According to Newspoll “78 per cent of voters believe in climate change and most attribute it to human activity”.

See: Tackling the other deficit: carbon policy credibility

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/tackling-the-other-deficit-carbon-policy-credibility/story-e6frg71x-1226050061717

The article goes on to state that only 30% of voters support a carbon tax.

Number me among those who thinks the preponderance of evidence supports the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) but who opposes a carbon tax. In fact I think the carbon tax is the second dumbest way of reducing emission yet devised.

I also strongly question the wisdom of a small country like Australia trying to take the lead on this issue.

But leaving policy responses aside it does seem that the majority of the Australian electorate accepts the reality of AGW.

In most of the world at least a plurality profess to believe that human activity is responsible for climate change or plays a role in climate change.

See: Gallup survey: Worldwide, blame for climate change falls on humans

http://earthsky.org/earth/gallup-survey-worldwide-blame-for-climate-change-falls-on-humans

In the survey, worldwide, 36% were not aware of global warming. Of the 64% who were aware of the issue three quarters thought that global warming was either a result of human activity (35%) or was responsible for global warming in conjunction with nature (13%).

So Australia is not unique. It does appear as if AGW is being accepted as fact by most of the world.

So far as I can tell the first political leader of any note to express concern about AGW was Maggie Thatcher.

See: Thatcher saw climate threat

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/thatcher-saw-climate-threat/story-e6frg7ax-1111119033099

>>"The danger of global warming is as yet unseen but real enough for us to make changes and sacrifices, so that we do not live at the expense of future generations," she [Thatcher] said.>>

Has the effort to convince humanity of the reality of AGW been largely won?

Has the debate mostly shifted to policy responses rather than the reality of AGW.

Are fossil fuel companies now in the same position as tobacco companies in the 1960s and 1970s?

Nohwwwwwww!

Everyone is bored shitless with the whole thing now. The window of opportunity has well past. Even recent natural disasters aren't piquing an interest.

Surveys are largely worthless.

I always liked the Sir Humphrey explanation...

Mr. Woolley, are you worried about the number of young people without jobs?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Are you worried about the rise in crime among teenagers?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Do you think there is a lack of discipline in our Comprehensive schools?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Do you think young people welcome some authority and leadership in their lives?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Do you think they respond to a challenge?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Would you be in favour of reintroducing National Service?"
Bernard Woolley: "Oh...well, I suppose I might be."
Sir Humphrey: "Yes or no?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Of course you would, Bernard. After all you told you can't say no to that. So they don't mention the first five questions and they publish the last one."
Bernard Woolley: "Is that really what they do?"
Sir Humphrey: "Well, not the reputable ones no, but there aren't many of those. So alternatively the young lady can get the opposite result."
Bernard Woolley: "How?"
Sir Humphrey: "Mr. Woolley, are you worried about the danger of war?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Are you worried about the growth of armaments?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Do you think there is a danger in giving young people guns and teaching them how to kill?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Do you think it is wrong to force people to take up arms against their will?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Would you oppose the reintroduction of National Service?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"

'It's the people's will. I am their leader. I must follow them.'
James Hacker

I'd support anything in a survey, unless it actually may cost me some money!

I too believe, I how ever think Gillard has made a pigs ear out of it.
An ETS was once achievable tax never will be.
Look back at the very brief time two conservatives had intentions to vote for one,greens had the power, BUT wanted more.
We will not get a carbon tax, the issue will unseat Gillard ,and she has only herself to blame.
I think we should have set the minimum costs package, conservatives once did too.
We then could have led not Cringed away in a corner.
We have handled this shamefully and England's bush fires in the hottest recorded April in history, how often are we hearing such? is food for laughter while Rome burns.

No Steven.We are well overdue for an ice age.AGW is not a scientific reality.Our Sun will reach another solar maximum in 2012,after which Sun spot activity will decline and we will experience a long cooling period.

We had better hope that an ice age is not too near.It will be far worse than any so called AGW.

I’m in the same boat as stevenlmeyer.

I accept AWG but don’t want a carbon tax as I don’t believe it will make any measurable difference and I don’t trust the intentions of governments enough here to want to reduce my quality of living.

“Sceptics” (I’ll be putting that word in brackets from here on in as people who automatically and instinctively reject all evidence for AWG, while simply parroting any old argument that some conservative blogger makes, for the sake of upholding the idea of a vast Marxist conspiracy, does not constitute scepticism) don’t seem to realise that one can reject the rushed and poorly-thought-through government responses without rejecting science.

I was once quite indifferent to - even bored of - this whole debate, since it had become so political and I really had no strong opinion either way. But after reading debate-after-debate on OLO about it, the curiosity got the better of me and I just had to look into the whole issue to see once and for all what the actual arguments from both sides were and which arguments were actually supported by the evidence.

My suspicions were that the climatologists were right and that the rightwing think-tanks and conservative bloggers (along with the frequently cited long lists of sceptical scientists from scientific disciplines that render their opinions irrelevant anyway) were wrong, but I was willing to be surprised.

So, lo and behold, after looking into it, it turns out that the climate “sceptics” are just another form of creationist in the sense that they simply repeat repetitively debunked arguments in a big game of internet “He said she said” and thus the suggestion that AWG is the new “religion” is extraordinarily hypocritical.

Furthermore, climatologists are like the new evolutionary biologists in the sense that most simply get on with their jobs and allow the scientific process to take its course while they filter out and ignore a noisy minority screeching in the background.

Continued...

...Continued

I might get into one of these debates on OLO about AWG one day but for now, I’m having fun sitting here in the back seat chuckling smugly to myself at the continual repeating of debunked claims from so-called “sceptics”.

Some of my favourites include:

- The Earth hasn’t warmed since 1998;
- The climate is always changing;
- We can’t even predict the weather accurately a week from now;

But I particularly like this one:

- In the 70’s, scientists predicted an ice age. Remember that?

To which I would reply: “No and neither do you.”

This is another classic example of internet “He said she said”. Sometime in the 70’s a few scientists noticed a cooling trend (an ice age may have even been mentioned in passing but it was by no means a consensus). Time magazine ran with it and released an issue of their magazine with an alarmist headline about an impending ice age. Some scientifically illiterate right-wing idiot discovered this in recent times and ran with it, allowing it to evolve into the “Remember when scientists predicted and ice age in the 70’s?” argument.

But my all-time favourite piece of “scepticism“ is...

[Drum roll please]

Climategate!

To this day, those who desperately need to transfer their hatred of the dead and gone Red Russia onto anything remotely “green” bring this up as though it were a trump card. Yet all it amounted to was a few lines (out of thousands of emails mind you - hardly the evidence of a vast conspiracy) misquoted and taken completely out-of-context (in true creationist quote-mining form funnily enough).

A classic example was Mike’s nature “trick [of the trade]” being blended in with the “hide the decline [in tree ring growth, not temperature]” to make it look like something that has been discussed openly since 1995 was being kept secret.

And don’t even get me started on the blatant manipulation of data and dishonesty of Monckton!

Yes, if anything is the "new religion", it's the so-called climate "scepticism".