U.K. government survey: climate optimists use less electricity than climate fearmongers

There are diverse ways to visualize a climate fearmonger.

You may think that a typical representative alarmist looks like a Luddite maggott who lives in the Stone Age, sleeps in the treetops, eats earthworms, and consumes no electricity.



Another, very different way to visualize a climate alarmist is to think about Al Gore, a hypocritical jerk who preaches about the reductions of the carbon footprint but whose household resembles a medium car factory and whose frequent flying emulates the evacuation of an island.

Which visualization is more accurate?




As The Telegraph and Anthony Watts' blog have reported, a special British-government-funded, Cambridge-Loughborough survey

Savings, beliefs and demographic change

has provided us with an answer.




The answer is that the correlation between climate alarmism and electricity consumption was too tiny and statistically insignificant which means that someone's paying lip service to the climate propaganda cannot be viewed as evidence that the person is actually behaving according to his or her words.

However, at one point, they actually admit that they have found a relationship – but the inverse one than one they would like to expect:

“Taken all together, householders who strongly agreed they were not worried about climate change because it was too far in the future in fact used less electricity rather than more, counter to the hypothesis that households concerned about climate change use less electricity.”

This sounds truly amusing – and as a government-funded proof that climate alarmists should be given proper thrashing for their outrageous hypocrisy. However, a common-sense, non-ideological explanation of this correlation is mentioned in the survey, too. The climate optimists are usually older people and older people generally live more modest lives, as far as electricity goes, and these two non-ideological correlations get imprinted to an apparently ideological correlation between climate alarmism and electricity consumption.

At any rate, it's rather remarkable that the "saviors of the planet" can't even produce a detectable signal that would show that they're behaving in accordance with their own Luddite proclamations. Many if not all of them are hypocritical jerks analogous to Al Gore – although usually not in the extent.

But hypocrisy isn't the only important interpretation of the result, I think. Another one is that what the true believers among the alarmists loons are really annoyed by are not the actual CO2 emissions. What they are annoyed by are the blasphemous words. The climate alarmists primary care about words. They're religious bigots not unsimilar to those in the ISIL.