Take the political heat out of climate scepticism

18 June 2010 by Roger Harrabin

CLIMATE scepticism is on the rise, boosted in large part by the hacked emails originating from the "climategate" scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in the UK, and by the carelessness of fact checkers for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The damage to the public standing of climate science has been substantial. In the UK in February, a BBC poll of 1001 people found that just 26 per cent believed human-made climate change was an established scientific fact, down from 41 per cent only three months earlier. And in the US, Republicans hope to kill the "American Power Act", sponsored by Senators John Kerry, a Democrat, and Joe Lieberman, who sits as an independent.