US trounces UK in climate scepticism jibber-jabber

I'd like to start by saying that is not my headline, I just used the same one.

A pair of UK researchers have surveyed international coverage of climate scepticism, both during the months following the IPCC's 2007 Fourth Assessment Report and during the late-2009 "Climategate" contretemps, and have discovered that among the six countries' publications they examined, the UK and US had by far the most "articles containing sceptical voices."

So the US and the UK seem to be the "hub" of climate change scepticism.

The article details the increasing efforts by researchers to determine the patterns of "uncontested scepticism" in the media. One such study, Painter and Ashe report, determined that "of the three main [US] cable channels (CNN, MSNBC and Fox News), Fox was the most likely to be dismissive of climate change science." The authors also note that although there have been a number of studies of the "organizational links between climate scepticism and conservative think tanks/business communities" that have "resulted in a tendency to view it as a discourse with conservative affinities," those studies' conclusion have not been tested outside the US

Our good friends Fox News is skeptical of Climate change, hmmmmm.... Imagine that.

To begin their research on climate scepticism outside the US, Painter and Ashe first defined three type of sceptics:
Type 1: "those who deny the global warming trend"

Type 2: "those who accept the trend, but either question the anthropogenic contribution saying it is overstated, negligent or non-existent compared to other factors like natural variation, or say it is not known with sufficient certainty what the main causes are"

Type 3: "those who accept human causation, but claim impacts may be benign or beneficial, or that the models are not robust enough, and/or question the need for strong regulatory policies or interventions"

Which category do the skeptics on ATS fall into I wonder?

Articles containing sceptical voices as a percentage of the all articles covering climate change or global warming, mid-November 2009 through mid-February 2010

Seems the people that have to most to lose economically are those who oppose it.

Though in 2007 China did have a good amount of sceptics, but that is to be expected since China is likely causing the most pollution.

Articles containing sceptical voices as a percentage of the all articles covering climate change or global warming, February through April 2007

Pollution over China


Coincidence? I think not.

Edit2: Forgot to add this graph showing the distribution into the categories shown above

Types of individual sceptics quoted in articles, by country

Edit: This thread is in response to this one here.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

reply to post by Renegade2283


Seems to me that looking at poles to determine policy is a tad political and speaks of an underlying and probably forthcoming propaganda campaign (like those aren't always going on). The only time you take a pole is to determine public opinion (not scientific facts) and whether or not the opinion needs to be changed.

I think it would be better to get the science right and have all the information and processes transparent and available. Speaking of which, they might want to do that with our political, legal and financial institutions as well.

Cheers - Dave

Interesting.

I'm always amazed that even though they cant tell me whether it will be raining next week, they still want to tell me that in ten years time the sea will rise and drown us all....hang on...it was ten years ago when they told me that, and the sea has NOT risen one single millimetre!!

reply to post by VoidHawk


Rising sea levels isn't the only repercussion of man-made climate change. There is also the threat of more violent weather, poor air quality, effects on animal populations, and many other possible negative impacts.

Ya I didnt expect many responses. Considering a good percentage of ATS'ers are skeptics themselves. Most of the time people dont want to hear the cold, hard, depressing truth.