A quick visit to the U.K. confirms that environmental and global-warming concerns are, on the surface at least, acutely more pronounced here than in the U.S. Reminders and nudges seem to be everywhere, many of them seemingly intended to make you feel guilty for every breath you draw and every bite you swallow. A bottle of Belu water arrives at the table: “All Profits to Clean Water Projects,” it says. “The U.K.’s First Carbon-Neutral Bottled Water.”
A Times article by Ben Webster reports on a £6 million governmental ad campaign arguing that “Man is causing global warming and endangering life on Earth”:
Ministers sanctioned the campaign because of concern that scepticism about climate change was making it harder to introduce carbon-reducing policies such as higher energy bills.
The advertisement attempts to make adults feel guilty about their legacy to their children. It features a father telling his daughter a bedtime story of “a very very strange” world with “horrible consequences” for today’s children.
The little girl has an angel’s face; the bedtime story includes weeping bunnies, rising seas, drowning doggies, and evil, energy-consuming grownups.
Most interesting, to me at least, was this bit of the article:
When asked how they would react if they knew climate change were going to have a serious effect on their children’s lives, 74 percent [of British adults surveyed] said that they would be willing to change their lifestyle. Fifteen percent said that they would not make any changes.
That’s encouraging, yes? Three of four adults “would be willing to change their lifestyle.”
But I’d advise you to ignore this survey completely. As we write at some length in SuperFreakonomics, such declarations of good intentions, which come at a personal cost with little in the way of immediate benefit, are the emptiest of promises.
Interestingly, my visit to London occurred on the same day the Sunday Times ran a longish extract (not yet online) of SuperFreakonomics; its headline: “Why Everything You Think You Know About Global Warming Is Wrong.”
That said, the incessant environmental nudging worked on me, at least for the first meal I took here. Instead of a breakfast including every form of meat known to man (as if often the case here), I took the Vegetarian English Breakfast, with a “sausage” made of spinach and ricotta (yum), vegetarian black pudding (like chomping a dry sponge), and a few slices of soy bacon (tasted quite nice, although it looked like a surgical glove). I believe the eggs actually came from chickens, though I cannot be certain.
and 
. You can also watch it on 
I guess I expected better from Levitt and Dubner:
http://climateprogress.org/2009/10/12/superfreakonomics-errors-levitt-caldeira-myhrvold/
Man is very likely the cause of global warming, but it is NOT endangering life on Earth. More likely, warming will be good for us by lengthening growing seasons. Climate has always fluctuated widely (consider ice ages and warm interglacials). Anthropogenic warming just gives this another push. The Earth has been through this naturally many times; it doesn’t need “saving”.
You don’t say where your vegetarian breakfast came from – if you’d been here two years ago then “food miles” would have been big in the press. You may not yet have cause to feel good about yourself for choosing that breakfast!
There is an interesting effect at play in the UK, along the lines of the law of diminishing returns: many of us have been living frugally for years (if we grew up in the 60s and 70s, some of us never lost the habit), so the advertising you mention is preaching to an audience which by now is either already converted or unconvertible. Hence the occasionally extreme images.
By the way – your conclusion that I, who sold my business some time ago, and my friends, who contract for overseas businesses, all fit the profile of suicide bombers’ financial dealings, that somewhat put me off buying your book!
Don’t worry the pudding always taste like a sponge.
Remember the lesson of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”. The assumption that there is or ever will be man-made climate change (remember the Orwellian global warming?) is the big dead elephant in the room. I think all the politicians on the bandwagon need to be replaced by public servants who can objectively evaluate scientific and technical data. The backlash will be swift.
Even if you believe in human caused climate change, how do we know the world will be worse for our children? It might be much better….
Yes, global climate changed in the distant past, but the rate of change we observe today is much greater than it was then. The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere today is greater than it has ever been in the past 65,000 years. Just based on unequivocal laboratory measurements of infra-red absorption by CO2, a lot of extra energy is being added to the atmosphere.
In essence, we’re performing a giant experiment on the atmosphere with ourselves right there in the test tube. Skeptics say that they want 100% certainty in the predictions before we call off the experiment. In science, 100% certainty comes only in mathematical proofs (and even there we have the Gödel problem). Don’t you think that it would be better if we tried out the experiment on white rats first?
“What really worries me is the NGO and government supported fear mongering that is used to indoctrinate and scare children. It is starting to look more and more like the religions of the past: If you don’t behave you will go to hell.
I honestly think this is bordering abuse.”
Exactly. Why do these alarmists and fear-mongers prey on children? Just like all abusers, because the children are at their mercy. Children are not supposed to have adult worries and feel responsible for adults matters. This is the same pattern often seen in children from alcoholic families, where one child becomes super-responsible for managing a family, Then, later in adult life, is always depressed, or is always a “co-dependent” person in relationships, and cannot enjoy life. This is how we are raising our children on a societal level now, by govt mandated curricula.