Politicians Don’t Know 2025 Must Be Peak Fossil Fuel – Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

University of East Anglia academics: “We surveyed British MPs – most don’t know how urgent climate action is”

We surveyed British MPs – most don’t know how urgent climate action is

Published: October 7, 2025 12.02am AEDT

John Kenny Research Fellow (Public Engagement with Climate Change), School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia

Lucas Geese Research Fellow, Tyndall Centre and School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia

To keep global warming below 1.5°C, greenhouse gas emissions had to peak no later than 2025. That was a key finding of the IPCC’s most recent major report on the topic, published a few years ago. Yet when we surveyed UK MPs and members of the public in four countries, fewer than 15% could identify this deadline correctly. 

This matters. If politicians and voters underestimate how urgently we have to fight climate change, they are less likely to back the tough policies needed. Instead, they risk assuming we have more time, all while climate change targets slip further out of reach.

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To close the gap between science and politics, communications must be sharper. Reports need to highlight timelines and consequences in ways that are impossible to ignore. Politicians and the public need to understand not just the scale of the climate crisis, but how immediate it is.

Read more: https://theconversation.com/we-surveyed-british-mps-most-dont-know-how-urgent-climate-action-is-266703

The cited study;

Publics and UK parliamentarians underestimate the urgency of peaking global greenhouse gas emissions

Abstract

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment reports treat politicians as recipients of information, but not as foci of research efforts. Moreover, academic research on politicians’ knowledge concentrates on belief in climate change’s anthropogenic cause. Little is known of how aware national parliamentarians are of key findings and policy recommendations from assessment reports. Here, we address this through a survey of 100 Members of Parliament in the United Kingdom on their knowledge of the well-publicised statement from the 6th assessment report of when global greenhouse emissions need to peak for a global temperature increase limit of 1.5 °C to be possible. Parliamentarians overwhelmingly overestimate the time period humanity has left to bend the temperature curve although partisan differences apply. Public surveys in Britain as well as Canada, Chile and Germany show similarly low knowledge, yet being younger, worried about climate change, and having lower levels of conspiracy belief mentality increase accuracy significantly.

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Read more: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02655-w

This is hilarious. I thought academics had already fully accepted their 1.5C global warming CO2 budget is dead as a dodo. Then along comes University of East Anglia, like they are caught in a 1990s timewarp, digging up yesterday’s embarrassingly unachievable CO2 emissions targets which most people have had the sense to quietly forget.

As for expecting politicians to understand climate claims, good luck with that.

A decade ago Martin Durkin made a documentary, “Britain’s Trillion Pound Horror Story”. Among other things, Durkin asked a bunch of politicians questions about Britain’s finances.

The few politicians who had any idea about the numbers mostly confused the deficit and the debt – they thought Britain’s annual public deficit was actually the total national debt.

If British politicians can’t get fundamental information about the financial state of the nation right, information which actually matters, they are hardly going to pay close attention to the latest revised alarmist claims from the IPCC.

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