there is a problem.
Gordon Brown will go to Copenhagen next month and make painful pledges on our behalf. He will promise to give an extra £1 billion a year to poor countries to help them to cope with climate change. He will also commit Britain to making savage cuts in carbon emissions, which will inflate our energy bills, push us into smaller, more efficient cars, and make flying much more expensive.
He might have had a chance to persuade us that these sacrifices were necessary if most believed the overwhelming majority of climate scientists, who say that our activities are causing a dangerous increase in global temperatures.
The Government is likely to respond to scepticism by underplaying the implications of legally binding commitments to cut carbon emissions by 34 per cent on 1990 levels by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2050.

It is too easy for the sceptics, armed with a handful of misleading facts, to sow seeds of doubt. It is true that global temperatures have not yet returned to the peak of 1998. The Arctic summer ice has grown substantially in the past two years and some scientists are revising upwards their estimates of polar bear numbers.
None of these facts counters the strong evidence of a long-term warming trend, yet there is a tendency to cling to the faintest glimmers of hope when confronted with overwhelming gloom.
Persuading the public of the need to act may become harder because some scientists predict a decade of cooling before the warming trend re-emerges.
The recession has not only pushed climate change down the agenda but also given the impression we are winning the battle. The Economic and Social Research Council estimates that global greenhouse gas emissions will be 9 per cent below what they were expected to be in 2012 because of the recession. Yet it also says that this will delay by only 21 months the moment when temperatures rise to a dangerously high level.
The crumb of comfort for Mr Brown is that Britons are less sceptical than Americans. A survey by the Pew Centre last month found that only 36 per cent of Americans believed that human activity was causing global warming. The proportion believing that warming was happening, from man-made or natural causes, fell from 77 per cent in 2007 to 57 per cent.