The British public, it seems, has not yet bought the climate-change alarmism their public officials have been trying to sell. A poll late last year found that of British respondents who had heard of climate change, about half thought it was primarily a natural process and only a small percentage thought it could be influenced by individuals changing their behavior. The messages and politics here are complex, writes the New Statesman:

At the moment we are mired in a bog of confusing messages. In a portentous speech to the Green Alliance last month, the Chancellor Gordon Brown talked about the need for “new global partnerships and multilateral networks” to tackle the environmental challenge. The recent climate change review by the economist Sir Nicholas Stern predicted hundreds of millions of “climate refugees” streaming across the world in an effort to escape from drought, flood and famine. Yet opinion polls for the BBC and others indicate that the reaction of people hearing these pronouncements is that they are simply relieved to hear the problem is nothing to do with them. An ICM poll last month found about half the people questioned in some parts of the country were quite clear about their unwillingness to change their lifestyle at all. Elsewhere, there is growing scepticism that any of it is true, and the dissenting voices are getting louder. A recent editorial in the Daily Mail told millions of readers that it is pointless to alter drastically the way we live simply on the “vague possibility of an ecological disaster”.