Polling On Pollution

I was listening to the radio as I went to bed on Saturday night, with two talking heads I'd never heard of reviewing the next day's papers with a presenter I'd never heard of (and who was so bad, I never want to hear again. But that's a whole other story).

There was a report which they said was in the Sunday Telegraph, although I can't find it on their website, which claimed that half of the UK population were now sceptical about climate change. My first reaction was one of dismay, until I considered the source - the Sunday Telegraph.

Nevertheless, my dismay grew as the first reviewer claimed Antarctic ice was increasing and Polar Bears were more than happy, so climate change couldn't exist. Standard sceptic charges.

The second reviewer, though, went on to agree with him. Her reasons weren't scientific or even pseudo-scientific. She declared that she refused to believe that climate change is real because the government lied to us over Iraq having WMD!

Thankfully, not everyone is so stupid. A new opinion poll commissioned by BBC Scotland shows that 63% of Scots believe that climate change is "an immediate and urgent problem", with a further 20% believing it was real but a problem for the future. That's 83% of Scots with their heads screwed on.

So why is there such a disparity in what Scots believe and what the UK as a whole believes? Could WMD lady be onto something, in that the increasingly-Tory English refuse to believe anything the government tells them, while the still-mostly-Labour-at-Westminster Scots are more forgiving of the UK government? Would the population listen to the argument more if it came from a truly independent source and they knew it wasn't just an excuse to raise taxes?

Or is it that Scots can more easily see a change in the weather compared to their southern cousins? I've heard this in various forms over the last couple of weeks, from someone claiming that you'd be hard-pushed to find a farmer that doesn't believe in climate change, to an article in yesterday's Guardian about the Himalayan countries having to cope with the effects of global warming here and now.

Would it take conclusive proof, right on their doorstep, for some to believe that this is real and happening? Or simply just changing the messenger?