Selling 'uncertain' climate science

Rising climate change skepticism worries BBC Environment Analyst Roger Harrabin:

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.

Libertarian columnists have helped turned many British Conservative parliamentarians into climate doubters, and the Conservative prime minister, David Cameron, has installed a Liberal Democrat climate secretary to give his coalition's green policies some protection from his own party's right wing.

Harrabin makes an inadvertent admission, however:

It's impossible to take the politics out of a topic as complex, uncertain and far-reaching as climate change.

The self-admitted uncertainty is the crux of the problem.