Only 41 per cent accept as an established scientific fact that global warming is taking place and is largely man-made. Almost a third (32 per cent) believe that the link is not yet proved; 8 per cent say that it is environmentalist propaganda to blame man and 15 per cent say that the world is not warming.

Even more interesting than the result, though, is the Thunderer’s appalled reaction. In a leader that might have been easily have been written by the Great Moonbat himself, the Times quite simply refuses to accept that the growing band of sceptics may have a point. Instead, it accuses these ‘deniers’ of being idiots:

It is possible that the collective expertise of brilliant scientists could be wrong. The best minds in the world once held a geocentric theory of the solar system. Before the discovery of sub-atomic particles they believed that everything was made of earth, air, fire and water. Right up to the 19th century, serious scientists wrote recipe books for making animals. But no previous process of scientific trial, error and progress has ever overturned such a well-attested thesis. Lord Rees has reminded us that we now live in a global village and it is, he pointed out, probably inevitable that there will be some global village idiots.

The Times’s approach is not unlike that of a Marxist theorist berating the bourgeoisie for their “false consciousness”; or indeed, a Eurocrat deciding that when sovereign nations keep voting “No” in Euro referendums it doesn’t mean that the EU is an oppressive and unpopular construct but that the voters need working on a bit harder so that they come to the correct “Yes” conclusion next time. It is, in fact, another perfect case of what Jonah Goldberg calls Liberal Fascism.

It is also an example of just how increasingly out-of-touch the MSM is with the views of the wider reading world. Recently, the Times launched a poster campaign boasting that it offered more extensive eco coverage than any other newspaper. Some of the claims made on these posters – such as the one about the North East passage being used as a commercial shipping route for the first time (when actually it has been used since 1934) – have been shot down by the excellent Andrew Orlowski on The Register.

But even if these claims were true, are wall-to-wall horror stories about impending man-made eco-doom really what readers of the quality newspapers want to read these days? My suspicion is not. I’m presuming that the audience which reads and comments on blogs isn’t totally different from the one that reads newspapers in print form. And if that’s the case, then the MSM’s obsession with AGW is looking increasingly out of date.

If you don’t believe me, check out the comments below one of George Monbiot’s columns, or indeed, either of the two Times articles listed above. Commenters who take the Al-Gore-approved line are vastly outnumbered by commenters who believe the whole AGW thing is a load of crock.

And it will take a bit more than bullying accusations that they’re “idiots”, I suspect, to swing them round.

Yesterday on the Today programme, one of its chief climate fear promoters (aka environment correspondent) Roger Harrabin reported the appropriately spine-chilling news that the Arctic sea ice is definitely going to melt by 2020. How do we know this? Because a Cambridge professor claims so based on ice measurements taken by Pen Hadow’s Catlin Arctic Survey.

Say what? Surely he doesn’t mean the same disastrous Arctic mission which has been described as the “scientific joke of 2009″?

They surely do.

The marvellous Watts Up With That website lists ten good reasons why the hard science provided by Catlin Arctic Survey’s research is roughly in the same league of predictive usefulness as tea leaves, chicken entrails or Gordon Brown’s treasury forecasting team.

They include, its “unrealistic vision of self-importance”, the failure of its ice radar sounding equipment “almost from day one” (a fact which the expedition only chose to reveal to the world on day 44), its presentation of false data to the world on its website (which, er, accidentally failed to mention that “live” biotelemetry data being sent straight from the Arctic wasn’t live at all) and  its blatant warmist bias which left it woefully unprepared for the colder-than-expected arctic weather that cut its expedition short.

My favourite, one though, is this cruelly brief dismissal by Dr Walt Meier of NSIDC – one of the world’s most prominent sea ice researchers.

“I don’t anticipate using the Catlin data.”

(Just like they said at Rio and Poznan and all the other “let’s see who can rack up the biggest carbon footprint” global shindigs that eco-campaigners insist on staging, the better to stoke up their self-flagellatory eco-guilt).

But, for the global warming deniers among us at least, the panic’s off. Nothing scary or dangerous is going to happen as a result of the Copenhagen summit. It will be a talking shop, abundant with airy platitudes and earnest pieties, but signifying less than ****er all as far as economy-damaging Kyoto-style legislation goes. There will be a political statement of intent. But no binding “agreement”.

Here are few reasons why:

1. A bit like one of those mutant pandas I mentioned yesterday, the science has turned viciously against the warmists. Not that it wasn’t against them before.  But they have their work seriously cut out if they’re ever going to recover from the  speech given at the UN world climate conference in Geneva last week by Professor Mojib Latif of Germany’s Leibniz institute.

National Post columnist Lorne Gunter explains:

“Latif is one of the leading climate modellers in the world. He is the recipient of several international climate-study prizes and a lead author for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He has contributed significantly to the IPCC’s last two five-year reports that have stated unequivocally that man-made greenhouse emissions are causing the planet to warm dangerously.”

Yet in Geneva, Latif was forced to admit that all those An-Inconvenient-Truth-style fantasy projections showing global temperatures rising inexorably with C02 levels were wrong. The world is getting cooler, not warming. It will continue to cool, Latif reckons, till 2020 or possibly 2030. By how much he doesn’t know: “The jury is still out.”

Which begs the rather obvious question: if the IPCC’s doomsday computer models didn’t predict this cooling phase, how can we be sufficiently confident in their other assertions to start basing major economic and social policy decisions on them?

2. The Chinese. Spin it how they will, President Hu Jintao’s two-minute speech to the UN yesterday was a massive blow to the Warmists. In classic “Tell the foolish gwailo what they want to hear, then carry on doing exactly what we want” Chinese diplomatic style, Hu Jintao promised “determined action”, while refusing to commit his country to any binding targets.

The Chinese are not stupid. Their priority number one (and two, and three) is economic growth, not assuaging green lobbyists.

3. People just don’t care about “climate change” that much. Environmental purity is a rich person’s luxury and with the recession most people have other priorities. In the latest Bloomberg poll in the US, for example, just 2 per cent of respondents considered “climate change” the most important issue facing the country.

4. Almost everyone knows deep down that the green lobby’s CO2 targets are pie in the sky. Says Stephen Hayward of the American Competitive Institute in WSJ Online

“Carbon dioxide is the result of complete fuel combustion. Apart from still-unproven technologies, there’s no way to remove it from the process. The only way to reduce emissions is to burn less fuel, which means less energy output.

“So, to meet the target the climate campaigners have set, the U.S., Europe and Japan will have to replace virtually their entire fossil-fuel energy infrastructure. For the U.S., the 80% target means reducing fossil-fuel greenhouse-gas emissions to a level the nation last experienced in 1910. On a per-capita basis, we’d have to go back to the level of about 1875.”

5. If anyone’s going to push these crazy measures through it’s President Obama. But, as Terence Corcoran sensibly points out, after the rough ride he’s had with his healthcare proposals, Obama is unlikely to want to outrage the US taxpayer still further.

“Mr. Obama, already fighting charges his medicare reform will boost taxes on the average American family by $3,000, isn’t likely to simultaneously mount an aggressive push for carbon control legislation that will add another $4,000 a year in taxes.”

6. Right, consider this my serious climate change piece for the week. Now, I can go back to trading childish insults. Phew!